Foreword.
This saga,both shocking and poignant, combines elements of drama,comedy and autobiography in a candid portrait of an Australian educationist.It is an epic story of his grooming,life and work. It ranges widely over politics,culture, ideology,history and love.It is the nicest,funniest and most touching story you’ll ever read about near death experience, gross wastage of public resources, and mass paranoia. It represents an earnest moral inquiry distinguished by offbeat humour and magical social realism. Your man reminds us that the personal and the political cannot be safely untangled, that we must position science and politics next to love and procreation.
His world is peopled by competing forces: some constructive, others destructive, all determined to shape his destiny. Journeying through numerous adventures, this everyman encounters an array of fascinating characters and many splendoured situations. Against a backdrop of epochal assets grabbing, the narrative is punctuated with memorable set-pieces. It is a fresh, affectionate and minutely observed account of life in the global village which readers can readily assume as part of their heritage.
This saga,both shocking and poignant, combines elements of drama,comedy and autobiography in a candid portrait of an Australian educationist.It is an epic story of his grooming,life and work. It ranges widely over politics,culture, ideology,history and love.It is the nicest,funniest and most touching story you’ll ever read about near death experience, gross wastage of public resources, and mass paranoia. It represents an earnest moral inquiry distinguished by offbeat humour and magical social realism. Your man reminds us that the personal and the political cannot be safely untangled, that we must position science and politics next to love and procreation.
His world is peopled by competing forces: some constructive, others destructive, all determined to shape his destiny. Journeying through numerous adventures, this everyman encounters an array of fascinating characters and many splendoured situations. Against a backdrop of epochal assets grabbing, the narrative is punctuated with memorable set-pieces. It is a fresh, affectionate and minutely observed account of life in the global village which readers can readily assume as part of their heritage.
Preface.
Ahoy dear readers, come right this way,gather round!
Full bore, over the top, I’ve driven into the tightest corner of my jam-packed life.
Over-reaching myself, taken by surprise, I was felled mightily by the vicious attack. Coming back to earth, listing badly, the bleakness of utter breakdown stared me in the face. Confined to quarters, sweating it out, I set to righting myself. Writing about myself, straining my heavy eyes in the twilight zone, I reflect on this long collision course.
Allow me, this maverick from upcountry,distiller of knowledge, missionary for public enlightenment, to show you the time of my life as I recall my quest for the Big Picture and my crack at the Big Time. Stalled in this last ditch but still above ground, I’m hanging in. Big Time.
Held to account, brought to book, I focus on the nature of my paralysis and the Spectre that crippled relations of my country, my profession and my mother. Moved by a raft of kindred spirits whose essence I distil, explore with me, heightened by a sense of survival, sweeping matters of identity and excellence. Come one, come all. Join me, me hearties, on this most eventful expedition. Breaking barriers that will stay in your memory.
If you enjoy the voyage and find it worth while, you can
help fuel it. If you are pushed for
time but not interest and means, fuel it by all means at
Otherwise you can give me constructive feedback and technical assistance [Find: Dear Reader] , and you can tell others about it.
Otherwise you can give me constructive feedback and technical assistance [Find: Dear Reader] , and you can tell others about it.
Come straight ahead with
me or if you wish to deviate, choose the portals of call according to your
interests before linking up again to the
main trajectory . Manoeuvre your way around by clicking on underlined words.
Portals.
Here are a few of the main portals of call.Each can be read as a stand alone episode without need to reference the others.
A Swift and Violent Event.
The pedagogue cut down in the scourge of paralysing attacks hitting the contemporary world, comes to the edge of the gyre.Never wavering,just waving.Recalled to life,he's out of time.Looking at things from a new angle,for the uncommon in the commonplace,he reconsiders his life so far.
It can be told in three tenses: future conditional, past both perfect and imperfect, and present indicative.
He takes the truth and puts a little curlicue at the end.
Post-bellum northern New South Wales. Capitalism’s golden age.
Born at a very young age,he grows up in a country town . His scorched earth mother and her mob. His social and resourceful character. His stock in trade. He walks the the political and religious divide,the shifting political sands.The ‘Doc’ takes on Ming the Merciless.Free rein. Home On The range. The bush poissonier. Cultural awakenings.Raised on radio.Cockamanie comedy.The day the workers called the tune.Upstairs and downstairs at thepleasure dome.Fifties film fare.The
Born at a very young age,he grows up in a country town . His scorched earth mother and her mob. His social and resourceful character. His stock in trade. He walks the the political and religious divide,the shifting political sands.The ‘Doc’ takes on Ming the Merciless.Free rein. Home On The range. The bush poissonier. Cultural awakenings.Raised on radio.Cockamanie comedy.The day the workers called the tune.Upstairs and downstairs at thepleasure dome.Fifties film fare.The
story-within-a-story-within a story.The cosy style of writing. The woman in black. The altar boys’ picnic.Tender mercies. The devil’s showground. A delicate matter. The secular estate. Treading the boards.Strike up the band. On a Good Wicket.The big blood sport.
The fresh faced plainsman makes it up the mountain range.He comes of age in the cathedral city. Like a duck to water he takes to scholarship .He meets The Masters of Many Tongues.With a touch of spice he spreads the word among our friends from the north. Pearls of wisdom.
Alarums and
excursions.
The Chinese are coming! The Chinese are coming! Driven by manly patriotic urgings,our weekend warrior buys into the grand project. He has the big one put over on him.Forward Defence and the casus belli. Come in spinner! Submitting to infantry training, he’s stung badly before looking under the hood of the massive military machine. He studies the killer elite at the steering wheel and how and where it drives things along . Their descent from The Asian Butcher’s yard into global barbarism.
With everything falling into place, he runs headfirst into the moral complexities of the real world. He comes face to face with the vagaries, hypocrisies and amoralities of contemporary politics.He
discovers the grand imperial imposture.The disconnect between the policies promulgated by the Empire and the reality on the ground. It’s division of modern society between those who conform and the dystopian world of those who do not. Increasingly disaffected with it’s system of control,he travels to the beat of a different drum.
The Dinner party and the Revolution.
Sai Zhen Zhou opens the door of knowledge to the Orient , giving him perspective on Chinese culture. She provides him with a greater understanding of it’s poverty, famine, and imperialised past. She and The Renaissance Man convey together their wartime impressions of life there. The great proletarian cultural revolution goes pear shaped.
All the Right Moves.
discovers the grand imperial imposture.The disconnect between the policies promulgated by the Empire and the reality on the ground. It’s division of modern society between those who conform and the dystopian world of those who do not. Increasingly disaffected with it’s system of control,he travels to the beat of a different drum.
The Dinner party and the Revolution.
Sai Zhen Zhou opens the door of knowledge to the Orient , giving him perspective on Chinese culture. She provides him with a greater understanding of it’s poverty, famine, and imperialised past. She and The Renaissance Man convey together their wartime impressions of life there. The great proletarian cultural revolution goes pear shaped.
All the Right Moves.
He listens to some chalky talk about government inspectors . He finds the ‘lost’ generation and it’s political vanguard: poets,prodigies, prophets and prodigal sons.The sword of Damocles still hanging,he hears some nuggets of wisdom about The God that Failed, The Angry Young Men and the Happy Young Men,blade on the feather,eye on the ball.
Desiderata. (See separate blog: betweenthelineseducation.blogspot.com)
Once deciding who he was, planning for every possibility he left nothing to chance. All sharp and shiny,he got back in the swim of things.Gangway! Blanketing the field, he got his hopes up. Then came the detours.The nasty social engineering.Imagination suspect. A series of indignities at the hands of the public school system.He finds himself the subject of of a very nasty hunt.Hit below the belt. Obstructed by the dead hand of officialdom. The Government Inspector.In loco parentis,house training the hooligans.The banned plays on.Going it alone while the getting was good,the outlier was presented with the chance to do a very special thing, unique to him, fitted to his talents and going beyond what was expected.Holding out hope, his optimism, absorbing further unpleasant shock, served him as a kind of ship's fender, protecting him on all sides.All except the inside. Snatching disaster from the jaws of victory,he is driven into the ground.
Desiderata. (See separate blog: betweenthelineseducation.blogspot.com)
Once deciding who he was, planning for every possibility he left nothing to chance. All sharp and shiny,he got back in the swim of things.Gangway! Blanketing the field, he got his hopes up. Then came the detours.The nasty social engineering.Imagination suspect. A series of indignities at the hands of the public school system.He finds himself the subject of of a very nasty hunt.Hit below the belt. Obstructed by the dead hand of officialdom. The Government Inspector.In loco parentis,house training the hooligans.The banned plays on.Going it alone while the getting was good,the outlier was presented with the chance to do a very special thing, unique to him, fitted to his talents and going beyond what was expected.Holding out hope, his optimism, absorbing further unpleasant shock, served him as a kind of ship's fender, protecting him on all sides.All except the inside. Snatching disaster from the jaws of victory,he is driven into the ground.
- So c’mon board, adventure awaits! Hold onto your hats for one cracking ride of a lifetime.Ready to cast off? Blades down. Steady as she goes. That’s the shot. Full speed ahead! Forward ho!
A Swift and Violent Event.
'Should I stay or should I Go”[ the Clash]
'I hit the ground all right. Not running but barely able to crawl. No soft landing. This had to be for real- ‘It’. Shivering on the brink of the Great Gaping Beyond,just short of too late, as close as you can without getting sucked in completely . Warding off the overwhelming plunge into free fall. Towards shutdown.It didn’t look like there was any coming up. Hanging in the balance, within an inch, fully aware of the choice, determined to stay, I clawed my way out of the throes back to dear life-just. Set upon in my own kitchen, the attack that morning was the mother of a weird sensation – being sucked into the ultimate vortex. Not waving but drowning, my left hand was writhing surreally around by itself as if it didn’t belong to me. Dragging myself like grim death across the dining room floor, I had to raise the alarm without unduly worrying Leonor. Tapping on the bottom of the wall groggily, I roused Ruben who like the rest of my family, was still slumbering away. Swinging into action- ready, steady go- my two young adult sons, Sean and Ruben lugged me gasping to the car and whisked me away to Balmain hospital. Their rapid response and presence of mind was of the essence.
Code Blue.
Out for the count in this hardluck round, hanging in the balance,what happened after that is all rather hazy. In the nick of time I was transferred by ambulance to the larger Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, better equipped for such an emergency. I had reached the bright lights, not the ones I had in mind,more like the spotlights in which a doomed kangaroo is frozen.Not on the way up,rather on the
way out- but with at least signs of life.Elated to be in the here and now, not the everafter.Stabilised,living to fight another day.My family had gathered around me,not knowing if they were waiting to farewell me or come face to face with an unknown future.My lights were on but there was nobody home.
After slipping in and out of semi-consciousness,away with the fairies, I came to, laid up in a hospital bed all dopey.I had stepped through the looking glass and things didn’t look good. All my natural functions had to be artificially assisted and I appeared just as helpless as one could possibly be and live. A blur of heads floating into view, peered down at me, testing me. Following the light of the pen torch as it traced a path across my view ruled out any damage to my sight:’You’ll be all right,’I remember vaguely being reassured as I awoke.Uh oh- it was ruder than that. Getting my left leg and arm moving was another story. Moreover locating the spot where they were pricked proved disturbingly difficult.In a bad way, delivered a king haymaker, my body had sure gone haywire. And I wasn’t alone. Every ten minutes in Australia someone bites the dust this way. This scene in all its horror I learned was unfolding repeatedly before others around the world.
I can see myself to a T in Gordon Yates, Australian WWII veteran, crawling desperately across the floor to get help. Likewise in Walter Koontz, New York cop, whose symptoms mirror my own closely. Walter was cut down after being disturbed by screaming and gunshots in his seamy bedraggled tenement block. I saw it hit mafioso Carmine Lupertazzi during his luncheon beside the golfcourse.Keeling over, totally whacked,never managing to finish his egg salad.What a waste. Arriverderci Carmine.
I saw Bill Mitchell caught out in delicto flagrante. He was left in a persistent vegetative state, as was Adam Trask,Californian lettuce farmer.I saw Lois Granger sprawled on the pavement of her town in Maine.Stone cold dead.Both she and her coffee had taken a spill after leaving the doughnut shop. She had seemed just fine to witnesses.Then she walked out and crumbled.
I saw Henry Kitteridge carrying a bag of mulch mix across his garden before he too crumbles.Surviving a few years, his sight gone, unable to talk much or do anything before adding himself to the mix .
I saw all the details as it happened to Tom Beaumont in his garden watering his lawn, Tom moved the hose over a bush and got a kink in it.Water stopped coming out of the nozzle and there was a loud hissing noise of water under pressure. As the water leaked at the other end of the hose, connected to the side of the house, Tom went around the bush and was undoing the kink when suddenly he twisted and squirmed, grabbed his neck and doubled over, falling to the ground. Unconscious,continuing to grasp onto the hose,he became a macabre fountain , water shooting crazily onto the driveway and his car.
The attack left Swedish actor Oskar Ekdahl without a ghost of a chance.His immediate comment was that the role of wraith in his current play was now his.Sam Shepherd’s character,the patriarch Robert Rayburn from the television series Bloodline, has his own bloodflow block up to follow a different line.Just to be different his fatal attack leads to him plunging from his kayak into the water.
No strangers to death defying acts, past experience had taught most of our octet first-hand never to rule out the chance of attack from without. What rocked us most in our common fate was that on this occasion the body blow wasn’t the work of any sinister or accidental agency. It was an inside job.Not just Lupertazzi, we seven, Gordon, Walter,Bill, Tom,Henry,Oskar,Robert and real life me all shared an inherent vice.We had suffered brain attack. Severe stroke.
I saw Henry Kitteridge carrying a bag of mulch mix across his garden before he too crumbles.Surviving a few years, his sight gone, unable to talk much or do anything before adding himself to the mix .
I saw all the details as it happened to Tom Beaumont in his garden watering his lawn, Tom moved the hose over a bush and got a kink in it.Water stopped coming out of the nozzle and there was a loud hissing noise of water under pressure. As the water leaked at the other end of the hose, connected to the side of the house, Tom went around the bush and was undoing the kink when suddenly he twisted and squirmed, grabbed his neck and doubled over, falling to the ground. Unconscious,continuing to grasp onto the hose,he became a macabre fountain , water shooting crazily onto the driveway and his car.
The attack left Swedish actor Oskar Ekdahl without a ghost of a chance.His immediate comment was that the role of wraith in his current play was now his.Sam Shepherd’s character,the patriarch Robert Rayburn from the television series Bloodline, has his own bloodflow block up to follow a different line.Just to be different his fatal attack leads to him plunging from his kayak into the water.
No strangers to death defying acts, past experience had taught most of our octet first-hand never to rule out the chance of attack from without. What rocked us most in our common fate was that on this occasion the body blow wasn’t the work of any sinister or accidental agency. It was an inside job.Not just Lupertazzi, we seven, Gordon, Walter,Bill, Tom,Henry,Oskar,Robert and real life me all shared an inherent vice.We had suffered brain attack. Severe stroke.
Most likely you have seen at least one of these onslaughts.Cinematic re-enactment has driven home to viewers just how profoundly frightening they are. Gordon Yates is the leading character in the ABC drama series ‘Changi’.Walter Koontz was played by Robert De Niro in the movie ‘Flawless’.Lupertazzi was grazing with with fellow mafioso Tony Soprano at the golf course
restaurant. Tom Beaumont was the hardware store owner the camera begins to settles in on at the beginning of ‘Blue Velvet’.Bill Mitchell was the American President played by Kevin Kline in the comedy drama ‘Dave’. Diplomacy down the drain,his first lady responded tartly ‘Why can’t you die from a stroke like everyone else?’
Adam Trask, played by Raymond Massey, in the Cain and Abel allegory ‘East of Eden’ was flattened following a quarrel with the son he neglects,played by James Dean, and the death of his favoured son.
Henry Kitteridge,played by Richard Jenkins, was the pharmacist in the TV series named after his wife,Olive who spent his days serving the locals in his Maine town One day he witnessed first hand what can happen when blood pressure can rise dramatically. After sorting out pills to control it,Henry Kitteridge rushes out of his pharmacy to try and revive Lois Granger. Little could Henry realise that sooner than later he would suffer a similar fate.
Oskar Ekdahl was the thespian poppa of Ingmar Bergman’s alter ego in ‘Fanny and Alexander’.
Unlike the seizures of Walter,Adam and Gordon whose blood is boiling after his mercenary son’s selfish financial demands on him, someone who had spent time crawling through suffocating stagnant swamp infested by Japanese troops, mine was not triggered by any apparent rush of blood. Like that of Lupertazzi,Beaumont and Robert Evans, the larger than life Hollywood film producer, it just came out of nowhere.
Tora!Tora,Tora!It could happen to- someone just like you.
Blowout.
A blood vessel on the right side of my brain had burst wide open. Like Tom Beaumont’s hose it had been under great pressure.This led to bleeding and swelling within and reduction of the blood supply flowing to part of the brain downstream, and damage to the immediate area.
‘You’ve had a haemorrhagic stroke’,said the neurologist socking it to me. Of such neurological events –called by the ancient Greeks apoplexia- it is one of the more all conquering, notoriously severe . It kills a lot more chaps, in fact,than were bumped off when Troy was sacked.
It wasn’t singularly painful when it happened or in the fog immediately afterwards. At that stage, it was all Greek to me. It was only gradually that my worst fears were realized, that the chilling sickening truth sank in.Like a ton of bricks. I was ‘all right’ all right- my left side seized up,communication of signals along nerve cells lost, knocked out of commission,out of alignment- crippled,washed out,knackered, fighting for my independence and inner peace. Reeling under the shock,I faced a downward turn better conveyed, not to put too fine a point on it, by the depth laden import – catastrophe. Those Greeks aren’t too bad with words,are they.Credit where credit’s due. Or do I sound like I’m Con descending?
Well Strike me pink!Shiver me timbers!That’s torn it!I had really blown it this time.Blown my top.Blown my ability to work.Blown my prospects.The whole shebang.To smithereens.
Well Strike me pink!Shiver me timbers!That’s torn it!I had really blown it this time.Blown my top.Blown my ability to work.Blown my prospects.The whole shebang.To smithereens.
Warts and All
“Suddenly I’m not half the man I used to be and There’s a Shadow Hanging
over Me”
The Beatles – “Yesterday.
What a comedown.Definitely not the break I’d been hoping for.I had incurred serious damage to that part of the brain that controls movement.Wham bam pow.It’s thar she blew. As the damage was on the right side of my brain, the debilitating weakness and paralysis this left hemiplegic feels is all down my left flank. The figure in the diagram would experience this down his or her right side. The sudden loss of muscle control would explain the sinking feeling I felt . The twitching movement of
my hand was due to Dr Strangelove’s or Alien Hand Syndrome in which the stricken part seems to take on a mind of its own. This was how Dr. Strangelove’s hand moved in the movie of the same name.
Bang went my physical balance. The tendency of my left side to give in is continuous.Off centre, my right side is heavier than my left. When I stand on two sets of scales, the right one will register more weight because of the difference in pressure. Much of my energy is spent in working to counter this lopsided effect. My right side has to carry my left.This wayward wing has become semi-autonomous.If I scratch higher up along my wry side—my neck for example-my left foot will twitch.My nerves are well and truly shot.Nice going,Allan.You've really done it.
Bang went my physical balance. The tendency of my left side to give in is continuous.Off centre, my right side is heavier than my left. When I stand on two sets of scales, the right one will register more weight because of the difference in pressure. Much of my energy is spent in working to counter this lopsided effect. My right side has to carry my left.This wayward wing has become semi-autonomous.If I scratch higher up along my wry side—my neck for example-my left foot will twitch.My nerves are well and truly shot.Nice going,Allan.You've really done it.
Of my two affected limbs my arm was the first to regain movement. The palsy is centred on the shoulder joint. I’m stumped turning the steering wheel of a car and doing repetitive arm movements.Off kilter everything I do with my hands is at an angle.Unable to approach things in my former even-handed way,I can’t cut the mustard or a rug anymore. ‘Butterfingers’ can’t open jars and cans easily and leave broadsheets all scrunched up. I get excruciating back pain as a result.My back
goes out while I stay in.
Way off the planet to begin with,it was if my left leg was subject to the G-force of Neptune. My biggest handicap , heavy as lead,stiff as a board it floats around and drags. In this bind I can’t flex it backwards. This wonky leg feels shorter than the right one.It’s difficult for this leg to clear even slightly uneven surfaces.
Getting into a car I have to hump this bodily member in. ‘Get Shorty’, my left side reminds my brain to the strains of Billy Holliday.
goes out while I stay in.
Way off the planet to begin with,it was if my left leg was subject to the G-force of Neptune. My biggest handicap , heavy as lead,stiff as a board it floats around and drags. In this bind I can’t flex it backwards. This wonky leg feels shorter than the right one.It’s difficult for this leg to clear even slightly uneven surfaces.
Getting into a car I have to hump this bodily member in. ‘Get Shorty’, my left side reminds my brain to the strains of Billy Holliday.
‘ All of me
Why not take all of me
Can't you see
I'm no good without you
You took the best
So why not take the rest
Baby, take all of me.’
Out of whack, this leg is hard to stand straight on and when I do I am always working at keeping my balance. Weak and wobbly , the leg and foot muscles are all spastic-sore and tight as a drumhead. So astonished was I to discover the extent, you could have knocked me down with a feather. The foot splays and is ultra-sensitive. If I tread barefooted on a miniscule object, I come to a screaming,unsettling halt. If you consider the muscles to be like springs, mine,maimed, resist stretching and insist on staying graven in a contracted state.Applying pressure feels like razorblades- or is it weasels?- ripping my flesh.Pinching myself to check if all this is really happening,I don’t have to dig too deep. This is nice, isn't it,getting hogtied at my time in life.
As the greatest tension is centred in my maximus gluteus,sitting for long is no option. My universal joint out of joint, it’s a big pain in the butt, leaving me in no position but to sit tight. This fall guy gets it in the neck which is what I guess comes from sticking it out. Its crunch time for me, the breaking noise I hear when I bend my gammy leg and neck.Stretching and moving, my pain graduates to sharp and pronounced.
Uncomfortably Numb
If you ask me, ‘Is the pain with you all the time’,let me just say ‘It gets my full attention.’ At rest what I feel is constant dull tension, one big ache. Already having osteo-arthritis complicates the matter. As for where the pain from one condition ends and that from the other starts,search me.
Knocking the stuffing out of me, this crushing clinching blow would seal my fate, leaving me on the ropes with other typical disabilities experienced by stroke and brain damage survivors. MRI’s confirmed the damage as well as the fact I still get claustrophobia. I have trying spatial and perception difficulties which were quite marked on the first days trying to get around. Sitting in an armless chair would see me falling off to the left side. My sleeping pattern has suffered. I'll probably never die in my sleep.I don't sleep so well. It’s hard to sleep on my left side – my natural position due to the discomfort.God asked Ezekiel to lay on his left side for 390 days and on his right side for 40 days.Why can’t he ask me? Do I have to be a fully accredited prophet to get the same deal? After trying to rest on either side ,tossing and turning, I end up fitfully again on my back,going through a phase where where I get whopping spasms.Jimmy Leg wakes up about 4.00am every morning,my throat as dry as the pub with no beer. I move my enervated limbs to avoid negative thoughts or get up which is no fun in winter.Running on empty,bashing my spine, I really have to push myself to get up. I’m stalked by chronic fatigue , hugely embarrassing for this slave to the rhythm,if not enough to curl my toes. I feel like the morning after when I haven't been anywhere the night before.My get up and go’s gotten up and gone.
My batteries won’t charge up any more. Don’t ask me to shake a leg. My left one can convulse like mad-like Marlon’s in his convincing role as parapleged war veteran- when I get jumpy or change my position in bed.Maybe I could get work powering an outboard motorboat. Lingering giddiness makes concentration fiendishly difficult. This all leaves me feeling drained,poorly, as if I’m not quite with it. To be fair, a stroke is not all bad news. As with the electric shock I had some years ago,I have to see it as a blessing in disguise. It’s very effective in frightening away warts- if you don’t mind the side effects.
Mountains out of Molehills.
Navigating this uncharted brave new cockeyed world is as daunting as that which confronted the original Incredible Shrinking Man, where everyday objects and normal go-rounds suddenly take on new riskier, staggering dimensions.Like Scott Carey’s, my shrunken unco-ordinated muscles have forced me into an extremity of circumstance,shrinking from dealing with simple operations that I once took for granted.Cut down to size by my flimsiness ,even the simplest tasks from before can seem overwhelming and take ages to complete if at all.I don’t do things by halves.I do them by much smaller fractions. Every little laboured movement I have to consider beforehand belt and braces, whether it be deciding whether to tighten my trakkies, which of the two objects in my left hand I wish to release,looking for papers ,planning pit stops, or wide-berthing and angling my ungainly way through doorways.Lagging behind,losing my pace, I pare down every unnecessary movement,leaving time of course to move my body sufficiently to maintain functionality. As with Scott, looking both ways before I cross a room,a trip around my retreat has become more like an expedition in the works than an off the cuff action.When I fall down, I wonder what else I can do while I’m down there.
‘You should see me when I’ve been drinking’,I say to people,though I do little of that.
Please remain in my favour. Because of my left side, off the wall deficit,while moving, I can swing out at things on my left side without meaning to. Make sure you stay on the right side of me.
It’s easier for me to get to the right by schlepping leftward and around.Going round in circles.You know the feeling?
Waddle I do.Maybe I could move ahead getting a research grant from the Ministry Of Silly Walks. A job as a tourist guide in Pisa.An artist’s model posing as a still life.Work as a stand-over man leaning on welchers, threatening glancing blows. Work in the physics department , demonstrating the principle of inertia.Become the greatest stand up comedian specializing in those lame‘Mummy,mummy,why do I keep walking in circles?’jokes. I would run rings around everyone else. I could hobble straight into an acting job as a drunkard,mutant or a zombie.Or like Oskar Ekdahl,as a ghost.If I break a leg,I’d get cast for sure.You never know your luck in the big city.Ever.
Walking on the wild side, hindrances to safe passage pop up everywhere. The most dangerous territory can be anywhere outside my house and beyond, where hurdles abound. Hazards,potholes,ridges and mishaps lurk in gravel parking lots, on footpaths of cracked cement and uneven kerbs. Unless manicured, our lawn becomes a jungle with various hidden traps. The evenness of this ground zero is a big consideration. Lumbering down inclines is much harder than going up. The gentle slopes in my garden—formerly imperceptible-- are much more demanding for me than were those of the lower reaches of the Himalayas.As for dancing -forget it.I would only only shake,rattle and roll.Flip,flop and fly. What I miss is trucking, strolling leisurely, not having to concentrate so hard on keeping upright-with an independent air.
Walking on the wild side, hindrances to safe passage pop up everywhere. The most dangerous territory can be anywhere outside my house and beyond, where hurdles abound. Hazards,potholes,ridges and mishaps lurk in gravel parking lots, on footpaths of cracked cement and uneven kerbs. Unless manicured, our lawn becomes a jungle with various hidden traps. The evenness of this ground zero is a big consideration. Lumbering down inclines is much harder than going up. The gentle slopes in my garden—formerly imperceptible-- are much more demanding for me than were those of the lower reaches of the Himalayas.As for dancing -forget it.I would only only shake,rattle and roll.Flip,flop and fly. What I miss is trucking, strolling leisurely, not having to concentrate so hard on keeping upright-with an independent air.
While I’m most assured when indoors, this tricky terrain is strewn with its own pitfalls. Just as carpeting,cables, stairs and slippery floors became dangers to Scott, taking on the proportions of precipitous cliff faces,sheer escarpments and bonebreaking surfaces,so too are they to me,threatening to trip me up, unsteady as I am to start with,impede my progress,or lay me flat on my back..Grounded, caged and constricted, immured within the house,itself a potentially lethal environment, I tread very carefully.
‘Remember to look up at the stars,not down at your feet’,Stephen Hawking exhorts us. On the march,waving their tiny antennae,our fine formic friends countermand this . I’ve avoided squashing thousands. In tune with them, my life has become an obstacle course in every sense of the word. Standing on shaky ground, I don’t get much around . The good thing about my next journey? I won’t have to pack.
Like Paul Newman’s character Henry Winning, convicted bank robber, who was transferred to hospital from prison with all the same symptoms as me, this homebody’s at the mercy of whatever impinges on my space. Henry colourfully illustrated the everyday vulnerability which paralyzed people are faced with. “One day this cockroach just climbed up my collar, decided to take a hike around my face. He parked half on my upper lip and half inside my nose, just scratched around in there looking for a little action...” I got bitten on my back under the shower by a whitetailed spider, not long before I blew my stack.While not brobdingnagian as that which menaced Scott, it’s sharp bite, potentially fatal, left a nasty skin lesion. A return call with me balanced precariously under the shower in my bathtub would put me not on my mettle,but on the harder stuff.
Walk,Don’t Run
Children, don't do
What I have done
I couldn't walk
And I tried to run.
John Lennon.
One tiny misstep,one slip up, can send me tumbling down the slippery slope into a yawning abyss of misery. During the first two and a half years after the Event, I lost my balance several times but managed to land on my rear unscathed. Then one evening bang in the bosom of my family, I came a whopping gutser. Losing my balance on the carpet,whoops a daisy, Humpty went sailing forward lickety split , all arms and legs flailing, all akimbo, landing smack dab on my dicky side.Not a pretty sight.Stopped cold, roaring like a wounded bull, I struggled to sit up. I wasn’t putting it on. A paroxysm of pain, like a thousand devils, swept through me. Rather than piling on the agony, I was agonizing on the pile.But unlike William Holden, tripped by his rug,I was still alive. The following day I had to be hoiked out of the house headfirst by ambulance and hospitalized for a few weeks. X rays ruled out fractures which left me not with a split licketty but bruised ribs, by no means as benign as it sounds.As bruised as my pounded ego. This rough trot set back my progress by a year.This was a crash course in survival.My worst enemy now is gravity.It gets me down more than ever.
While the only part of me that can swim is my head,things otherwise are not going swimmingly for me in the pool, Kerplunk! I don’t capsize and stay afloat. It gives me buoyancy. However there has been no miraculous flow on to free up my inner stiffness ,no rejuvenating ‘life force’ to absorb, making me feel cocooned, younger and stronger. Having long given up prospects of walking on it, I wade through the water with my inimitable Australian Crawl.
Ferrying things around the house bit by bit get rather irksome, but taking it on the chin,I keep it up. To increase the tipsy load, I take the bit – any bit – between gritted teeth.In this kitchen sink drama,I feel as washed up as the crockery I take charge of.
As for being able to plan my affairs, this has tended to go by the board. All in tatters,all part of the inevitable unravelling process. I just tend to rack up papers as I seem to have lost most of the organizational ability I banged away at developing.With lots of unfinished business,scaling everything back, I have my paperwork – much of which involves cutting things out – cut out.Have I shot my bolt totally?Where is the life that late I led? Where is it now? Totally dead?While the only part of me that can swim is my head,things otherwise are not going swimmingly for me in the pool, Kerplunk! I don’t capsize and stay afloat. It gives me buoyancy. However there has been no miraculous flow on to free up my inner stiffness ,no rejuvenating ‘life force’ to absorb, making me feel cocooned, younger and stronger. Having long given up prospects of walking on it, I wade through the water with my inimitable Australian Crawl.
Ferrying things around the house bit by bit get rather irksome, but taking it on the chin,I keep it up. To increase the tipsy load, I take the bit – any bit – between gritted teeth.In this kitchen sink drama,I feel as washed up as the crockery I take charge of.
Hell’s Bells
“If you hear your ears ringing… Don’t answer”
An old jungle saying
To top matters off there is the intensification of something I had before the stroke. If the buildup to the breach of the vascular wall had been going on silently, the repercussions would be anything but. The message was loud and clear. My tinnitus – the constant ringing in my ears is now horribly pronounced. High frequency cicadas in my head that no one else can hear. Aiming for a ringing endorsement of my work,something got left out.
The dratted sensation is like many things.How many? Don’t ask. It’s like that of having the ringing sound associated with electric static you experience on TV or radio always around. This figures as it is believed to be the electric charge of the central nervous system in its aural form. It’s like the silvery sound of endless seething seas, hissing and receiving across sand. The cacophonous symphony grows louder the more I think about it.
I listen closely to my body now.I don’t have much choice.
There’s an Australian thriller ‘Noise’ which features a policeman assailed with this abominable crown of thorns. The dull knelling sound creeps into every scene amplifying my own.
welcoming counterpoint is the beautiful warbling and twitter of our local birds, replacing the cockcrow to herald the new day. As far as I know so far, there’s not much you do about the ding. I just have to cop it sweet.My advice to anyone suffering from this affliction: “If you hear your ears ringing… Don’t answer.”
The sound naturally conjures up to me that made by the air rushing past me as I fall from the sky
My task then is to convince my brain that is the whooshing of the air as I fly around viewing the wonders of our planet on my magic flying carpet.
As well as this, noises that previously would not have flustered me in the least give me such a turn. As for the gunshots that so jolt the flatfoot these would have me jump out of my skin if I could do so.Then again,not that it’s all bad.
Stars that used to twinkle in the skies,
Are twinkling in my eyes,
I wonder why?
It was when I started to see flashes of light from the side of my left eye that I realised that together with the sounds they made up a silver lining. I was experiencing vitreous detachment .Let me explain. The vitreous contains the humour or clear gel that fills the space between the lens and the retina, the lining of photosensitive tissue at the back of the eye. At birth the vitreous is attached to the retina. Over time it changes, shrinking and developing pockets of liquefaction, similar to the way a gelatine dessert shrinks, or detaches, from the edge of a pan over time.The vitreous shrinking causes a pull in vitreoretinal attachments, irritating the retina and causing it to discharge electrical impulses. These impulses are interpreted by our brain as 'flashes'.
I can now hear my thudding heartbeat in one ear.With a bit of luck,the temoporal bone in my skull will thin and I’ll get SCDS.Then I’ll be able to hear the swishing of my bodily fluids.I’ll able to hear my eyeballs squeak in their sockets and my brain wobble.
Why do these strange things come about? Doctors point out,such things happen with age.Coping with them is an issue of mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter.
So I say eat your heart out young yuppies,you who pay extravagant amounts to experience ‘son and lumiere’ and cataracts in the world’s top tourist sites.I’ve get them built in for free in the comfort of my home without having to jetset anywhere.
I’ve developed a great sense of vitreous humour.
A Matter of Time
'Well it's a good life and a good world, all said and done, if you don't weaken, and if you know that the big wide world hasn't heard from you yet, not by a long way, though it won't be long now...' Arthur Seaton.
Before this Event I was plumbing the slippery depths of cosmology. I had purchased a copy of Stephen Hawking’s ‘A Brief History of Time’. I had wanted to be able to think more like Hawking.Now my darkest hour upon me, I feel more like him, turned inside out after the Big Bang.. We both know full well where a freefall into a black hole can lead you.A world falling round our ears. On borrowed time like ours, the interest rate is sky high.It was later than we thought.
My future will soon be a thing of the past. Before this event I lived for the future,although like every sentient human being I was discovering how time speeds up as one gets older until it runs off the spool at the end. The cold realization that I’m still here finally set in.Now waking up I begin by saying ‘am’ and ‘now’. Now the future is so problematic I feel stranded in the now and the past. This is difficult territory as I have to constantly counter the inevitable ‘what if…’ line of thought.
“Live each day as it comes,’I hear you say. ‘Tomorrow is another day’ .
Not true. Today is another day. We have no idea what tomorrow is going to be. It might turn out to be another day, but we can't be sure. If it happens, I'll be the first to say so. But, you know what? By that time, it'll be today again.’
“Live each day as it comes,’I hear you say. ‘Tomorrow is another day’ .
Not true. Today is another day. We have no idea what tomorrow is going to be. It might turn out to be another day, but we can't be sure. If it happens, I'll be the first to say so. But, you know what? By that time, it'll be today again.’
One Mind Blowing Experience
Bang went my peace of mind,shaken to the core. Gone my sunny irrepressible disposition, my get up and go,my unsinkable “joie de vivre’ –all packed up in one fell sweep.I went straight from feeling super to feeling superfluous. Seriously deflated,my ability to cope with the emotional trauma concomitant with this condition is sorely taxing . At times I feel the menace of mental havoc. Like 4.00a.m. when I wake in a cold sweat wrestling with my blankets and this heavy nagging foreboding.In my upbeat years I had been chasing a dream—now I am fending off a never-ending nightmare.Oh make me wanna holler.
If you think the corporeal features of stroke are bad,that’s not the half of it.It’s the morbid psychological ones that wreak the greatest havoc:fear, anger, frustration, depression. It’s a negativity, an absence, a greyness, a cloud.And a a generalized human anxiety about the approach of death. This sense of pending doom like that expressed by Beckett’s characters, marked by immobility and a hopeless inability to alter the consequences of chaos.Most memorably in ‘Happy Days’ through the concrete image of a woman sunk waist deep in the ground in the first act and up to her neck in the second.
Well I never felt more like singing the blues. Just thinking about me being so knock kneed makes me shudder, frightens the living daylights out of me. Forced to ask tough questions about myself,always together before,someone whose head was screwed on tight. Through the prism of my stroke the glare of my defects of character-flaws, foibles and failures, is magnified multiply and unrelieved.Above all the regret of not having come up short,not realised my full potential. My pangs of anger have been directed at myself for winding up in such a pinch. On the threshold of sixty years of age,before my time, I placed such a burden on the shoulders of my long suffering partner. Not seeing any immediate and tangible results,she hadn’t gone along completely with my mission.
She had come to see my doing what I,her awful wedded husband, chose to do in life as a precious indulgent luxury .Understandably so in light of my shortfall.
My pangs have been directed at myself for my ignorance. A year before my big one I had a mini stroke. I know this now from what I have learned. I felt giddiness and staggered from chair to chair in our lounge room until it passed. Ting-a-ling, this was my wake up call to stave off what was looming- but I didn’t hear the bells. That day I had eaten at a dodgy restaurant and I put my symptoms down to food poisoning. That’s all I could think of as I’d never felt like that before. I failed to spot the menu special that day – Red Herrings. I hadn’t been feeling unwell. True,problems in the plumbing department had surfaced.The cracks were appearing. I did have high blood pressure which my former general practitioner advised to bring down. I cut down my salt intake and went swimming more. What I needed was to hear was ‘It’s your funeral’, strong portents about this insidious scourge—how this disaster waiting to happen can creep up on you like thieves in the night, ever so gradually, ever so secretly and cut you down in your tracks.Was this why what G.P.’s do is sometimes called medical ‘practice’?
Nobody told me there’d be days like this.I was due for a full tune-up. I probably needed prescriptions for some of the pharmaceuticals I am on now. Taking my medicine, I do hear such warnings from the federal government now. They have launched a serious media campaign of awareness to stroke as the third biggest cause of death in Western countries and the largest cause of disabilities. There are five million survivors in the U.S.
Nobody told me there’d be days like this.I was due for a full tune-up. I probably needed prescriptions for some of the pharmaceuticals I am on now. Taking my medicine, I do hear such warnings from the federal government now. They have launched a serious media campaign of awareness to stroke as the third biggest cause of death in Western countries and the largest cause of disabilities. There are five million survivors in the U.S.
Ripe for the picking,like most people I was working like a maniac.Our underlying problem is that we are working and living too hard in a mad congested social rush driven so frenetically by an anarchic cut-throat military-industrial complex that creates so much noise , disequilibrium and stress pell mell,everything going ‘time is money,get it while you can’. Even in the best of times that was so.How much more so will it become now the global economic crisis deepens and deepens. The white heat overwork epidemic that has led to Australians clocking up among the longest working hours in the OECD. The way things panned out for me involved making up for lost time post haste in
the nerve-wracking, feverish, over- arching race to buy a family house and,full tilt, hard on myself, perpetually on edge, on the go go, reaching for the secret,crying for the moon, to build a self sustaining rewarding career.I was always trying to prove myself all the time with an absolute determination to do things and blow everything away in front of me.Quicksilver had to win.
Opening up, full on,pumped up,pedal to the metal,greasing the wheels,all cylinders firing,locked into formula one high gear, powering along,burning rubber,caught up in the punishing high octane race for takeoff, carried away to the exclusion of almost everything else. Out on the streets when the traffic started jumping was the time when my blood started pumping. Sleep being at a premium, I went into overdrive, pulling out all stops,gunning the engine, stoking my way stonkered body’s furnace to stay on the treadmill,barreling along faster to stay in the one place.
Zowie.Giving it all I had,never cutting corners,never slackening,opening it up even further. Vroom.Like a bat out of hell, pushing my luck,hard-pressed,wrapped up in my work, forgetting myself,shrugging off concern, reaching breakneck speed,tempting fate, taking it to the limit one more time in my fuel injected,nitro-boosted flight- you’ve got the picture?- a man possessed of great ambition,a man driven.Riding for a fall. My maxim had long been ‘Let it rip’ but what ended up ripping wasn’t what I had had in mind.In the hot seat, in the land of Oz, hurtling round the Emerald City, fast and furious.Whoosh! Ruled by the clock,it was too late to turn it back . Too late to bail out, something had to give. Didn’t see the stop sign,took a turn for the worse,hit the skids. Mother Nature can only take and forgive so much.To think I spent more time worrying about my car being on the blink than about me blowing a gasket. Bubbling away,this pressure cooker needed an escape valve, to ease up, downshift and take my family for a holiday.
‘So we’re not going to Thredbo this year?’
‘No.it’s New Zealand we’re not going to.It was Thredbo we didn’t go to last year.’
Like many things, I was always going to be able to manage this but my ship never quite came in.The life of this phoenix turned out much more irreversible,far flakier than I had bargained for.Unable to back up, to turn the arrow of time, to lure back the moving finger,press the re-set button,undo things. I have to concentrate on keeping equanimous, level-headed and not giving in to demoralizing downbeat despair. Those ghastly sinking feelings can overwhelm so suddenly.Seeing I can’t throw my hands up in the air easily, I pick myself up again,reminding myself with a kind of Zen illumination: ‘I am after all alive’, but vulnerable at all levels to being overpowered.I used to give the impression of granite; now there’s limestone within. I used to be so easy going, feeling indispensable, indestructible, unstoppable,full of staying power, starry notions, on top of everything within my means,sure to have my way. Even as the telltale signs of aging were appearing,pointing to trouble ahead, I clung as tenaciously as a barnacle – or was it stubbornly – to the rose coloured mantra governing my generation – that everything was possible if you put your mind to it.Oh yes I was the great pretender. Though I saw it all around, I never thought that I could be affected.Made of sterner stuff,thought that I’d be last to go. That dying was the last thing I’d do.My favourite joke was that I was going to live forever-even if I died in the attempt.I constantly assured myself, ‘So far so good’.Yet the more staunchly I defied my age the more it bit back.
‘So we’re not going to Thredbo this year?’
‘No.it’s New Zealand we’re not going to.It was Thredbo we didn’t go to last year.’
Like many things, I was always going to be able to manage this but my ship never quite came in.The life of this phoenix turned out much more irreversible,far flakier than I had bargained for.Unable to back up, to turn the arrow of time, to lure back the moving finger,press the re-set button,undo things. I have to concentrate on keeping equanimous, level-headed and not giving in to demoralizing downbeat despair. Those ghastly sinking feelings can overwhelm so suddenly.Seeing I can’t throw my hands up in the air easily, I pick myself up again,reminding myself with a kind of Zen illumination: ‘I am after all alive’, but vulnerable at all levels to being overpowered.I used to give the impression of granite; now there’s limestone within. I used to be so easy going, feeling indispensable, indestructible, unstoppable,full of staying power, starry notions, on top of everything within my means,sure to have my way. Even as the telltale signs of aging were appearing,pointing to trouble ahead, I clung as tenaciously as a barnacle – or was it stubbornly – to the rose coloured mantra governing my generation – that everything was possible if you put your mind to it.Oh yes I was the great pretender. Though I saw it all around, I never thought that I could be affected.Made of sterner stuff,thought that I’d be last to go. That dying was the last thing I’d do.My favourite joke was that I was going to live forever-even if I died in the attempt.I constantly assured myself, ‘So far so good’.Yet the more staunchly I defied my age the more it bit back.
The point of living, and of being an optimist, is to be foolish enough to believe the best is yet to come.
Peter Ustinov
Constantly reminded how life gets us all in the end, I can’t fool myself very convincingly any longer.I have to accept my body has limits.No more denial of my immunity at the ultimate level.I’ve come to accept it as part of the deal, the unwritten guarantee that comes with your birth certificate.Like all us mere mortals,I can’t skip death, put it off gracefully to a later date,go out on a high note,or even in a blaze of glory.What a comedown. Definitely not the break I’d been hoping for. Out of order, out of sorts, I get on pins and needles about every little thing. About creaking across the road, shambling skew whiff in the street, toppling over. About the wind-it doesn’t take much more than a breath to blow me over. About the chill that winter brings, getting bundled up and weighed down, the mounting pressure to sell up our home and about ending up in a wheelchair again fulltime. Feeling trapped inside my own flagging body, grieving for my functioning self.
In the ‘Desperate Housewives’ black comedy, Orson Hodges lays it on the line to his nefarious mother after she suffers a stroke during her last abortive murder attempt. Avoiding turning her in to face charges, he points out to her that her paralysis has resulted in a more severe sentence hanging over her head, worse than she would receive from any court.One without parole.
Dragging my overladen baggage stuffed with loose ends, crowding out the dreams, all my long term plans hanging in midair, I have to get through an emotional minefield booby-trapped with impossible choices and ethical puzzles past and present to reach the happy memories. But at least they arethere,the old familiar places, and I, my own man, past master of my own destiny will make it.. I’m not the only one who’s made mistakes but they're the only things that I can truly call my own.And if I don’t make it, it won’t be from lack of trying.
‘Make it to where?’ you might ask.
I intend to live to at least 77, the average life expectancy for the average Australian male.Plus three more for a good round number.
Our age should be judged not by how long we’ve lived,but by how long we intend to keep on living.
Different Strokes for Different Folks.
Sic transit gloria mundi- "thus passes worldly glory."
No matter has become of greater interest to me than accounts of how others have dealt with this sentence. You might say I have stroke on the brain.
They come in all shapes and sizes. I now know that they can happen to every man and his dog. I make mention here of the calvary reached by some noteworthy characters who have come to my attention . I feel for them as fellow sufferers if for no other reason. None of us make it out alive anyway. Facing the Great Leveller there is but one degree of separation between us.
Each stroke being unique,the severity of the sentence varying from one person to another. Mine lies between that of the two Sharons. On the way to the hospital I heard on the radio that Israeli strongman Ariel Sharon had had a massive one. As his country’s greatest weakling ,he vegetated for eight years in a coma having suffered frightful internal complications before expiring.
The other is Sharon Stone who had her stroke at the time of the attack on the World Trade Centre. She didn’t take any immediate action and carried on somewhat befuddled. Before she got treatment her malady went unnoticed in the trauma of the first day’s post 9/11. Wispier than when I last saw her,she was deeply affected by her experience. It took her a year to approach normalcy again. I haven’t seen any ostensible sign of paralysis in her so presumably her stroke was relatively mild. She has since reprised her role as the siren for which she became famous.
The cerebral stroke suffered by Edmund Hillary while mountain climbing in 1954 didn’t stop him going on to greater things. On each new visit to high altitudes, he took an ever greater risk with his cardio-vascular system.
Robert Evans whose Mafioso tentpole features the Godfather’s stroke knew what was on offer when he produced his own neurological blockbuster. Happily he speaks of his own good recovery.
Then there are the strokes that lead to speech and hearing problems. The aphasic stroke of Baudelaire, the French poet, led to his loss of speech, understanding of language, paralysis and death at the double. Tony Blair’s father couldn’t find his voice for three years after his attack. Kirk Douglas’ was signalled by a painful sensation in his right cheek followed by a slack-jawed inability to talk.Anthony Hopkins,who watched his ‘reel’ wife fall fatally in ‘The Human Stain’,his ‘father’ fall just before his fatal stroke in ‘Remains of the Day’, handed down these stories on the set of
‘Legends Of The Fall.’He demonstrated the distortion it can bring the face. It’s a good job I escaped this aphasia.My mobility’s difficult enough without lymph problems .Walking with a lisp.
The stroke of Francisco Goya, the Spanish painter who captured horror so masterfully on canvas, was brought on by a coach accident. It led to his loss of hearing at the age of 47. He died from a stroke at the age of 82, a long period in between, which gives me some glimmers of hope. They can occur seriatim which happened to Dr Coombs about whom I will write later, Elizabeth Taylor,Margaret Thatcher and her friend, the late General Pinochet. Like her marriages, Elizabeth Taylor’s came serially. She had gone for a Burton as did Dickie in the unhappier sense when his number 59 came up, having his stroke at the same age as me.I had cautioned him to take care, but you know what these fast living high flyers are like.
In the Spanish film “Salamina Soldiers”, an old infirm republican veteran from the Civil War-a true Wobbly if ever there were one - remarks how befitting it is that it’s his left side that is paralysed whereas the right remains bolt upright and solid-- like the political right. Of course when it comes to one’s leanings, it can cut either way. Walter Koontz the stout hearted prejudiced upholder of the state, now reduced to tears, anguish and raging frustration, was stricken on the right side.
Strokes have no respect for ideology as the above examples indicate. Robert Menzies, Australia’s long term big wheel would become a fifth one, rolled around after his seizure. The Portugal fascist dictator Salazar, Winston Churchill, Stalin and Leonid Brezhnev were all candidates for this affliction. Propped up with no official reference to his condition, as was the Soviet practice, Brezhnev’s eventual decision to back the coup in Afghanistan followed by military intervention, contributed to the political paralysis and unravelling of the Soviet Union and a seismic change in global geopolitics.
How are the mighty fallen.Sapped of his strength, cooped up in his home, Joseph Kennedy, the puissant patriarch of the Boston clan could do nothing to allay his torment on being told the tragic news of his boys.Such terrible thefts.God forbid this ever happen to me.
Damaged Goods
‘ How much can a koala bear?’[Austen Tayshus]
Quasimodo, Couch Slouch, Sluggish Snail, Beached Whale.To name but a few of the weird and wonderful characters and creatures I feel I’ve morphed into vicariously.As you’ll see the list goes on. These weren’t part of this script I was to stick to.Surrendering the things of youth gracefully.Dancing in the dark,walking through the park and gardening. Reduced to basic survival,life gone terribly amiss,my bubble burst. I needed this stroke like a hole in the head, which is what it is in effect considering the death of brain cells. It was a devastating blow to me, bereft of my life force,pinned down by inertia. Engaged in meaningful activity, I could always keep going, sweep the issue of potential withering of my faculties under the carpet. I could handle any adversity by the sweat of my brow, as long as I was in the pink. Neither an uptight, 9 to 5,clock punching, buttoned- down man of convention, straight as a die without the tie that might pinch off my circulation, marking time, standing on ceremony,collecting my pay cheque, nor one who waiting to bow out, be led out to pasture at a certain age,I had no interest in putting my feet up,in endless leisure activities.Not one little bit.My best work was yet to come. My security hinged on my functionality. No margin for error.Having wound up too clapped out to do lots physically,my golden years will be somewhat tarnished.I was a big man yesterday but boy you oughta see me now.The effect of my chequered life can be seen writ large on my gaunt grizzled lived-in features.Face to face with my self,taking a long hard look,the question is inescapable. Is that wan haggard reflection in the unflattering glass really mine?
My doctors confirm it’s the very same,that my eyesight could be much worse.I get to and from medical facilities on a community bus whose drivers give me every assistance. ‘Take My Hand, I'm a Strange Looking Parasite’, I urge them,rephrasing the lyrics from ‘Kismet’, as they guide me aboard.One learns one’s scale. Before this downfall, carrying all before me, the weight of the world on my shoulders, I endeavoured to help turn it on it’s ear.To give it the slightest nudge. Now it’s painstakingly difficult just to change my position in bed.Before I still felt I was on the approach path, warming up for take-off, heading for bigger things.To better help others,not just myself. Now I feel more like death warmed up, like I have been trampled by a rampage of Rugby League forwards. My musculature is all out of whack.Torque about twisted. My poor body feels more twisted than Chubby Checker’s, more bent than J. Edgar Hoover’s. Getting out of bed for some time usually took ten teetering minutes for The Crooked Man,all six foot one of him, to get his balance.Not bang on the
dizzying heights I had been aspiring to. One of my therapists,Theodora posited I hit the deck ten
minutes later than usual.Seriously though, the overall effect of being so fragile like this that you are always aware of it. Any comfort zone to which I can retreat has narrowed considerably.
Don’t get around much anymore.I just don’t go out .My family call me Pilot Light.
Secreting fewer endorphins,walled inside our house, I’m at my best propped up in our sofa absorbing some good offering on television,shifting around,rolling my ebertian eyes or else catching some rays, soaking up the early spring and autumn sun.
I worship the sun more than ever. I can see it. The things it brings me are quite apparent all the time: heat, light and food. There's no mystery about it, it doesn’t ask to see the colour of my money, I don't have to dress up, and there's no pageantry.
Otherwise I’m aching. It is said of today’s baby boomers that ‘the 60 year olds’ are the ‘new 40 year olds’. Well this young crock is one of the new ‘80 year olds’. I always like to be one of the first.
dizzying heights I had been aspiring to. One of my therapists,Theodora posited I hit the deck ten
minutes later than usual.Seriously though, the overall effect of being so fragile like this that you are always aware of it. Any comfort zone to which I can retreat has narrowed considerably.
Don’t get around much anymore.I just don’t go out .My family call me Pilot Light.
Secreting fewer endorphins,walled inside our house, I’m at my best propped up in our sofa absorbing some good offering on television,shifting around,rolling my ebertian eyes or else catching some rays, soaking up the early spring and autumn sun.
I worship the sun more than ever. I can see it. The things it brings me are quite apparent all the time: heat, light and food. There's no mystery about it, it doesn’t ask to see the colour of my money, I don't have to dress up, and there's no pageantry.
Otherwise I’m aching. It is said of today’s baby boomers that ‘the 60 year olds’ are the ‘new 40 year olds’. Well this young crock is one of the new ‘80 year olds’. I always like to be one of the first.
I used to savour living in Sydney so as to have access to its libraries. As I built up my own library, my access to the city libraries became less. With my own books way out of reach,my life’s so circumscribed that I surrender to suburban lassitude. Watching a lot of movies has become my main shot in the arm.
Keeping an eye on the world going by my window,I’m taking my time. I used to love zipping around this pushy harbour city. My car sat idle at the front of our house for two and half rough and rainy years only having been driven by me once. That was fairly nerve wracking so now I’m relegated to the slow lane.I didn’t want to share the misfortune of Peter Griffin,back behind the wheel after his stroke.Peter,the main character of the animated television series ‘Family Guy’,his long face all askew, was all over the road singing along to his car sound system:’It’s The End Of The World As We Know It’.After crashing through street signs,letter boxes and rubbish bins,he careered off the macadam down an incline head- on into a riverside tree. As if to mock him,a rowing crew were worked past him to the chant of: ‘Stroke!Stroke!Stroke!’
I could only look on helplessly as my dear tip top Falcon and slowpoke I, scarcely past our prime, were overtaken by smaller, buzzier runarounds.It was as if we too were being mocked. My sturdy trusty workhorse was the first write off to the glue factory.I guess my race is run. I had been working towards greater mobile rigour,but not of this tortoise kind.Still,it’s all over the mortis kind. Infinitely.
I went through many of the tests in life that we humans set for ourselves to qualify for something or show we are up there with the best. But the one I am put to now is gruelling in the extreme – the endurance test of my ability to withstand unrelenting strain and pain. Each day of this awkward business presents exacting trials.
Like a whitetailed spider, reality bites. On my beam’s end it positively savages.Ever mindful that all said and done I enjoyed a full, considered life. Life is not the amount of breaths you take. It’s the moments that take your breath away.I went where I wanted,did what I wanted with whom I wanted.I had the greatest reward that any man or woman can have on this earth-to love and be loved. Ever mindful that all said and done I enjoyed a full, considered life-I went where I wanted,did what I wanted with whom I wanted.I’m not the first person to end up on the bottom of the deck.I must emphasise above all, there’s a hell of a lot of poor beggars who suffer more.What matters is how I live with it. I’m reconciling myself stoically to my new daily reality, facing the expanding mortal coil. They ask questions of my character. If you yourself ask how I got to be so stoic,I have just one answer.Years of practice.
Like a whitetailed spider, reality bites. On my beam’s end it positively savages.Ever mindful that all said and done I enjoyed a full, considered life. Life is not the amount of breaths you take. It’s the moments that take your breath away.I went where I wanted,did what I wanted with whom I wanted.I had the greatest reward that any man or woman can have on this earth-to love and be loved. Ever mindful that all said and done I enjoyed a full, considered life-I went where I wanted,did what I wanted with whom I wanted.I’m not the first person to end up on the bottom of the deck.I must emphasise above all, there’s a hell of a lot of poor beggars who suffer more.What matters is how I live with it. I’m reconciling myself stoically to my new daily reality, facing the expanding mortal coil. They ask questions of my character. If you yourself ask how I got to be so stoic,I have just one answer.Years of practice.
The Inner Soul
“Hello is there anyone in there?” asked the nurse of Henry Winning peering into her patient’s frontage. Because the effects of stroke are internal, it is hard even for family members to some extent to appreciate what the stroke survivor is feeling. It has been put to me that because my body is intact,I should be capable of correcting the malfunctioning through will power. The daughter of one survivor I know thinks he is ‘putting on an act’.
In Henry Winning’s case it turns out that he was. He was faking it to get out of the maximum security jail and take to his heels. Having initiated the ruse, his freedom from prison depended on him pulling it off. In acting out this lethargy, he learned to feel what it is like to be at one’s lowest ebb and—to get through:“When you know they’re gonna be stickin pins in ya, it ain’t good enough to be playing possum ... you’ve get to be a possum – a dead possum”.
“You learn to funnel everything down so finally all you know, all you are, is a heartbeat. I’ve got to tell you, when you get to place like that, it’s one kick in the arse.”
When things get to overwhelm me,I psych myself into this state.
Fortunately most people take me at face value and accept what they see and what I tell them. Some sense instinctively that I have come a long way even if I haven’t disclosed much. I find this very encouraging, affirming my determination to go even further, to show my staying power and inner strength.I can’t let my side down.People have come a long way in empathising with disabled,though some some have just a little further to go. A driver at Balmain Hospital noticed another jumping spritely from his car parked car. ‘Hey,that’s a disability parking space,Spastic.’
The hospital has severe penalties for those parking incorrectly. A sign at the front of the hospital reminds the public: ‘Unauthorised Vehicles Only.Offenders Will Be Towed Away’.
“It’s a Family Affair”
When my way was dark and troubles were near,
Your love provided the light so I could see.
Girl, just knowing your love was near,
When times were bad,
Kept the world from closing in on me, girl.
(The Temptations You're my Everything- Written by: Cornelius Grant et als.)
The effects of stroke act to drag your loved ones down in its wake.Tony Blair, who attributing his political genesis to his father’s massive stroke at age 40, singled out this event as the most traumatic event of his upbringing,For this wounded silverback’s brood it was no less so.With one of the two sources of support for the family down,the wind taken out of my sails,my tight ship threatened to run aground.. Poverty is not a disgrace, but it's terribly inconvenient. Everyone on board has felt great financial and emotional strain. Happily for Mr.Blair, his mother’s brother, a butcher, was able to step in and help bring home the bacon. In my case it’s my feisty commonsensical wife who has ended up being the financial backbone of our family. ‘Grateful’doesn’t begin to cover what I feel towards her. Mere words could not explain. I wouldn’t have blamed her jumping ship. As any disability pension pittance is pegged to her income –and as a schoolteacher’s income is not a princely one -I am dependent on my better half- or I can say four fifths . Over and over again.A tower of strength,her taking charge the financial side of things has
taken a huge load off my mind.
As for opening those long windowed envelopes, I've packed it in.I can’t bear to see what's inside.. So stone motherless skint I can’t even pay attention.Even if I were to write a blank cheque,it would bounce.
As I face the music,trying to dance,she has steadied off dealing out the ‘I told you so’s’, just getting on with it as women have always done. As did the wife of President Woodrow Wilson who carried on his work when he was unable to speak or move. All communication with the Commander-in-Chief went through Edith. She entered the sick room with messages and emerged with verbal instructions or the scrawl of a signature on a piece of paper. She purportedly insisted that she screen all of Wilson's paperwork, in some cases signing Wilson's name to documents without consulting her husband , convalescing from his stroke.Come the moment, cometh the woman. In effect the first woman U.S. President,Edith kept the true extent of his incapacitation from the outside world, simultaneously shielding him from intrusion and hiding his condition from outsiders.
taken a huge load off my mind.
As for opening those long windowed envelopes, I've packed it in.I can’t bear to see what's inside.. So stone motherless skint I can’t even pay attention.Even if I were to write a blank cheque,it would bounce.
As I face the music,trying to dance,she has steadied off dealing out the ‘I told you so’s’, just getting on with it as women have always done. As did the wife of President Woodrow Wilson who carried on his work when he was unable to speak or move. All communication with the Commander-in-Chief went through Edith. She entered the sick room with messages and emerged with verbal instructions or the scrawl of a signature on a piece of paper. She purportedly insisted that she screen all of Wilson's paperwork, in some cases signing Wilson's name to documents without consulting her husband , convalescing from his stroke.Come the moment, cometh the woman. In effect the first woman U.S. President,Edith kept the true extent of his incapacitation from the outside world, simultaneously shielding him from intrusion and hiding his condition from outsiders.
Any Port in a Storm..
Having lost my moorings, we’ve had to pilot a tricky course through these straits to avoid foundering,to stay afloat. Weathering the choppy sea, me listing to port side, we’ve been buffeted by the full force gale. Close to the wind,we’ve had to batten the hatches,trim the sails,splice the mainbrace.My motto is flagged on our masthead : ‘Use it up, wear it out, make do and mend, or do without’.To avoid being dashed on the rocks the whole family dynamic has changed at a rate of knots, with paterfamilias, wearing his clothing to the limit of usefulness, taking a back seat,tail between legs, to play last fiddle,his first mate jettisoning some cherished carefully laid plans or postponing others. What a drag it is put on hold!
‘You could have ended up in some two bit suburban nursing home,Allan.'
‘I wouldn’t be seen dead in such a place.’
‘You might well have been.You’re lucky you have someone to care for you,although I can’t imagine why.’
The thing is we have many hours between us.Many hard miles.Moreover our family means everything to her,to me and to our boys.
I owe this super trouper big and have to try hard not to let my subsequent loss of esteem and tormented pride get the better of me. Through her careful domestic management, some loans and a frugal but healthy diet we have managed to scrape through the past years eking out a low-key spare
living .The recipe,you might ask.After cooking my goose stewed in my own juice, I’ve eaten heaps of humble pie,swallowed my pride, licked at all that dried egg caked on my mug from yesteryear,and sugarcoated my bitter pills.
As for keeping out of the doldrums,we’ve had to change tack,making our own entertainment.It got quite difficult trying to go out with me the way I am.She just had to keep standing me up.
EnterThe Ginger Ninja.Our carrot topped grandson,a little ray of sunshine, a joy to watch as he struts his stuff, stealing the show.Look at those red cheeks. All of one year old, this mere chit,swagged along with his toy mobile phone clasped to his ear.Barely out of nappies,nature boy threw his clothes off and danced around.To him, Leonor is as generous in her attentions as she is to our sons.Is she ever! She dances attendance on him like some to royalty,catering to his every whim and wishes, as long as they are healthy.
living .The recipe,you might ask.After cooking my goose stewed in my own juice, I’ve eaten heaps of humble pie,swallowed my pride, licked at all that dried egg caked on my mug from yesteryear,and sugarcoated my bitter pills.
As for keeping out of the doldrums,we’ve had to change tack,making our own entertainment.It got quite difficult trying to go out with me the way I am.She just had to keep standing me up.
EnterThe Ginger Ninja.Our carrot topped grandson,a little ray of sunshine, a joy to watch as he struts his stuff, stealing the show.Look at those red cheeks. All of one year old, this mere chit,swagged along with his toy mobile phone clasped to his ear.Barely out of nappies,nature boy threw his clothes off and danced around.To him, Leonor is as generous in her attentions as she is to our sons.Is she ever! She dances attendance on him like some to royalty,catering to his every whim and wishes, as long as they are healthy.
Five years later enter his sister Nemireh too. Kitchy kitchy koo. ‘Nemireh, clap your hands.Do like I do.Do wacka do.’
Following the ancient and familiar ritual that I did,Sean tosses his second baby into the air – and hopefully catches her. On the way up she fills her lungs to protest, to cry in terror – only to issue a relaxing, relieving gasp when she escapes the force of gravity. The first laughs of a lifetime.
Brother and sister love to play and shout.They never have any cares.
They keep me and Leonor happy.We always have their coming to look forward to.
Picking up the Pieces
Following the ancient and familiar ritual that I did,Sean tosses his second baby into the air – and hopefully catches her. On the way up she fills her lungs to protest, to cry in terror – only to issue a relaxing, relieving gasp when she escapes the force of gravity. The first laughs of a lifetime.
Brother and sister love to play and shout.They never have any cares.
They keep me and Leonor happy.We always have their coming to look forward to.
Picking up the Pieces
“If you’ve found a reason to live on and not to die, you are a lucky man”.
Alan Price.
In salvaging what I can from the burnt out wreckage, I would remember the comment made to me by John Eccles long since on the importance of adapting to a greatly changed existence.
Professor Eccles had discovered the chemical means by which signals are communicated or repressed by nerve cells, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine.He had outdistanced the field in his specialty. I joked to him that as he was going to live in Chicago, the best way he could adapt, if he was going to spend time in such tough areas as the Maxwell Street neighbourhood where Benny Goodman was raised, was to learn to run fast like the locals.To outdistance the field in their specialty.
I had always wanted to be somebody.Now I have to be content with being more specific- just me.
During my first weeks in hospital I had to be mechanically hoisted around. I had to re-learn the basic gestures of daily life, devoting hours a day to therapy, and regaining the skills needed to care for myself — like how to take a shower and button shirts, and eat with a knife and fork. A key to my restoring my normal bodily structure and function is the regime of constant exercise I undertake.Leonor and the boys laid the groundwork for this herculean task, getting me on a frame and taking short sliding, steps, barely lifting my feet,scuffing along the corridors of the hospital. Taking it kinda slow,doing the Harlem Shuffle.
Before I left the hospital,the doctors not betting on my future,I didn’t expect to be around long.The discharging officer checked on my address.’What will be the best way to get in touch with you?
‘Just rap three times on my coffin.’
When I made it home, I was wheelchair bound. The old chair was very stiff and the wheels were worn and didn’t turn well at all.Before I was discharged, fellow patient Alan Lonnon gave me some reassuring advice: ‘Try and make it to Lourdes.’
‘You think so,Alan.Do you believe in such miracles?’
There was a local fellow down on his luck exactly like you.His family scrimped and saved and took him to Lourdes? They got him to the water’s edge and he couldn’t get in ’cause his leg wouldn’t move, so they had to hire a little crane and pick him and his wheelchair up over the water and submerge him. And when he came out, they all checked out his mobility.’
‘And he was healed?’
‘Heavens no. His left side was still heavy and stiff , but lo and behold-the chair had new wheels.’
Once home my physiotherapist coaxed me out of this vehicle and after seeing my modest faltering baby steps he and others have been an ongoing source of encouragement for my return towards normality.
‘That’s more like it’,says Leonor constantly.’You’re coming along better every day.The show must go on.’
I’m sticking it out.I now rely on a walking cane. My assigned neurologist stated that my left leg will never be more than a prop. So far he’s mostly right-being positive doesn’t change the salient facts- but I’m determined to refute this opinion. While I,listless layabout Lazarus, tire easily and can”t stand up, walk or sit in a regular chair for long, I’m determined not to take things lying down.Unable to bend my stiff neck around,I’m determined not to look back.Rather to stay the course and get back in shape, on an even keel.One step at a time.
Lord Gym
'Laughter is the tonic, the relief, the surcease for pain'
Charlie Chaplin.
I have been fortunate to be accepted into a medically screened and fully supervised program at Balmain Hospital. Under the direction of Dr.Nalin Singh,the Strong Centre has helped me keep my mind and body together together.I found a world of difference between the low morale and some questionable professionalism in the ward from which I had been discharged,deemed never to walk again,and the esprit de corps amongst Dr.Singh’s staff.Whilst in the Beazley ward of Balmain Hospital-aka the‘Beastly’ Ward- my spirits had been lifted not by the highly qualified medical staff but by the Irish cleaner,Maureen, who beat away my black dog with her early morning singing and kind nature.
Whilst away with the fairies,with little control over my urinary function or the curtains surrounding my bed at visiting hours,it was observed by one doctor that my ‘exhibitionist’ tendencies might pose a risk to the public upon my release! I didn’t learn this until later.It hadn’t been discussed with me at
the time.This LGBTish doctor should have known better.The same doctor pushed the drug Zoloft onto me to deal with my depression.I had to spit it into the bin on the sly as the effects were so sickening.
Like most people,one who likes to put members of the medical profession on a pedestal,it was a relief to have my faith restored by Dr.Singh and his emphasis on common sense,compassion,humour and less reliance on drug use. It gives fast acting relief.
He’s a natural with the infirm.He welcomes the widest range of patients from across the social spectrum.This has a socially cohesive function.
As he was putting me through my medical assessment to determine my ability to take part,I mentioned the appropriateness of the Centre’s title. ‘It’s actually an acronym.’he said. ‘It’s official title is The Strength Training,Rehabilitation,Outreach,to the Needs of the Geriatric program.’
'What does the 'Outreach' refer to?’ I asked.
‘The STRONG at Home program allows staff to prescribe and supervise the training of clients who train in other settings, such as gyms, their home.’
or their workplace.
‘I believe weight training has fewer side effects than orthodox medical treatments.’
‘We find that it produces results in countering depression equivalent to chemical intervention.Our regime is as powerful as any drug on the market and without the side effects.Some drugs cause confusion,agitation,sleep problems and loss of balance,Essentially the drugs are just treating the patient’s depression,whereas exercise is treating their physical health as well as their mental health. It brings about lasting improvements in reduced anxiety and improved self-efficacy, self-esteem and body image.
‘How do this work?’I asked him.
‘We believe exercise relieves depression by changing neurotransmitter levels in the brain and affecting people’s self perceptions.’
This approach helps tip the locus of control out of the hands of the preferred healers,the pill makers, and consequently back to us.It’s not the rule. Our hospitals are overall not designed for the frail elderly. The treatments on offer and the medicines prescribed are usually only tested on robust 50-year-olds. The response to age-related memory loss and dementia is to institutionalise, isolate, sedate. Supporting independence and wellbeing in old age is a low priority.
There are increasing numbers of ageing citizens who require health and pension services. There is general and growing fear that this will lead to financial disaster. This perception has infiltrated our health system and led to a number of movements within medicine that are either consciously or unconsciously informed by our low regard for the elderly and the fiscal fear they now embody. Some of these movements - advanced planning, dying with dignity, avoiding futile over-treatment or even hospital - are morally sound, even laudable, but given our cultural climate they risk giving sanction to a form of health-rationing for our elderly, in a system which historically has held them in the lowest regard.
Dr.Singh welcomes the widest range of patients from across the social spectrum.This has a socially cohesive function.
‘Our program,’he told me, ‘ highlights the growing emphasis on healthy living.It represents a shift that’s happening world wide.Looking at more lifestyle related issues that used to be thought of as preventative medicine.Now we’re thinking about them as treatments.Many of of our participants are
now able to get out of their chairs and carry their shopping bags with ease while a few have been able to throw away their walking sticks.Some become stronger than their children.’
‘And better pallbearers for their friends no doubt.’
I have always dreaded the thought of being shackled down in a hospital.This is what happens to me
now on a regular basis.
My left foot flies involuntarily not over a cuckoo’s nest but off the pedal of the hip machine.To stop this my trainers strap it down with velcro, a material whose strength I had my doubts about at first.I never thought it would catch on.
The Strong Centre uses exercise (weights, aerobics and balance), with a wide array of equipment,to treat chronic disease and disability.Older people are much less likely to be be subject to falls and fractures if they are involved in strength and balance training.
‘ Aerobic exercise,’said Dr.Singh, ‘going for runs around the block or some laps in the pool, doesn’t prevent this.The relative benefit of resistance versus aerobic training is weighted very heavily towards resistance training the older you get.If you are a betting person,strength training is the way to go.It maintains and increases bone density ,vital in overcoming the effects of osteoporosis.
It can slow or halt the wasting effect of disused muscle groups. Sarcopenia is like the ugly sister of osteoporosis: together they work to make us frail as we age. By the time we hit 60, the sedentary lives most of us lead will result in our muscles being 20 to 40 per cent of their former girth. This shrinkage results in a major reduction in strength.'
‘I know the feeling.You sit in a rocking chair and can't get it going.’
'Power resistance training counters this. Not only is the skeleton strengthened but the muscles around it as well. Six months of has been shown to increase strength by 40 to 150 per cent and muscle size by up to 30 per cent. Understandably, this has a positive effect on walking speed, ability to rise from a chair and other daily activities. Weight training can have a dramatic effect on health if done at the optimal level which is 80% of a person’s maximum strength.One of the key rules of weight training is that you must keep increasing the load to maximize benefits,so once you’ve mastered one level.move to the next.
His research, published in The Journals of Gerontology shows that to be effective in reducing depression the exercise must be suitably robust. The weights must be hard to lift and increase as strength rises. Low-intensity exercise (walking, swimming) yields some results, but it is high-intensity resistance training that produces pronounced, measurable change in mood.
‘Some would argue having the frail and elderly involved in weight training is dangerous.’I said.
It’s more dangerous not to.’
There’s a widely held belief that weight training dangerously elevates blood pressure and causes damage to the heart.’
‘This is not supported in the literature’,replied Dr.Singh, ‘Nor in practice.For such people it’s a gateway to a more active life.Age is just a number. The idea that you're too old to be active is disappearing fast. The exercising older person can be more up and moving than the twenty year old who just sits and tweets all day. Researchers have shown that those who regularly train with weights attended hospital less frequently, had shorter stays and in one study fewer participants died during the study period than in the control group. One message is clear.The older you are,the more you should be doing it.And the frailer you are,the more benefit you’ll reap from a properly prescribed weight training program.’
the time.This LGBTish doctor should have known better.The same doctor pushed the drug Zoloft onto me to deal with my depression.I had to spit it into the bin on the sly as the effects were so sickening.
Like most people,one who likes to put members of the medical profession on a pedestal,it was a relief to have my faith restored by Dr.Singh and his emphasis on common sense,compassion,humour and less reliance on drug use. It gives fast acting relief.
He’s a natural with the infirm.He welcomes the widest range of patients from across the social spectrum.This has a socially cohesive function.
As he was putting me through my medical assessment to determine my ability to take part,I mentioned the appropriateness of the Centre’s title. ‘It’s actually an acronym.’he said. ‘It’s official title is The Strength Training,Rehabilitation,Outreach,to the Needs of the Geriatric program.’
'What does the 'Outreach' refer to?’ I asked.
‘The STRONG at Home program allows staff to prescribe and supervise the training of clients who train in other settings, such as gyms, their home.’
‘I believe weight training has fewer side effects than orthodox medical treatments.’
‘We find that it produces results in countering depression equivalent to chemical intervention.Our regime is as powerful as any drug on the market and without the side effects.Some drugs cause confusion,agitation,sleep problems and loss of balance,Essentially the drugs are just treating the patient’s depression,whereas exercise is treating their physical health as well as their mental health. It brings about lasting improvements in reduced anxiety and improved self-efficacy, self-esteem and body image.
‘How do this work?’I asked him.
‘We believe exercise relieves depression by changing neurotransmitter levels in the brain and affecting people’s self perceptions.’
This approach helps tip the locus of control out of the hands of the preferred healers,the pill makers, and consequently back to us.It’s not the rule. Our hospitals are overall not designed for the frail elderly. The treatments on offer and the medicines prescribed are usually only tested on robust 50-year-olds. The response to age-related memory loss and dementia is to institutionalise, isolate, sedate. Supporting independence and wellbeing in old age is a low priority.
There are increasing numbers of ageing citizens who require health and pension services. There is general and growing fear that this will lead to financial disaster. This perception has infiltrated our health system and led to a number of movements within medicine that are either consciously or unconsciously informed by our low regard for the elderly and the fiscal fear they now embody. Some of these movements - advanced planning, dying with dignity, avoiding futile over-treatment or even hospital - are morally sound, even laudable, but given our cultural climate they risk giving sanction to a form of health-rationing for our elderly, in a system which historically has held them in the lowest regard.
Dr.Singh welcomes the widest range of patients from across the social spectrum.This has a socially cohesive function.
‘Our program,’he told me, ‘ highlights the growing emphasis on healthy living.It represents a shift that’s happening world wide.Looking at more lifestyle related issues that used to be thought of as preventative medicine.Now we’re thinking about them as treatments.Many of of our participants are
now able to get out of their chairs and carry their shopping bags with ease while a few have been able to throw away their walking sticks.Some become stronger than their children.’
‘And better pallbearers for their friends no doubt.’
I have always dreaded the thought of being shackled down in a hospital.This is what happens to me
now on a regular basis.
My left foot flies involuntarily not over a cuckoo’s nest but off the pedal of the hip machine.To stop this my trainers strap it down with velcro, a material whose strength I had my doubts about at first.I never thought it would catch on.
The Strong Centre uses exercise (weights, aerobics and balance), with a wide array of equipment,to treat chronic disease and disability.Older people are much less likely to be be subject to falls and fractures if they are involved in strength and balance training.
‘ Aerobic exercise,’said Dr.Singh, ‘going for runs around the block or some laps in the pool, doesn’t prevent this.The relative benefit of resistance versus aerobic training is weighted very heavily towards resistance training the older you get.If you are a betting person,strength training is the way to go.It maintains and increases bone density ,vital in overcoming the effects of osteoporosis.
It can slow or halt the wasting effect of disused muscle groups. Sarcopenia is like the ugly sister of osteoporosis: together they work to make us frail as we age. By the time we hit 60, the sedentary lives most of us lead will result in our muscles being 20 to 40 per cent of their former girth. This shrinkage results in a major reduction in strength.'
‘I know the feeling.You sit in a rocking chair and can't get it going.’
'Power resistance training counters this. Not only is the skeleton strengthened but the muscles around it as well. Six months of has been shown to increase strength by 40 to 150 per cent and muscle size by up to 30 per cent. Understandably, this has a positive effect on walking speed, ability to rise from a chair and other daily activities. Weight training can have a dramatic effect on health if done at the optimal level which is 80% of a person’s maximum strength.One of the key rules of weight training is that you must keep increasing the load to maximize benefits,so once you’ve mastered one level.move to the next.
His research, published in The Journals of Gerontology shows that to be effective in reducing depression the exercise must be suitably robust. The weights must be hard to lift and increase as strength rises. Low-intensity exercise (walking, swimming) yields some results, but it is high-intensity resistance training that produces pronounced, measurable change in mood.
‘Some would argue having the frail and elderly involved in weight training is dangerous.’I said.
It’s more dangerous not to.’
There’s a widely held belief that weight training dangerously elevates blood pressure and causes damage to the heart.’
‘This is not supported in the literature’,replied Dr.Singh, ‘Nor in practice.For such people it’s a gateway to a more active life.Age is just a number. The idea that you're too old to be active is disappearing fast. The exercising older person can be more up and moving than the twenty year old who just sits and tweets all day. Researchers have shown that those who regularly train with weights attended hospital less frequently, had shorter stays and in one study fewer participants died during the study period than in the control group. One message is clear.The older you are,the more you should be doing it.And the frailer you are,the more benefit you’ll reap from a properly prescribed weight training program.’
This was just what the doctor ordered.
I go in,I go out,I work it out. My main exercise over a long period had been the push ups I did upon waking.I’d go ‘up two three,down two three,up two three---’-and then I’d lift the other eyelid.
I had done some weightlifting. I used to strain as the sweat stood out in beads on my forehead. I used to grit my teeth and chew into my tongue, flaring my nostrils and breathing threats at my stubborn shoulders. This was my idea of weight lifting- simply standing up.
As for aerobics,I had jogged in the street,but found it hard going. Running in front of cars I tended to
get tired.Running behind them,I got totally exhausted.
The main thing I’d exercised was caution.
Now this instant oldie ‘pumps iron’,lifting to the max in the purpose built state of the art gym with a medley of walking wounded, mostly hoarier,some stronger than me.Whether we ironmen and ironwomen suffer from Parkinson’s disease, Oldtimers disease, stroke, osteoporosis, diabetes,nephritis and in my case an incurable case of imaginitis.. Of the same kidney,we’re all good pals and jolly good company.Young’uns should regard us as their future selves.Among other people with physical problems at this home away from home,we feel accepted and appreciated. Finding a shared comfort in suffering,we geriatric gymnasts are bound by another kind of love- the recognition of a shared humanity that renders differences of class, religion, and politics extraneous.Its a special service,not just run of the treadmill.
‘I didn’t expect to see you here,’I said to Tom Uren when he turned up at the gym.
‘I guess at my age it’s good to be seen just about anywhere.’
Like myself Tom was impressed by Dr.Singh’s wall poster reminds us of renowned athlete Muhammad ali's inspiring approach to staying on top of things: “The fight is won or lost far away from witnesses - behind the lines, in the gym, and out there on the road, long before I dance under those lights.”
‘You would relate to this message,Tom.’
'I can relate to this message very much. It’s the same for anyone involved in public life.’
So while Dr.Singh doctors the patients,I doctor their details.
Professional physical therapists assisted by students from the university campus help us to lift our game, increase our kinetic activity,help us join the ranks of the wellderly.It targets those areas that need most attention.’Not least the grey matter,’ explained to me one of the therapists. ‘It increases the blood flow there,improving transmission between brain cells,increasing neurogenesis and neuroplasticity.It cuts down amyloid plaques just as it does for exercising rats.’
‘I can just see these ropy rodents admiring the artwork in the hospital,stealing into the gym at night to bulk up their muscles ---,’I answered,struggling to come up with her name again. Right then I was having amnesia and deja vu at the same time. I think I'd forgotten her name before.
I go in,I go out,I work it out. My main exercise over a long period had been the push ups I did upon waking.I’d go ‘up two three,down two three,up two three---’-and then I’d lift the other eyelid.
I had done some weightlifting. I used to strain as the sweat stood out in beads on my forehead. I used to grit my teeth and chew into my tongue, flaring my nostrils and breathing threats at my stubborn shoulders. This was my idea of weight lifting- simply standing up.
As for aerobics,I had jogged in the street,but found it hard going. Running in front of cars I tended to
get tired.Running behind them,I got totally exhausted.
The main thing I’d exercised was caution.
Now this instant oldie ‘pumps iron’,lifting to the max in the purpose built state of the art gym with a medley of walking wounded, mostly hoarier,some stronger than me.Whether we ironmen and ironwomen suffer from Parkinson’s disease, Oldtimers disease, stroke, osteoporosis, diabetes,nephritis and in my case an incurable case of imaginitis.. Of the same kidney,we’re all good pals and jolly good company.Young’uns should regard us as their future selves.Among other people with physical problems at this home away from home,we feel accepted and appreciated. Finding a shared comfort in suffering,we geriatric gymnasts are bound by another kind of love- the recognition of a shared humanity that renders differences of class, religion, and politics extraneous.Its a special service,not just run of the treadmill.
‘I didn’t expect to see you here,’I said to Tom Uren when he turned up at the gym.
‘I guess at my age it’s good to be seen just about anywhere.’
Like myself Tom was impressed by Dr.Singh’s wall poster reminds us of renowned athlete Muhammad ali's inspiring approach to staying on top of things: “The fight is won or lost far away from witnesses - behind the lines, in the gym, and out there on the road, long before I dance under those lights.”
‘You would relate to this message,Tom.’
'I can relate to this message very much. It’s the same for anyone involved in public life.’
‘And for you too,Tom, in your early days training.’
'Muhammad says his way of joking is to tell the truth.He says for him ‘that’s the funniest joke in the world.’
'Well one thing’s for sure,there’s a lot of politicians who don’t tell the truth and there's nothing funny about this. And Muhammad has said truthful things that do sound funny.’
‘Can you remember any of these?’
'As well as dishing out shiners,he’s served some killer one liners.Not surprisingly many of them are black and boastful.When asked to define boxing,Muhammad replied, ‘Boxing is a lot of white men watching two black men beat each other up.’
‘I’m so fast that last night I turned off the light switch in my hotel room and was in bed before the room was dark.’
‘A rooster crows only when it sees the light. Put him in the dark and he’ll never crow. ‘I have seen the light and I’m crowing.’
‘My toughest fight was with my first wife.’
‘it's just a job.Grass grows,birds fly,waves pound the sand.I beat people up.’
While we wait our turn for our session,we swap tales with more than a hint of blarney.
‘Do you know,I told Dr.Singh,’ by simply telling a joke,you exercise 72 muscles in your neck,throat,mouth and tongue.’
‘No wonder people say they laugh til it hurts.They have a workout without realizing it,’ he laughed.
‘According to Dr.Lee Berk from Loma Linda University,’ I said, letting it be known I knew a little something about the physiological base of humour, ‘laughing increases the body’s antibodies which help to fight off infection and alien bacteria.’
‘You don't stop laughing because you grow old, You grow old because you stop laughing.’
'Well one thing’s for sure,there’s a lot of politicians who don’t tell the truth and there's nothing funny about this. And Muhammad has said truthful things that do sound funny.’
‘Can you remember any of these?’
'As well as dishing out shiners,he’s served some killer one liners.Not surprisingly many of them are black and boastful.When asked to define boxing,Muhammad replied, ‘Boxing is a lot of white men watching two black men beat each other up.’
‘I’m so fast that last night I turned off the light switch in my hotel room and was in bed before the room was dark.’
‘A rooster crows only when it sees the light. Put him in the dark and he’ll never crow. ‘I have seen the light and I’m crowing.’
‘My toughest fight was with my first wife.’
‘it's just a job.Grass grows,birds fly,waves pound the sand.I beat people up.’
While we wait our turn for our session,we swap tales with more than a hint of blarney.
‘Do you know,I told Dr.Singh,’ by simply telling a joke,you exercise 72 muscles in your neck,throat,mouth and tongue.’
‘No wonder people say they laugh til it hurts.They have a workout without realizing it,’ he laughed.
‘According to Dr.Lee Berk from Loma Linda University,’ I said, letting it be known I knew a little something about the physiological base of humour, ‘laughing increases the body’s antibodies which help to fight off infection and alien bacteria.’
So while Dr.Singh doctors the patients,I doctor their details.
Professional physical therapists assisted by students from the university campus help us to lift our game, increase our kinetic activity,help us join the ranks of the wellderly.It targets those areas that need most attention.’Not least the grey matter,’ explained to me one of the therapists. ‘It increases the blood flow there,improving transmission between brain cells,increasing neurogenesis and neuroplasticity.It cuts down amyloid plaques just as it does for exercising rats.’
‘I can just see these ropy rodents admiring the artwork in the hospital,stealing into the gym at night to bulk up their muscles ---,’I answered,struggling to come up with her name again. Right then I was having amnesia and deja vu at the same time. I think I'd forgotten her name before.
‘Exercise builds up our hippocampus, associated with short term memory’,she continued.
‘Aren’t elephants better qualified for this’,I replied.
‘Rats,hippos, elephants, even old dogs like like you,’Liz came back- as did her name, ‘can all be taught new tricks.’
Indeed exercise strengthens not only our wits but our ability to remember words- such as‘hippocampus’.Ideal for me,being rather catawampus. Under guided supervision we happy campers see our performance pick up through measurement. This raises my confidence, my self-esteem, my
ability to rise standing from a chair and complete activities of daily living.
Before each session we are asked whether we’ve had any changes to our health.
'Any pains,blains,strains,sprains?’asks Liz. ‘Tell me your banes.
‘I’m recovering from bubonic plague,’I reported,testing her credulity.
‘Don’t give me that,’she replied.
The late magistrate Barbara Holborow told of her problem . Some years ago she had tripped over and broke her femur in ten places ending up with seven pins and two plates in her left leg.
She said, ‘I’ve been suffering lately from metal fatigue.’
‘Don’t you mean mental fatigue?’
‘And that too.You see I’ve been travelling round a lot lately.’
‘So how did that affect you?’
‘The beeping and ringing have been driving me crazy. My spare parts have been setting off
alarms ,detectors and scanners beeping when I’ve passed through courtrooms and airports.The more thorough wand scan beeps when it reaches my left leg.After September 11, they'd go, 'We need to check.'’
‘Barbara,your sound, like your reputation, precedes you.’
One lady,Maria Bello replied, "My leg hurts in several places?"
Always ready with an answer,Liz said, "Well Maria, don't go there anymore!"
Maria added, ‘I may have to stop and go to the bathroom more than once.While I’m having troubles
doing number two’s,I can’t stop passing water.’
‘When you get a bladder infection, Maria, urine trouble. You’ll have to see your G.P.’
‘Any wheezes,sneezes or seizures?Any post nasal drip caused by the grippe?’ asked Liz another time.
Maria replied, ‘I’ve been extra tired lately.I’ve been taking this new medication.'
‘What did your G.P. advise you?’
’He said ‘I want you to take two of these pills every Saturday,Sunday and Monday and skip the remaining days in the week.’
‘Possibly your fatigue is a side effect of this dosage.’
‘I think not.I think it’s all the skipping I’ve had to do.’
On another occasion she answered ‘I haven’t slept for three days.’
‘Why’s that Maria?’
‘Because that would be too long.’
doing number two’s,I can’t stop passing water.’
‘When you get a bladder infection, Maria, urine trouble. You’ll have to see your G.P.’
‘Any wheezes,sneezes or seizures?Any post nasal drip caused by the grippe?’ asked Liz another time.
Maria replied, ‘I’ve been extra tired lately.I’ve been taking this new medication.'
‘What did your G.P. advise you?’
’He said ‘I want you to take two of these pills every Saturday,Sunday and Monday and skip the remaining days in the week.’
‘Possibly your fatigue is a side effect of this dosage.’
‘I think not.I think it’s all the skipping I’ve had to do.’
On another occasion she answered ‘I haven’t slept for three days.’
‘Why’s that Maria?’
‘Because that would be too long.’
‘I’ll have to think about that,’replied Liz. ‘For now I can’t stress this strongly enough,never under any circumstances take a sleeping pill and a laxative on the same night.'
Another lady,a little embarrassed, reported a persistent case of loose bowels.Liz comforted her saying by telling her how common it is. ‘Four out of five people suffer from it.’
Back came the reply:‘If four out of five people suffer from diarrhea…does that mean that one enjoys it?’
Unlike these two,,another lady reported problems with number one’s. ‘I’ve been suffering from Oliguria, a decreased output of urine.’
Liz said, ‘We can work on your bladder problem together.
The lady replied , ‘There is no wee. I’ll have to work it out by myself.’
Another lady constantly complained about nonexistent illnesses.She has a walk in medicine cabinet.After checking her carefully,Liz said, ‘I can’t but think you’re a bit of a hypochondriac.’
‘Now that really hurts,Liz.’One lady responded as follows, ‘I,ve just had a bit of a shock.When I woke up this morning, I glanced in the mirror and nearly fainted at what I saw. If I get one more wrinkle , I could screw my hat on.My hair has gone even more grey and wiry and falls out in clumps, my skin has become pasty looking and horribly blotchy and both my eyes are bloodshot.They look like they’re bulging from their sockets. ”
Liz gave her a quick examination, looked her in the eyes and said to her, “Well,you will have to see
your G.P. The good news is, there’s nothing wrong with your eyesight!”
Another lady reported her eyes were inflamed, itchy and teary.
‘The whites have certainly turned pink.You should report straight to casualty. ‘Then,’ she said winking one of her own eyes, ‘check out a new website ‘conjunctivitis.com’ It's a site for sore eyes.’
Francesca said, ‘ My pacemaker’s playing up. Every time some spunky bloke passes my house,my garage door opens.’
Liz’ reply: ‘Pull yourself- and your blinds- together ,Franca,or it’ll be curtains for you.’
Before entering the gym,Liz asked a former scientist who had studied under the biologist JBS Haldane, ‘Any aches,breaks or shakes?Any languishments of the limbs or troubles of the thoracic tracts?Any trembling of the trunk?
‘I’ve noticed I’ve been passing blood,
Only a few drops, not a flood.’
Liz advised him: ‘Don’t wait for aches and pains
To have a surgeon mend your drains;
Ask your doctor, your best friend,
To peer into your hinder end,
To prove or to disprove any rumour
You’ve got a malignant tumour.
If he says 'cancer' you're a dunce
Unless you have it out at once,
For if you wait it's sure to swell,
And may have progeny as well.’
Some months on his return Liz asked him ‘How did you get on?’
He replied as follows:
'In order to decide the issue
They scraped out some bits of tissue.
The microscope returned the answer
That I had certainly got cancer,
So I was wheeled into the theatre
Where holes were made to make me better.
I'll swear, without the risk of perjury,
It was a snappy bit of surgery.
Through this incision, I don't doubt,
The neoplasm was taken out,
Along with colon, and lymph nodes
Where cancer cells might find abodes.
Liz asked, ‘ And how are you coping now?’
‘My rectum is a serious loss to me,
But I've a very neat colostomy,
And hope, as soon as I am able,
To make it keep a fixed time-table.
A third much smaller hole is meant
To function as a ventral vent:
So now I am like the two-faced Janus
The only god who sees his anus.’
Liz:'While you're in the area,you might check out your buttocks.
They're made up primarily of the gluteus maximus muscles, which are the largest and strongest muscles not only in the butt but also in the entire human body.'
'The butt's my wife's biggest asset.She's always trying to perk it up.'
'Whenever you climb up stairs, run, bend and lift, squat, lunge, whenever you get out of your chair,
squeeze your butt! Imagine you’ve a hundred dollar bill between your cheeks. You drop it, you lose it!'
'I won't.My wife's always calling me a tightwad.'
Liz asked a lady who’d been away for a while to report on her recent medical examination.
‘Thought I'd let my doctor check me,
'Cause I didn't feel quite right. . .
All those aches and pains annoyed me
And I couldn't sleep at night.
He could find no real disorder
But he wouldn't let it rest.
What with Medicare and bulkbill,
We would do a couple tests.
To the hospital he sent me
Though I didn't feel that bad.
He arranged for them to give me
Every test that could be had.
I was fluoroscoped and cystoscoped,
My aging frame displayed.
Stripped, on an ice cold table,
While my gizzards were x-rayed.
I was checked for worms and parasites,
For fungus and the crud,
While they pierced me with long needles
Taking samples of my blood.
Doctors came to check me over,
Probed and pushed and poked around,
And to make sure I was living
They then wired me for sound.
They have finally concluded,
Their results have filled a page.
What I have will someday kill me;
My affliction is old age.’
As the Centre is a teaching facility for students of exercise and sport sciences, an element of the educational procedure is to lay out to them the various handicaps of participants.
Indicating me,I overheard Doctor Nathan De Vos explain to a student who was a bit slow off the mark that morning,"As you can see, this patient limps because his left side musculature is very weak.Now what would you do in a case like this?"squeeze your butt! Imagine you’ve a hundred dollar bill between your cheeks. You drop it, you lose it!'
'I won't.My wife's always calling me a tightwad.'
Liz asked a lady who’d been away for a while to report on her recent medical examination.
‘Thought I'd let my doctor check me,
'Cause I didn't feel quite right. . .
All those aches and pains annoyed me
And I couldn't sleep at night.
He could find no real disorder
But he wouldn't let it rest.
What with Medicare and bulkbill,
We would do a couple tests.
To the hospital he sent me
Though I didn't feel that bad.
He arranged for them to give me
Every test that could be had.
I was fluoroscoped and cystoscoped,
My aging frame displayed.
Stripped, on an ice cold table,
While my gizzards were x-rayed.
I was checked for worms and parasites,
For fungus and the crud,
While they pierced me with long needles
Taking samples of my blood.
Doctors came to check me over,
Probed and pushed and poked around,
And to make sure I was living
They then wired me for sound.
They have finally concluded,
Their results have filled a page.
What I have will someday kill me;
My affliction is old age.’
As the Centre is a teaching facility for students of exercise and sport sciences, an element of the educational procedure is to lay out to them the various handicaps of participants.
The student piped up: "I suppose I would limp too."
As well as getting us to exercise,some trainers also double as nutritionists. It falls to Kate to encourage us to eat wisely and improve our diets . To watch our weight as well as our height.She deals with those who’ve stopped growing at both ends and are now growing in the middle.
‘We have to replace fat by muscle.Muscle is metabolically active and burns energy..Fat is not.By increasing your lean muscle mass through your weight training, you increase your metabolic rate and therefore the rate at which fat is burned.Over the age of 40,you lose 1% of your muscle mass every year.10 % per decade-so over time your body becomes weaker and simple activities become harder.
Kate has to counter entrenched views in this area.Having always been a slim person, I found it hard to believe that my expanding waistline gave rise to concern.Flabbergasted,you might say,to find out.
‘Is it really possible that I'm as overweight as you say I am.’
Kate replied ‘Maybe you would prefer to look at it in a different way. According to this chart, you're about 10 inches too short.’
‘Isn’t this girth better for my balance?’I argued. Doesn’t this mean my centre of gravity has been
lowered?’
‘If you don’t do something about it right now,’said Kate, ‘It will be all of you that’s being lowered.’
‘I’m going to be cremated,Kate. My last hope for a smoking hot body.Or is there an other certain way I can get my weight back to standard, to look buff with ripped roided out muscles,carved pecs?’
She said what I took to be: ‘Sure,don’t eat anything fatty.’
‘What,you mean cut out cookies and croissants? No chocolate cake with cream for this beefcake?’I asked dolefully,my face becoming longer. ‘No Cappucinos,caramels, ‘Belle Fleur?’ The very pleasures of life.
‘Like I said,’she answered, repeating the advice the way she had given it , ‘Don’t eat anything,Fatty.’
To guide us to a healthy diet,Kate has mounted wall displays of food products showing us which are the best for our health.One shows the differing calorie content of alcoholic drinks.One guy fond of a
tipple commented ‘I went on a whisky diet last month.’
‘Oh yes,’ said Kate sceptically.And did you lose anything?
‘For sure. I lost three days.’
‘And are you eating good nutritious unprocessed food?’
‘I personally stay away from natural foods.At my age I need all the preservatives I can get.'
tipple commented ‘I went on a whisky diet last month.’
‘Oh yes,’ said Kate sceptically.And did you lose anything?
‘For sure. I lost three days.’
‘And are you eating good nutritious unprocessed food?’
‘I personally stay away from natural foods.At my age I need all the preservatives I can get.'
The Centre is where I was referred after my stroke.If it’s a caring public health service you’re after,you can’t go past it. This community hub exudes professionalism and life through its committed director, staff and volunteers. Two of the latter have worked to rid me of my bias, helping me with my balance.
Max is an unhurried genial octogenarian who found his sea-legs in the Australian Navy during World War Two. He used to ride his bicycle to and from the hospital, a distance of about 5 kilometres as the crow flies. He’s ruled that route out now as strictly for the birds. Coming a big cropper during ticker tantrums, convinced him to go for the bypass.
Lynne Brooker is a gracious patient lady who when young reached great heights trekking in the Himalayas. Over four seasons she learned to keep a steady position crossing raging torrents by way of stepping stones. Lynne sang me this advice:
‘Walk like a man
‘Walk like a man
Fast as you can
Walk like a man my son
No condition’s worth
Crawling on the earth
So walk like a man my son.’
Noticing the upper part of my carriage inclined forward, Theodora advised:
‘You’re just the sort of creature, man
That nature did intend
To walk right through the world, my man,
Without the Grecian bend.
Stooped posture, all this bending forward,
This fashion has to go.
You must work to stand up straight and walk without the slightest bow.’
Encouragement aside,the line I toe is not too fine.For me balancing on my left foot is difficult so I need to place my index finger on the railing to avoid toppling over. I try not to push down too hard but this was hard at first.
When presenting myself for a workout,Nathan once asked if I had any changes to my health or any injuries.
I replied, ‘Nathan,I do. When I press my leg it hurts. Then when I press my chest it hurts, when I press my head it hurts, and when I press my stomach it hurts. I'm worried, what's wrong with me?’
Observing my finger,Nathan replied: Don’t do yourself any further injury. Ease off balancing on your left foot for a while. You have a swollen finger!’
We exchange details of our performance on the various low impact,air pressured machines.I asked Liz,another patient how she goes on the leg press.
‘I have great difficulty bringing my leg back after I push it out.It’s weak as I’ve had hip dislocation
since birth.
I said to her, ‘What’s a joint like that doing in a girl like you?
We all perform best when incentivised by rewards both physical and social. Andrea, one of our
exercise trainers kept reminding us, ‘ Remember,you’ll reap the benefits later on.’ I called him ‘Mandrea’ to avoid confusion with his female namesake,a Sports and Exercise student on placement.This wasn’t necessary as most lady gymnasts there attested.It’s that Italian thing.
Or even that Australian fling.
I found out why one short widowed dancing school dropout in the waiting room was always poring through the obituaries.That’s where he looked for eligible women.
‘You should go to dances’,I suggested.
‘I’m not much good in that department.I went to one just last week.I got all spruced up before and went to the barber’s .I even had my ears trimmed.’
‘How did you go? Did you score?’
‘I enjoyed the great seafood buffet,though I fluffed my pick up line.I asked this sexy generian , ‘Do I come here often?’
‘Did your dancing make up for it ?’
‘That was another story.I was dancing with this sexy generian.She wasn’t impressed with my footwork.I’ve got two left feet.I apologised saying, ‘I’m sorry,I’m a little stiff from exercise.’
‘I enjoyed the great seafood buffet,though I fluffed my pick up line.I asked this sexy generian , ‘Do I come here often?’
‘Did your dancing make up for it ?’
‘That was another story.I was dancing with this sexy generian.She wasn’t impressed with my footwork.I’ve got two left feet.I apologised saying, ‘I’m sorry,I’m a little stiff from exercise.’
She said ‘ I don’t give a damn where you’re from.You’re treading all over my feet.Please get off.’
‘I take it you went home emptyhanded.’
‘I’m afraid so.All I managed to pull was a mussel.’
‘It sounds like you have difficulty getting close to people.’
‘My friends tell me I have an intimacy problem.but they don't really know me.'
‘Did you ever think of joining a club where people dance?’
‘I used to belong to a naturist club.’
‘That’s interesting.How do the members dance?’
‘Very carefully indeed.’
‘Did you ever consider joining a Lonely Hearts Club.’
‘I applied to one along with a photo but they knocked back my membership.They said they weren’t that lonely.’
‘Maybe your photos don’t do you justice.’
‘They don’t.They just look like me.’
‘I wouldn’t worry too much about it at your age.’
‘But I do.Until I find another soul mate,I’ll remain unsettled.’
‘Try to be content with what you’ve got.Worry is like a rocking chair: it gives you something to do but never gets you anywhere.’
One over ripe lothario,Jack Callaghan,who has worked in hospitals himself uses the Centre as a
‘I take it you went home emptyhanded.’
‘I’m afraid so.All I managed to pull was a mussel.’
‘It sounds like you have difficulty getting close to people.’
‘My friends tell me I have an intimacy problem.but they don't really know me.'
‘Did you ever think of joining a club where people dance?’
‘I used to belong to a naturist club.’
‘That’s interesting.How do the members dance?’
‘Very carefully indeed.’
‘Did you ever consider joining a Lonely Hearts Club.’
‘I applied to one along with a photo but they knocked back my membership.They said they weren’t that lonely.’
‘Maybe your photos don’t do you justice.’
‘They don’t.They just look like me.’
‘I wouldn’t worry too much about it at your age.’
‘But I do.Until I find another soul mate,I’ll remain unsettled.’
‘Try to be content with what you’ve got.Worry is like a rocking chair: it gives you something to do but never gets you anywhere.’
One over ripe lothario,Jack Callaghan,who has worked in hospitals himself uses the Centre as a
pickup joint.A lifter if there ever there was,he doesn’t draw the line at trying to pick up weights.
He chatted up one senior lady saying to her ‘Ma cherie,your teeth are like stars.’
‘Indeed they are’,she replied, ‘they come out at night.’
During the day Jack likes to watch all the girls go by from his verandah.
One session he was working out on his hamstrings when a middle aged maiden took his fancy. He turned to a nearby trainer and asked, ‘What machine in here should I use to impress that sweet young thing over there?’ Laura looked him up and down and said: ‘Try the ATM down in Darling Street.’
‘I tried it yesterday,’said another elderly man,without success.I asked a young man to help check my balance.He pushed me over.’
‘What a lousy scumbag,’I commented,What did he say to you?’
He said, ‘Your money or your life!’
'What on earth did you say?'’
‘ I said, ‘I’ll have to think about it.’’
This elderly man is still chasing girls too. He doesn't remember what for, but he’s still chasing them.
Standing up straight and steady, packing our bodies together along a simple straight line can really test our patience- and sometimes that of our trainers.It tested me how to pack a laugh anatomical:‘There once was a gymnast named Lydia
During the day Jack likes to watch all the girls go by from his verandah.
One session he was working out on his hamstrings when a middle aged maiden took his fancy. He turned to a nearby trainer and asked, ‘What machine in here should I use to impress that sweet young thing over there?’ Laura looked him up and down and said: ‘Try the ATM down in Darling Street.’
‘I tried it yesterday,’said another elderly man,without success.I asked a young man to help check my balance.He pushed me over.’
‘What a lousy scumbag,’I commented,What did he say to you?’
He said, ‘Your money or your life!’
'What on earth did you say?'’
‘ I said, ‘I’ll have to think about it.’’
This elderly man is still chasing girls too. He doesn't remember what for, but he’s still chasing them.
Standing up straight and steady, packing our bodies together along a simple straight line can really test our patience- and sometimes that of our trainers.It tested me how to pack a laugh anatomical:‘There once was a gymnast named Lydia
In her balance grew steadily giddier
When walking the line
She’d fall down all supine
Cried her trainer, ‘That’s enough!I’ll be glad to get riddya.’
Laura couldn’t of course even if she were serious.
That said she has taken to prodding me in the back,taking me by surprise. This is so I can correct my balance when forced. I can take it. Like Lydia,I’m no pushover.
Veronica Elmers volunteers too but has her hands full these days.She drives her man Reg all the way from the southern suburbs.He used to believe everything was coming his way.Still insisting on doing things he can’t,Reg is trying hard but gradually losing it.’
Dr.Singh asked him, ‘How is old age treating you,Reg?’
‘Age is kinder to me than you’d think. With my bad eyes, I can't see how bad I look,and with my rotten memory, I have a good excuse for getting out of a lot of stuff.’
‘What kind of capers does he get up to?’I asked Veronica.
Dr.Singh asked him, ‘How is old age treating you,Reg?’
‘Age is kinder to me than you’d think. With my bad eyes, I can't see how bad I look,and with my rotten memory, I have a good excuse for getting out of a lot of stuff.’
‘What kind of capers does he get up to?’I asked Veronica.
‘Going off on his own without telling me,going into other peoples houses by mistake-that sort of thing.He took off in the car one day by himself.He wanted to show me he could make his own way to the Centre. I was listening to the radio when they put the word out that a car was going the wrong way on the freeway.I yelled out to Reg to tell him of this drama but,oh look, discovered both him and the car gone. I rang him frantically on the mobile.
When he answered I cried"Reg, I just heard.A car is going the wrong way. Please be careful!"
Reg replied blissfully, "It's not just one car,Veronica. There's hundreds of them!"
One knee extender,Olive, said ‘Reg is not alone in such escapades.’ She told us of a similarly hairy trip she had experienced recently coming to the Centre: ‘My friend drove me here in an old borrowed Falcon.The seats were fixed rather low. ‘Like her,I could barely see over the dashboard.
My friend commented, ‘Ever notice that anyone going slower than you is an idiot but anyone going faster is a maniac.’
As we were cruising along, we came to an intersection.I could swear as God is my judge the stoplight was red but we just went on through.
I thought to myself "I must be losing it. I could have sworn we just went through a red light.'
So, I turned to my friend and said, ‘Didn't you see that red light?"
She
said, ‘You've seen one, you've seen them all.’I thought to myself "I must be losing it. I could have sworn we just went through a red light.'
‘Have you ever thought about this?’ said my friend as we drove along, ‘At a traffic light yellow means yield, and green means go. On a banana, it's just the opposite, yellow means ‘Go ahead’, green means ‘Stop’, and red means, ‘Where'd you get that banana?’
I didn’t say anything.My heart was still in my mouth.
Regaining my composure I asked her, ‘When did you realize you'd reached middle age?’
‘That would have been when I was being cautioned to slow down by my doctor, instead of by the police.’
After a few more minutes, we came to another intersection and the light was red again. Again, I could swear we went right through. I was really concerned that I was losing it.And I was getting on edge.
At the next intersection, sure enough, the light was red and I could swear we went on through. So, I turned to my friend and said, "Did you know that we just ran through three red lights in a row? You
could have killed us both!"
‘Well,blow me down’,she said, turning to me , ‘am I driving?"
Indeed she was.It takes a lot to stop her.
Not that such concerns worry one of our members who will remain nameless.He lives under a flight
Indeed she was.It takes a lot to stop her.
Not that such concerns worry one of our members who will remain nameless.He lives under a flight
path. He is stoically grateful about his good luck: ‘‘Have I been in the wars.Everything hurts and what doesn't hurt, doesn't work.Arch supports I have for my feet or I wouldn’t
be able to walk in the street.Arthritis have I in both knees.When I talk it’s
with a wheeze. My pulse is weak and my blood is thin.I've had two bypass surgeries, a hip replacement, new knees, fought prostate cancer and diabetes.I’m a trellis for varicose veins.My back goes out more than I do. I'm half blind, can't hear anything quieter than a jet engine, take forty different medications that make me dizzy, winded, and subject to blackouts. I have bouts with dementia. I’ve been having voices in my head but suddenly they’ve gone away.’
‘So what's the problem then?’ asked Doctor Singh.
‘I think I'm going deaf,’he replied.’’
‘You've got hypochondria.’ said the doctor.
'That as well!I have poor circulation, hardly feel my hands and feet anymore. I can't remember if I'm 85 or 92.Have lost all my friends.But, thank God, I still have my driver's licence.’
Professor Singh, the Centre’s director, always has a waiting room full of people who need his advice and specialist treatment.
Some are couples who’ve shared many years and belongings together.
One day I was sitting there opposite an elderly couple having a snack. I noticed that they had just one sandwich,some biscuits and an extra drink cup. As I watched, the gentleman divided the sandwich in half, then counted out the biscuits, one for him, one for her, until each had half of them. Then he
poured half of the coffee into the extra cup and set that in front of his wife. He then began to eat, and his wife sat watching, with her hands folded in her lap.
I decided to ask if they would allow me to get another hospital issue sandwich for them so that they didn't have to split theirs. The old gentleman said, ‘Oh, no. We've been married fifty years, and everything has always been and will always be shared, fifty fifty.’
I then asked the wife if she was going to eat, and she replied,
‘Not yet. It's his turn with the teeth.’
‘How does that work when you go to a restaurant?’I asked.
‘There’s no problem.Last night we went out to a new Thai restaurant in Balmain, and it was really great. I would recommend it very highly."
I asked: ‘What's the name of the restaurant?’
He knitted his brow in obvious concentration, and finally said to me: ‘Aahh, what is the name of that red flower you give to someone you love?’ I replied: ‘A carnation?’ ‘No, no. The other one, the man said. I offered another suggestion: ‘The poppy?’ ‘Nahhhh,’ growled the man.
‘You know - the one that is red and has thorns.’
I said: ‘Do you mean a rose?’
‘Yes! Thank you!’ the man said.
He then turned toward his wife and asked: ‘Rose, what's the name of that restaurant we went to last night?’
poured half of the coffee into the extra cup and set that in front of his wife. He then began to eat, and his wife sat watching, with her hands folded in her lap.
I decided to ask if they would allow me to get another hospital issue sandwich for them so that they didn't have to split theirs. The old gentleman said, ‘Oh, no. We've been married fifty years, and everything has always been and will always be shared, fifty fifty.’
I then asked the wife if she was going to eat, and she replied,
‘Not yet. It's his turn with the teeth.’
‘How does that work when you go to a restaurant?’I asked.
‘There’s no problem.Last night we went out to a new Thai restaurant in Balmain, and it was really great. I would recommend it very highly."
I asked: ‘What's the name of the restaurant?’
He knitted his brow in obvious concentration, and finally said to me: ‘Aahh, what is the name of that red flower you give to someone you love?’ I replied: ‘A carnation?’ ‘No, no. The other one, the man said. I offered another suggestion: ‘The poppy?’ ‘Nahhhh,’ growled the man.
‘You know - the one that is red and has thorns.’
I said: ‘Do you mean a rose?’
‘Yes! Thank you!’ the man said.
He then turned toward his wife and asked: ‘Rose, what's the name of that restaurant we went to last night?’
While waiting to talk to Dr.Singh one day about our regime,I asked Brian Tarlington,another gym junkie: ‘How long have you had your drivers licence,Brian?’
‘Mate,I drove taxis over fifty years.I’ve had my licence since I was this high,’he said,extending his palm an inch over his head.I’ve had licences to drive trucks,buses,tanks.’
‘Tanks?’ I said.
‘You’re welcome.’
‘How did you two love birds meet?’ I asked him and his missus,Daphne.
‘Brian picked me up in his cab one day just before Easter.‘I said, 'Arthur Phillip’s Close.’He said, ‘ Hang on,we’ll lose him at the lights.’I wanted to go straight home but we got mixed up in one huge
traffic congestion.Most people were trying to leave town.We had only gone a couple of hundred yards when I realized we weren’t going anywhere fast.Then as we inched slowly forward I decided I was losing money. I leaned forward and tapped him gently on the shoulder. He screamed, mounted the pavement, almost hitting a rubbish bin but managed to swerve back on to the road.
I asked him’What on earth was that all about? I only wanted you to stop so I could get out and walk home.’
‘I'm sorry,’he explained, ‘but this is my first day back driving a cab; for the last few
months I’ve been driving a hearse!’
As it turned out Brian knew the quickest way to go in traffic and avoid traffic jams.This one was so big,hundreds of people were coming in their cars just to see what was going on. Being the smart cabby he was,Brian started reversing out of that parking lot.He ended up driving me backwards weaving past other cars all the way home.Going by the meter it worked out he owed me fifteen shillings.’
‘Was hacking what you always wanted to do in life,Brian?’
‘At first I wanted to be a brain surgeon but I had a bad habit of dropping things.’
‘Then he wanted to be a tree surgeon but he couldn’t stand the sight of sap,’said Daphne.
‘Do you eat a lot?’
'I’m a light eater.As soon as it’s light,I start to eat.’
‘Here’s a handy reducing exercise for you to start with.Place both your hands against the edge of your table and push back.’
'I prefer to sleep. It’s the only thing that keeps me from eating around the clock.How common is my condition,Doctor?’
‘It’s undeniable. You face the same looming menace as many Australians.’
‘Fat people blocking the footpath.You can’t get around it.’
‘The first time I see a jogger smiling, I'll consider it’’.
'Did you ever think of going swimming?
'I’ve never swum a stroke in my life. ‘I’ve never swum a stroke in my life. I’ve never gone skinny dipping nor chunky dunking because it was never more than half an hour since I last ate.'
‘You know that swimming is good for you surely.’‘Especially if you're drowning’.
‘Not only do you get a cardiovascular workout but yes, you don't die.’
'Then why do you drink so much?’
‘I drink to forget.’
‘To forget what?’
‘I can’t remember. I’ve got the memory of an elephant and a figure to match’
‘Haven’t you read of the dangers of alcohol?’
‘I have.That’s why I gave it up.’
‘What,alcohol?!’
‘No,reading.’
'Have you ever given up drinking at all?
'Yes One Good Friday when the bottle shops were closed and I hadn’t made provision. .I was forced
to live all day,that Black Friday, on nothing but food and water.'
‘Can’t you simply refuse an invitation to drink?’
'The only time I’ve said no to a drink was when I misunderstood the question.’
‘Have you ever considered joining Alcoholics Anonymous?’
‘I’m actually a member but I drink under a different name.’
‘What got you started drinking? with most things in the lives of men,it was to do with love of a difficult woman. As well as the price of alcohol,it was her who drove me to drink. That's the one thing I’m so indebted to her for.’
‘You realize don’t you that if you regularly drink more than three units of wine a day, you could be well on your way to becoming an alcoholic.’
‘You’re welcome.’
‘How did you two love birds meet?’ I asked him and his missus,Daphne.
‘Brian picked me up in his cab one day just before Easter.‘I said, 'Arthur Phillip’s Close.’He said, ‘ Hang on,we’ll lose him at the lights.’I wanted to go straight home but we got mixed up in one huge
traffic congestion.Most people were trying to leave town.We had only gone a couple of hundred yards when I realized we weren’t going anywhere fast.Then as we inched slowly forward I decided I was losing money. I leaned forward and tapped him gently on the shoulder. He screamed, mounted the pavement, almost hitting a rubbish bin but managed to swerve back on to the road.
I asked him’What on earth was that all about? I only wanted you to stop so I could get out and walk home.’
‘I'm sorry,’he explained, ‘but this is my first day back driving a cab; for the last few
months I’ve been driving a hearse!’
As it turned out Brian knew the quickest way to go in traffic and avoid traffic jams.This one was so big,hundreds of people were coming in their cars just to see what was going on. Being the smart cabby he was,Brian started reversing out of that parking lot.He ended up driving me backwards weaving past other cars all the way home.Going by the meter it worked out he owed me fifteen shillings.’
‘Was hacking what you always wanted to do in life,Brian?’
‘At first I wanted to be a brain surgeon but I had a bad habit of dropping things.’
‘Then he wanted to be a tree surgeon but he couldn’t stand the sight of sap,’said Daphne.
‘Life cuts us down to size doesn’t it.’
‘I’d never trade him in’,she added. ‘He’s reliable, got high mileage and is still in reasonable running condition.’
‘It sounds like all your relationship needs is an occasional service and tune up.Has it ever lost it’s sense of direction?’
‘There was a period Some years back when we disagreed about what was what. I said ‘Brian, our relationship is at a crossroads. Down one road is struggle and hardship, but eventually, happiness. The other, well, that's a dead end.’He replied, ‘That's not a crossroads. That's a T-Junction’.
‘I see you took the first road.’
‘The thought of being without Brian sends shivers down my spine.’
‘You know,as we age,'said Brian, 'the discs between the vertebrae of our spines-you can think of them as as gel-like cushions- end up pressing closer together, just like me and Daphne,’ taking his missus by the hand.
‘Oh you are a one!’,cooed Daphne.
‘Now these cushions dry out and become thinner,’continued Brian. ‘The result is that our spines become more and more squished with time. Moreover as we age,dem dry bones may also shrink both in density and size, which could also add to the shrinkage and the risk of hip fracture. Most people shrink from age 30 to 70, with men getting about an inch shorter.’
‘‘Don’t trip on dem
pants,Brian.Now what about women’I asked.What about your Daphne?’
‘This delightful nymph,’ he said, ‘ has gotten about two inches shorter since I first drove after her and overtook her.’
‘So where does this all take us,Apollo?’
‘ Well. when we hit age 80, all of us lose another inch on top of that. And as it turns out,everyone shrinks a little bit each day. Water in the spinal discs get more and more compressed throughout the
day, causing people to be just a smidgen shorter at the end of the day than they were at the beginning . However, whatever height is lost at the end of the day is regained after a night's rest.’
‘Of course exercise will help us keep our back straight and maintain our posture,I said..’
Getting a little impatient to see the good doctor,a little behind in his busy schedule, Brian called out to him as he came by,"Doctor,will you be long. I think I'm shrinking fast!" The doctor calmly
responded, "Now, settle down. You’re doing O.K. at knee extension. You' might just have to extend your patience the same.’
‘Doctor,at my age,patience is not a virtue----it's a luxury.'
Another less patient patient who had been waiting awhile was getting visibly annoyed. Not having made proper allowance for time, his parking meter ticket had expired.He asked.’How much flaming longer Doc. ? What would you prescribe for my shrinkage. A cup of tea, a Bex and a good lie down?’
‘If you have to get your back up,’replied the doctor, ‘ do it the right way. To strengthen your core,keep up your exercises, hold your head to the sky. Walk tall,walk tall and look the world right in the eye.’
'I remembered that advice.That's what my mama told me when I was about knee high.'
‘That way you’ll live to be eighty.’
‘I am eighty.’
‘See, what did I tell you?’
‘When did you first notice you were getting old?’Dr.Singh asked him.
‘It was on my seventieth birthday’,he replied. ‘By the time I lit the last birthday cake candle myself the first candle had burnt out.Then my son lit them for me. When I tried to count the candles ,which incidentally cost more than the cake, I was driven back by the heat.
‘Of course exercise will help us keep our back straight and maintain our posture,I said..’
Getting a little impatient to see the good doctor,a little behind in his busy schedule, Brian called out to him as he came by,"Doctor,will you be long. I think I'm shrinking fast!" The doctor calmly
responded, "Now, settle down. You’re doing O.K. at knee extension. You' might just have to extend your patience the same.’
‘Doctor,at my age,patience is not a virtue----it's a luxury.'
Another less patient patient who had been waiting awhile was getting visibly annoyed. Not having made proper allowance for time, his parking meter ticket had expired.He asked.’How much flaming longer Doc. ? What would you prescribe for my shrinkage. A cup of tea, a Bex and a good lie down?’
‘If you have to get your back up,’replied the doctor, ‘ do it the right way. To strengthen your core,keep up your exercises, hold your head to the sky. Walk tall,walk tall and look the world right in the eye.’
'I remembered that advice.That's what my mama told me when I was about knee high.'
‘That way you’ll live to be eighty.’
‘I am eighty.’
‘See, what did I tell you?’
‘When did you first notice you were getting old?’Dr.Singh asked him.
‘It was on my seventieth birthday’,he replied. ‘By the time I lit the last birthday cake candle myself the first candle had burnt out.Then my son lit them for me. When I tried to count the candles ,which incidentally cost more than the cake, I was driven back by the heat.
Some of the gymnasts like John Ennion have hearing problems.He needs to read lips.People don’t mind him
doing that, but he uses one of those yellow highlighters. Some don’t realise what an effort he puts into listening to what they say . You have to credit him for trying so hard.One day he was talking about his new hearing aid. ‘It’s great.I long resisted getting such a device.I can hear well with it.’ I never thought I’d hear myself say that.’
I asked him ‘What kind is it?’
John responded; ‘ 1pm.Time for our session to start.’
‘You can say what you want about deaf people---’
The Centre monitors carefully the progress of arthritis amongst us and how this affects our ability to function. One day while I was waiting to see the Professor, an elderly rickety lady fromRose Bay
I asked him ‘What kind is it?’
John responded; ‘ 1pm.Time for our session to start.’
‘You can say what you want about deaf people---’
The Centre monitors carefully the progress of arthritis amongst us and how this affects our ability to function. One day while I was waiting to see the Professor, an elderly rickety lady from
While he was attending to her,I asked Tanya why she worked at the Centre while she could be enjoying her own free time.
I like to help people’,she replied. ‘Without volunteers, the Centre doesn’t have enough full time employees to operate effectively.’
Twenty minutes later the rickety lady came briskly out of Professor Singh’s room walking almost upright.Now I’d seen everything. She was holding her head high and even managed a smile. Tanya said to her, ‘As I live and breathe,that’s fantastic, a grade one Galilee miracle even. You walked in bent in half and now you walk out erect. What a marvellous doctor he is. Tell me,how did Professor Singh help you out.?"
"Miracle, shmiracle," she said, "he just went click.It’s all part of his schtick. To adjust the length you simply push a button on the stick. "
Her problem it turned out had been the same as that of the Centre.She too had been short of staff.
Of course it can go the other way.
Another lady had a similar problem to me.One leg was a bit shorter than the other. ‘What’s your name,?’I asked her.
‘Eileen.’
‘Professor
Singh’said one of the elderly ladies, ‘I feel the need to have a rest in the
afternoon.
Is that good or bad for me?’
‘Having a siesta is associated with a reduced risk of dying from a heart problem’,he said.
'Having a nap in the middle of the day may help people to unwind and relax - which is important for our overall health. However it is important to get a balance between rest and activity, as being regularly active also helps reduce the risk of coronary heart disease.’
‘I can take forty winks after my morning workout here with a clear mind.’What never fails to amaze gerontologists is how the ageing process proceeds at such very differing rates from one person to the next.One former fireman referred by his G.P.to see Dr.Singh struck the doctor as a fairly healthy looking late septuagenarian despite having more chins than a Chinese phone directory.
‘ Inside every old person is a young person wondering what happened,’said Dr.Singh. ‘Is that what
you’re wondering?
‘I couldn’t have put it any better myself,’ said the pudgy puffball letting out a cough.'One minute I was feeling young and ready to set the world on fire. The next I felt as old as the hills.’
‘'I can't help noticing how fit you look,considering your age.
You look like Mick Jagger who works out
every day.’
‘Doctor,they’re not wrinkles.They’re laughter lines.’
‘Oh come now.nothing is that funny.Anyway what's your secret for a long life?"
‘Doctor,they’re not wrinkles.They’re laughter lines.’
‘Oh come now.nothing is that funny.Anyway what's your secret for a long life?"
'Whatever it is,it’s not genetic.I’m having a blast while I last.I smoke two packs of cigarettes a day.'
‘That probably explains your coughing.'
‘I hoped you wouldn’t have pointed that out.You've just made a happy man old.’
‘Don’t you have the willpower to stop?’
‘I have indeed.I’ve given it up dozens of times.’
'You know where that can lead to,don’t you.’
‘It`s not the cough that carries you off, it`s the coffin they carry you off in." he said. "I also drink a six pack of beer every night, eat fatty foods.My favourite food is seconds.'
‘Don’t you have the willpower to stop?’
‘I have indeed.I’ve given it up dozens of times.’
'You know where that can lead to,don’t you.’
‘It`s not the cough that carries you off, it`s the coffin they carry you off in." he said. "I also drink a six pack of beer every night, eat fatty foods.My favourite food is seconds.'
‘Did no one ever advise you against all this? You need the support of others’
‘You’re right.We’re all in this alone.’
‘What about your family?’
‘ My father always used to say, "What doesn't kill you, makes you stronger," - 'til the accident.’
‘The accident?’
‘His dying wish was to have his family around him. I can't help thinking he would have been better off with more oxygen.’
‘I take it he never exercised.’
' No one in my family ever exercised. and have never exercised.If it weren't for the fact that the idiot box and the refrigerator are so far apart,I would never have exerted myself at all.'
‘You say that as if you’re proud of it.It's amazing you don’t look worse,’ said the doctor, ‘apart from
your weight and your problem.’
‘My problem? Give it to me straight,Doctor.I can take it. What do you think my problem is?’
‘I don't know exactly what your problem is, but I'll bet it's hard to pronounce.’
'No matter what I've done,Doctor,I haven't been able to lose my excess baggage.I mean I've tried everything short of diet and exercise.'
‘And now you realize it's time to change.If you were to join us,you’d have to diet carefully.’
‘Yes, I know.You don’t have to say it.The first few months I'd spend just finding my feet.’
‘What do you weigh?’
'Let me just say that when I get on my Smart scales, a voice instructs automatically, ‘One at a time’.‘Do you eat a lot?’
'I’m a light eater.As soon as it’s light,I start to eat.’
‘Here’s a handy reducing exercise for you to start with.Place both your hands against the edge of your table and push back.’
'I prefer to sleep. It’s the only thing that keeps me from eating around the clock.How common is my condition,Doctor?’
‘It’s undeniable. You face the same looming menace as many Australians.’
‘Fat people blocking the footpath.You can’t get around it.’
'What was your attitude to exercise before?’
'I have to admit I haven't been into working out.When I wear a tie and a belt at the same time I turn into sausages.'The most exercise I’ve done over recent years is shaking,trembling and of course stretching’,he said,pulling up his shirt to display depressed lines of white shiny abdominal skin.
‘Striae distensae’,said Dr.Singh. ‘They pose no health risk in and of themselves.I must admit they are rather spectacular.’
‘That’s nothing.You should see the stretch marks on my bath tub.My philosophy has always been no pain,no pain.I thought if god had wanted me to bend over,he would have left pieces of gold scattered on the ground.'‘While you do have one obvious problem,it isn’t that obesity runs in your family. The problem is no one runs in your family.Did you never consider jogging?’
'Did you ever think of going swimming?
'I’ve never swum a stroke in my life. ‘I’ve never swum a stroke in my life. I’ve never gone skinny dipping nor chunky dunking because it was never more than half an hour since I last ate.'
‘You know that swimming is good for you surely.’‘Especially if you're drowning’.
‘Not only do you get a cardiovascular workout but yes, you don't die.’
‘It’s not even safe for me on the sand.The last time I lay on the beach people felt sorry for me and tried to roll me back into the water.’
‘You might consider cutting down your alcohol intake.Did no one ever warn you against excessive drinking?’
‘My G.P. told me to watch my drinking. Now I drink in front of a mirror.’
‘You might consider cutting down your alcohol intake.Is it that you use it as a crutch?’
‘I don't use alcohol as a crutch,Doctor Singh, because a crutch helps me walk.’'Then why do you drink so much?’
‘I drink to forget.’
‘To forget what?’
‘I can’t remember. I’ve got the memory of an elephant and a figure to match’
‘Haven’t you read of the dangers of alcohol?’
‘I have.That’s why I gave it up.’
‘What,alcohol?!’
‘No,reading.’
'Have you ever given up drinking at all?
'Yes One Good Friday when the bottle shops were closed and I hadn’t made provision. .I was forced
to live all day,that Black Friday, on nothing but food and water.'
‘Can’t you simply refuse an invitation to drink?’
'The only time I’ve said no to a drink was when I misunderstood the question.’
‘Have you ever considered joining Alcoholics Anonymous?’
‘I’m actually a member but I drink under a different name.’
‘What got you started drinking? with most things in the lives of men,it was to do with love of a difficult woman. As well as the price of alcohol,it was her who drove me to drink. That's the one thing I’m so indebted to her for.’
‘You realize don’t you that if you regularly drink more than three units of wine a day, you could be well on your way to becoming an alcoholic.’
‘If I regularly drank three units of wine a day I'd be well on my way to being cured.’
‘Do you know your limit?’
'I know my limit.I just keep passing out before I reach it.'
‘How many drinks does it take to get you intoxicated?’
‘It takes only one drink to get me drunk.the trouble is I can't remember if it's the fifteenth or the sixteenth..’
‘Alcohol is slow poison you know.’
‘That may well be,but who’s in a hurry?’
‘You’re missing out on so much.Do people feel sorry for you?’
‘I feel sorry for people that don't drink.When they wake up in the morning, that's the best they're going to feel all day.’
‘Do you need glasses?’asked Dr.Singh,noticing his squint.'I don't.I drink straight out of the bottle.'
'If I were you,I’d be checked for diabetes or liver irregularities.Have you had your urine checked lately?’‘Doctor Singh,the last time I gave a urine sample ,it had an olive in it.’
'You never mentioned recreational drugs.What about cannabis,cocaine,ectasy.Have you used these?
‘I tried cocaine to cut down my weight. It just made me eat faster,’
'Do you view these kind of drugs as a crutch, for those who can’t cope with reality?’
‘I view reality as a crutch for people who can't cope with drugs.’
‘Do you still use them?’
'I don't do drugs anymore,thank God.I can get the same effect just by standing up real fast.'
‘Do you have any addiction to medically prescribed drugs?’
‘I’m addicted to placebos.I’d give them up but it wouldn’t make any difference.’
‘Do you ever have falls?’
‘I tripped over a phone only yesterday.’
‘Do you know your limit?’
'I know my limit.I just keep passing out before I reach it.'
‘How many drinks does it take to get you intoxicated?’
‘It takes only one drink to get me drunk.the trouble is I can't remember if it's the fifteenth or the sixteenth..’
‘Alcohol is slow poison you know.’
‘That may well be,but who’s in a hurry?’
‘You’re missing out on so much.Do people feel sorry for you?’
‘I feel sorry for people that don't drink.When they wake up in the morning, that's the best they're going to feel all day.’
‘Do you need glasses?’asked Dr.Singh,noticing his squint.'I don't.I drink straight out of the bottle.'
'If I were you,I’d be checked for diabetes or liver irregularities.Have you had your urine checked lately?’‘Doctor Singh,the last time I gave a urine sample ,it had an olive in it.’
'You never mentioned recreational drugs.What about cannabis,cocaine,ectasy.Have you used these?
‘I tried cocaine to cut down my weight. It just made me eat faster,’
'Do you view these kind of drugs as a crutch, for those who can’t cope with reality?’
‘I view reality as a crutch for people who can't cope with drugs.’
‘Do you still use them?’
'I don't do drugs anymore,thank God.I can get the same effect just by standing up real fast.'
‘Do you have any addiction to medically prescribed drugs?’
‘I’m addicted to placebos.I’d give them up but it wouldn’t make any difference.’
‘Do you ever have falls?’
‘I tripped over a phone only yesterday.’
‘You have to arrange the cable more safely.’
‘It was a cordless phone.’
‘Did you hurt yourself?’
‘Not as much as the time before.I fell down a flight of stairs in the city. Somebody rushed over to me and asked, ‘Did you miss a step?’
‘No way,’ I answered, ‘I hit every one of them.’
‘Have you come to terms with the idea of living to an old age?’
‘I used to be but am increasingly less so.The idea of living a long life appeals to everyone, but as with everyone the idea of getting old doesn't appeal to me.’
‘When do you think you’re old?’
‘You know you're old if they have discontinued your blood type.’
'Just how old are you?'
'Twenty-six,’ he said.
‘Don’t you feel sorry for the way you’ve punished your body?You’ve got to get wiser,not wider. You’ve got to protect your organs. Those beautiful, intricate and faithful structures pump and squeeze and metabolise away quietly, keeping you alive.What will you be like when you’re fifty? I always say that life begins then.’
'Maybe it's true that life begins at fifty.But from my observations,everything else starts to wear out,fall out or spread out.'
'How long would you like to live?
‘I’d like to live until I die.No more,no less.’
‘ I’m sure you will.Do you intend to be buried or cremated?’
‘When I die, I'm leaving my body to science fiction.’
‘If you paid attention to science facts you could live to be eighty or ninety if you give up all those things and rescue your body.’’
‘All those things that make me want to live to be eighty.I’ll endure with them.That’s how I roll.’
‘Ride out the clock, stay unfit. I've got news for you: the next chapter is not that long.’
‘I feel sorry for teetotalers, because when they wake up in the morning, that’s the best they’re going to feel all day.I feel sorry for those who don’t drink or smoke because someday they’re going to be in a hospital bed, dying, and they won’t know why.’
‘So in your own way you believe in something.You feel you’ve achieved a kind of inner peace?’
' I believe the way to achieve true inner peace is to finish what I start. So far this week I’ve finished
a large bottle of Johnny Walker and a large tiramisu cake.I believe I’ll have another six pack tonight. I feel better .'
‘You can’t postpone any longer giving up all this binging .’
‘I will try,Doctor.I'm going to stop putting it off,starting tomorrow. '
‘What’s holding you back?’
‘I’ll tell you what’s holding me back.It’s me spine.’
‘That does it.You’re obviously not yet a candidate for our regime.
‘Could you tell me why in plain English,I can never understand those medical terms.’
‘Well you asked for it. You have no self control.You’re simply lazy.’
‘O.K.Now could you tell me the medical term so I can tell my friends.’
‘Tell them you have a terminal case of chronic indolence.At this point you appear beyond redemption.You have no self control whatsoever.'
'Can I have a second opinion on this?'
'O.K.You have difficulty avoiding temptation as well.but I can assure you this.as you grow older it will avoid you.'
Looking much healthier,A genuinely 80-year-old man came to the clinic to be checked up.
I said to my community driver,Glen, ‘I hope I look that good when I’m eighty.’
‘You don’t look that good now,’joked Glen.
'How’s your memory?’Dr.Singh asked the octogenarian.
‘Pretty good.In fact I can't remember the last time I forgot something.’
‘You can’t postpone any longer giving up all this binging .’
‘I will try,Doctor.I'm going to stop putting it off,starting tomorrow. '
‘What’s holding you back?’
‘I’ll tell you what’s holding me back.It’s me spine.’
‘That does it.You’re obviously not yet a candidate for our regime.
‘Could you tell me why in plain English,I can never understand those medical terms.’
‘Well you asked for it. You have no self control.You’re simply lazy.’
‘O.K.Now could you tell me the medical term so I can tell my friends.’
‘Tell them you have a terminal case of chronic indolence.At this point you appear beyond redemption.You have no self control whatsoever.'
'Can I have a second opinion on this?'
'O.K.You have difficulty avoiding temptation as well.but I can assure you this.as you grow older it will avoid you.'
Looking much healthier,A genuinely 80-year-old man came to the clinic to be checked up.
I said to my community driver,Glen, ‘I hope I look that good when I’m eighty.’
‘You don’t look that good now,’joked Glen.
'How’s your memory?’Dr.Singh asked the octogenarian.
‘Pretty good.In fact I can't remember the last time I forgot something.’
Doctor Singh was amazed at what good shape the man was in.
‘You’ve got a strong grip there’,he said as he shook the man’s hand. ‘Do you use a hand exerciser?’
‘You’ve got a strong grip there’,he said as he shook the man’s hand. ‘Do you use a hand exerciser?’
‘I don't need one.I have a faulty back door handle.’
’You probably don’t need to use our service.You seem to have stayed in great physical condition?’‘ ‘I’m a bit thinner on top and thicker in the middle.Otherwise I’ve got everything I had twenty years ago,except it’s all lower.I don’t spend my time feeding pigeons in the park.I’ve still got lead in both my pencil and my rifle. In my spare time I like to go back to hunt and fish ,’ said the old guy, ‘and that's why I'm In such good shape. I'm up well before daylight and out setting my lines and stalking wild pigs. In the evening I have a beer and all is well.’
‘Well,’ says the doctor, ‘I'm sure that helps, but there's got to be more to it. How old was your father when he died?"
‘It’s always been poor.For example I remember my third birthday.'
‘That’s great recall.’
‘I’d just turned fifteen.’
‘Dr.Singh,why do we have to get old?’
‘Because that’s what people do.But don’t let it get you down. It’s too hard to get back up.Isn’t that what we learn from life?m
‘I've learned that life is like a roll of toilet paper. The closer it gets to the end, the faster it goes.”
‘Never regret growing old.It’s a privilege denied to many.Now how far back do you remember?’
‘Back to the days of silent radio. Back to when the Dead Sea was only sick. Back to when you bought politicians,they stayed bought. Back to when the wonder drug was Mercurochrome. Back before drawing boards were invented and people had nowhere to go back to.Back to when it was my belt that buckled,not my knees. Back to when going out was good,before coming home was better. Back to when I sank my teeth into a steak and they stayed there.Before the waiter would ask how I'd like my steak...and I’d say ‘pureed.’
‘Are you still managing to get lucky in bed?’
‘Well,’ says the doctor, ‘I'm sure that helps, but there's got to be more to it. How old was your father when he died?"
‘Who said my father's dead?’
The doctor was impressed, ‘You mean you're 80 years old and your father's still alive? How old is he?’
‘He's 100 years old,’ said the man.
Doctor Singh asked him lightheartedly, ‘So, I guess he goes hunting and fishing with you too?’
‘He comes along to keep me company sometimes.But not tomorrow.No,Dad can’t come tomorrow. He's getting married then.’
‘Getting married! That’s amazing.It’s vital to have a partner.'
‘It is for him.He and my mother were inseparable.He said to me some time ago Would you bury me next to your mother?’
I said, ‘Don’t you think you ought to die first?’
‘Is the bride the same age as him?’
‘She’s forty.I’ve had a haemorrhoid longer than that.’
'Have you warned him to take it easy on his honeymoon in case of a heart attack.’
'I did.He replied: ‘Que sera sera!If she dies,she dies.’.
‘So tell me,why would a man at that age want to tie the knot again?’
‘Is the bride the same age as him?’
‘She’s forty.I’ve had a haemorrhoid longer than that.’
'Have you warned him to take it easy on his honeymoon in case of a heart attack.’
'I did.He replied: ‘Que sera sera!If she dies,she dies.’.
‘So tell me,why would a man at that age want to tie the knot again?’
‘Who said he wants to?’
‘How’s your memory?’ Dr.Singh asked another male entrant.‘It’s always been poor.For example I remember my third birthday.'
‘That’s great recall.’
‘I’d just turned fifteen.’
‘Dr.Singh,why do we have to get old?’
‘Because that’s what people do.But don’t let it get you down. It’s too hard to get back up.Isn’t that what we learn from life?m
‘I've learned that life is like a roll of toilet paper. The closer it gets to the end, the faster it goes.”
‘Never regret growing old.It’s a privilege denied to many.Now how far back do you remember?’
‘Back to the days of silent radio. Back to when the Dead Sea was only sick. Back to when you bought politicians,they stayed bought. Back to when the wonder drug was Mercurochrome. Back before drawing boards were invented and people had nowhere to go back to.Back to when it was my belt that buckled,not my knees. Back to when going out was good,before coming home was better. Back to when I sank my teeth into a steak and they stayed there.Before the waiter would ask how I'd like my steak...and I’d say ‘pureed.’
‘Are you still managing to get lucky in bed?’
‘Doctor,for me sex at eighty five is like trying to shoot snooker with a rope. How cruel can nature be? ’‘Look at it positively.You’ve played your role in continuing the species.Impotence is natures way of saying ‘no hard feelings’.
'He asked another,an aging bohemian, the usual question. ‘How’s your memory?’
‘Pretty good.I can remember way back.’
'How far back?’
‘Back when I ordered three minute eggs,the waitress didn’t ask for the payment in advance.Back when the air was clean and sex was dirty. Back before Doris Day was a virgin.Back when I turned off the lights for romantic reasons, not economical ones. Back when safe sex meant a padded headboard.Back when I could see who I was having it with. Back when I could remember who got tied up.’
'Are you still active?’
‘Do you think that wisdom comes with age?’
‘I have all the answers but nobody is asking me the questions.’
‘Let me ask you one.Are you talking about wisdom-or knowledge? What’s the difference?
‘Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.’
‘Do you suffer greatly from fatigue?’
‘After painting the town red, I need to take a long rest before applying a second coat. It takes me all night to do what I used to do all night long.’
‘Have you considered pharmaceutical back up in the erogenous zone?’
‘My doctor refused to write me a prescription for such drugs. He said it would be like putting a new flagpole on a condemned building.’
‘Everything that goes up must come down.but there comes a time when not everything's that's down can come up.How is your wife taking this?’
‘It doesn’t bother her any more.I came home recently and said to her, ‘Don’t you think we should sit down and have a serious talk about our sex life?’
She replied, ‘You want me to turn off ‘Days Of Our Lives’ for that?’
Dr.Singh interviewed Mr.John McDonald.
‘Do you have any conditions I should know about,John?'‘ZZZZZ’
'He asked another,an aging bohemian, the usual question. ‘How’s your memory?’
‘Pretty good.I can remember way back.’
'How far back?’
‘Back when I ordered three minute eggs,the waitress didn’t ask for the payment in advance.Back when the air was clean and sex was dirty. Back before Doris Day was a virgin.Back when I turned off the lights for romantic reasons, not economical ones. Back when safe sex meant a padded headboard.Back when I could see who I was having it with. Back when I could remember who got tied up.’
'Are you still active?’
‘I’ve slowed down considerably.I’m at an age at which food has largely
taken the place of sex.In fact I’ve just had a mirror placed over my
kitchen table.’
‘For how long can you sustain your love making these days?’
‘I recently made love for an hour and five minutes, but that was the night the clock is set ahead.’
‘Do you find it difficult to share your most intimate thoughts with your spouse?’
‘It can be .I told her last week that unless she expressed her feelings and told me what she liked I wouldn't be able to please her, so she said, ‘Get off me.’
‘When did you notice you were getting older?’
I knew this when I was having sex with someone half my age-and it was legal.’
He asked another,a champion greenhouse gardener,about his memory. ‘I’ve got difficulty remembering things. I just pointed out the extent of this to my apprentice.’
‘For how long can you sustain your love making these days?’
‘I recently made love for an hour and five minutes, but that was the night the clock is set ahead.’
‘Do you find it difficult to share your most intimate thoughts with your spouse?’
‘It can be .I told her last week that unless she expressed her feelings and told me what she liked I wouldn't be able to please her, so she said, ‘Get off me.’
‘When did you notice you were getting older?’
I knew this when I was having sex with someone half my age-and it was legal.’
He asked another,a champion greenhouse gardener,about his memory. ‘I’ve got difficulty remembering things. I just pointed out the extent of this to my apprentice.’
‘Do you think that wisdom comes with age?’
‘I have all the answers but nobody is asking me the questions.’
‘Let me ask you one.Are you talking about wisdom-or knowledge? What’s the difference?
‘Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.’
‘Do you suffer greatly from fatigue?’
‘After painting the town red, I need to take a long rest before applying a second coat. It takes me all night to do what I used to do all night long.’
‘Have you considered pharmaceutical back up in the erogenous zone?’
‘My doctor refused to write me a prescription for such drugs. He said it would be like putting a new flagpole on a condemned building.’
‘Everything that goes up must come down.but there comes a time when not everything's that's down can come up.How is your wife taking this?’
‘It doesn’t bother her any more.I came home recently and said to her, ‘Don’t you think we should sit down and have a serious talk about our sex life?’
She replied, ‘You want me to turn off ‘Days Of Our Lives’ for that?’
Dr.Singh interviewed Mr.John McDonald.
‘Do you have any conditions I should know about,John?'‘ZZZZZ’
Dr.Singh propped up his head with his hand and gently spoke in his ear,‘Did you have a late night,John?’
‘I’m a narcoleptic,’said John,stirring.
‘So you can fall asleep at the drop of a hat.’
‘I'm so good at sleeping, I can do it with my eyes closed’,said John,yawning.’
‘Well the regime you’ll undertake here will help you be more alert and sleep at the right time.I’m sure there are serious risks you want to avoid.Can you tell me about these.’
‘Well Doctor,I had a sudden snooze yesterday in the loungeroom.It was so cold.I slept like a log.’
‘That sounds quite relaxing.’
‘I fell asleep in the hearth.’
‘Does coffee keep you awake?’
‘Unfortunately no,not even when it’s hot and being spilled on me.’
‘Have your pathology tests indicated anaemia? Has your G.P. prescribed iron tablets?’
‘I’ve swallowed so many,when I awake,I’m always facing north.’
‘Any other associated problems?’
‘It hasn’t helped in my conjugal relationships.I’ve been accused by my ladies of sleeping
around.What’s more I like to sleep naked.’
‘ Opportunity may knock at your door.’
‘If it does,it had better be loud otherwise I may not awake.’
‘You need to watch your weight,John.Do you keep a record ?
‘I do.My wife bought me a car for Christmas. I said ‘That’s no good to me, I want something that will go from zero to one hundred and sixty in three seconds’. So she bought me a set of bathroom scales.’
‘Do you find yourself getting more forgetful?’
First you forget names,then you forget faces.Next you forget to pull your zipper up and finally,you forget to pull it down.'
’Joyce Skilling,a most definite nonagenarian, is a voluntary receptionist at the Centre.She still buses it all the way from St.Peter’s.
'What do you think of voluntary work?’ I asked her.around.What’s more I like to sleep naked.’
‘ Opportunity may knock at your door.’
‘If it does,it had better be loud otherwise I may not awake.’
‘You need to watch your weight,John.Do you keep a record ?
‘I do.My wife bought me a car for Christmas. I said ‘That’s no good to me, I want something that will go from zero to one hundred and sixty in three seconds’. So she bought me a set of bathroom scales.’
‘Do you find yourself getting more forgetful?’
First you forget names,then you forget faces.Next you forget to pull your zipper up and finally,you forget to pull it down.'
’Joyce Skilling,a most definite nonagenarian, is a voluntary receptionist at the Centre.She still buses it all the way from St.Peter’s.
'I wouldn't do it if you paid me.'
'And what do you think is the best thing about having reached such a grand age.' I asked her.
She simply replied, 'First,no peer pressure. Second,everything comes with a life time guarantee.’
I value my place in the program highly,coming twice weekly to begin with. Professor Singh, who
I have been receiving acupuncture treatment and Chinese herbs. Sean, my eldest son, practices traditional Chinese medicine professionally and introduced me to a range of complementary therapies.His deft needling of my various points-a jab well done-brought me forward no end for which I am proudly grateful.
Beatles- 'Help'
Survival is the prime command, the first thing that we are always commanded to look upon as the be-all and end-all of what we’re about. You can break all the laws as long as you can save lives. And if you don’t save lives, it’s not worth staying alive for. You know, this may be very naive, and it makes
me sound like a do-gooder. I am not only a do-gooder, I am also a pragmatist. I know that it takes a lot of hard work to do the right thing and to believe in the right thing and to defend what you believe in. But that’s what I do, and that’s what I’ve been doing all my life. And I’ve got to keep doing it until I no longer can.
I suffer from a certain angst, but I’m not making a life's work of it.
Hope springing eternal, I have to draw upon- without platitudes- the most profound lesson I have learned from it-- the resilience of the human spirit in extremis.Best expressed simply by Charlie who wrote this evergreen.
You'll find that life is still worthwhile,
If you just smile.
Forced to fly lower, to fly farther, and to test himself -- overspent and fatigued -- right up until death's door, forced to carry the hardships of "maximum effort" – he asked himself, how much can a man take?
Having confronted hitherto unknown expectations, rejections, hopes and disillusionments,I have crossed abruptly over that thin line between adulthood and old age. And once over that threshold, nothing is like it was before.
I had travelled on the ‘live now,pay later’ scheme: ‘Adventure before dementia.’
I had enough money to last me the rest of my life... unless I had to buy something.
Now when it comes to buying meals outside ,the restaurateurs insist I pay upfront.
Caught short,flat busted,I had no nest egg set aside , all my earlier ones having been cracked in the one basket.The only thing I had set aside for a rainy day was my umbrella.
Racking my brain,what plan can Rip Van Winkle hatch up now after awakening? Conceding the extent of my injury,I have to adjust my sights one last time. Having lost totally the world of paper I lived and worked in,I now had to enter the completely new digital age. In future shock, feeling time and tide rocket past me, I’m determined,if I’m going through the wringer to squeeze out every last drop of life from this spent frame.In one last fling, I’m reliant on my only useful ability left.For the life of me,by a process of elimination, I can’t see further reprieve other than through good old time honoured story telling.
He would tell me the story of the war and I was deeply marked by it.I felt particular compassion for people who had had bombs rained upon them.
Dad illustrated his account with his own photographs and those taken by Cecil Beaton to widen the scope. Beaton was officially employed by the British Ministry of information. He recorded the war at home and abroad,preserving moments that changed the face of the earth forever – the bomb damage on the streets of London and the night operations on RAF stations; injured children in hospital and
agrees humour is the next best medicine,an antidote to the pain and problems of existence,up to and including mortality itself,monitors each and everyone’s progress.When discussing mine in an interview,he put it to me:‘Allan how flexible are you?’
I replied ‘Well,Professor, do you want me to do a Michael Jackson? I’m not quite ready to do the splits.Any acts of contortion are out of the question. I now have difficulty making ends meet.’
‘What I mean is -would you mind dropping one session per fortnight.’
Being compliant I agreed, reflexively crossing my fingers,if not my legs,that I would not lose any more.
Being compliant I agreed, reflexively crossing my fingers,if not my legs,that I would not lose any more.
I have been receiving acupuncture treatment and Chinese herbs. Sean, my eldest son, practices traditional Chinese medicine professionally and introduced me to a range of complementary therapies.His deft needling of my various points-a jab well done-brought me forward no end for which I am proudly grateful.
This porcupine bristles further, attending the acapuncture outpatients clinic at Balmain hospital. I advised one of the doctors Alex Yao to practice Voodoo Acupuncture. That way I wouldn’t actually have to attend. I’d just be shuffling along and...‘Oooohhhhhh, that's far,far better...’
I listened to hypnotherapy tapes and tell my body to heal. I command my toes to wiggle just like Uma Thurman’s character in the film “Kill Bill’. Maybe I too need Quentin Tarantino to shock and direct me to curl them. With Robert Evans in charge of production, of course.
Stretching on tenterhooks I push my limbs every which way but loose , ad nauseam, to relax, elongate these muscles,screaming for relief, and help their elasticity. It will be a long stretch. While I’m aware there’s no silver bullet in reaching my target, manipulative soft tissue therapy has to be my best shot. I respond well to assistance in stretching and massage, getting immediate and visible relief and some ease in walking. However this hands-on answer to pain relief is the one most overlooked, even though Hippocrates documented the medical benefits of massage- ‘friction’- over two thousand years ago. It’s as open and shut a case as a foldup massage table . I myself applied it in soothing the savage breast of one my students,John Altomare,at Concord High School.With the approval of his parents and in front of the class, I eased the heebie jeebies of this hyperactive boy,prone to throwing his weight around, by working on his back. Susan Sarandon’s “Icebound’doctor knew this when treating migraine.But being time consuming and labour intensive it’s easily dismissed in orthodox practice as an indulgence .Such treatment costs an arm and a leg privately and doesn’t get considered in the public health system. I have had highly trained angels of the ward at my beck and call to give me a leg up moving or getting me pills, access to the best educated doctors to prescribe any drug on tap---but not to anyone who could assuage my pain through the laying on of hands. Not to any therapist versed in tactile techniques, able to work through the knots and out of tune muscles. I had to hand it to the The Red Cross though, one of their hospital services vindicated my feelings on this matter.One of their lady volunteers visited the hospital on one occasion to massage needy hands.A drop in the ocean blue but a pointer in the right direction.When I broached this subject ripe for discussion with Daniella,one of the Hospital therapists,she pointed out that if they offered the use of touch as a service,there would be a queue lined around the block.Can you imagine- public hospitals as palliative centres where people could come to have their pain relieved without drugs?Now where’s the rub?
I can get a rebate for certain ancillary services such as osteopathy which I’ve found most helpful,but they’re still prohibitively expensive. I can massage myself to a certain extent and have achieved greater flexibility, but it’s never as penetrating as by others. I need to be kneaded.
I can get a rebate for certain ancillary services such as osteopathy which I’ve found most helpful,but they’re still prohibitively expensive. I can massage myself to a certain extent and have achieved greater flexibility, but it’s never as penetrating as by others. I need to be kneaded.
'Now I find I've changed my mind and opened up the doors. Help me if you can, I'm feeling down And I do appreciate you being round.
Help me, get my feet back on the ground, Won't you please, please help me?
And now my life has changed in oh so many ways, My independence seems to vanish in the haze. But every now and then I feel so insecure, I know that I just need you like I've never done before.'
Beatles- 'Help'
Never one of my favourite Beatle’s tracks it’s feeling of insecurity felt incongruous with my self image of confidence. Now the protective shell I built around my emotions has been cracked,I can like John express my dependence on others with a stinging honesty I couldn’t before.I could go so far as to say that Someday My Prince Will Come.In his album my brother Miles expressed this wish unabashedly,so why can’t I? Unlike George Costanza, fearful of male therapists,I have no shadow of a doubt about my orientation. Since the stroke I have felt like a damsel in distress waiting for a prince with strong hands to appear and ease my pain. I feel with consistent muscular therapy,not as a substitute for exercise but as a spur,my progress can be accelerated. It came to my notice in time that such a man, a prince of healing had operated in this city , using his magic hands to alleviate the pain of a legion of sufferers ,and what’s more had got some hopeless cases up on their feet and walking. Alas I read about this former boxer turned muscular therapist in the obituary section of The Sydney Morning Herald. His wife described him as having had a heart of gold. While his clientele had included Australia’s richest man and his hands had ranged over very soft silky tissue like Kylie Minogue’s to the armour plating of Mike Tyson,he never charged people who had no money.Keeping in mind that this might be yet another urban myth I contacted Peter Bartlett,the writer of the death notice,who assured me it wasn’t,having known John Guttenbeil For thirty years.Unfortunately,according to his family his sleight of hand weren’t passed on.
His possible successor materialized in the form of my son Phillip who is studying physiotherapy.He knows how to apply simple,proper and precise techniques. With strong hands and a healing heart he has agreed to help panelbeat my buckled frame,to help bend the bars that trammel me.To help me shake loose.This is a big ask. However nothing ventured nothing gained.Some say ‘Break a leg!’.I say’Wake a leg!’
Of course it could well be that a princess might do such a trick.One line of thought amongst therapists is that overly firm pressure to the muscles can reduce the flow of blood to them rather than sluicing them with their lifeboosting properties.Horses for courses.Only practice can tell.I must say my vessels dilated studying ‘Manual of Love’[Part 2].Not so much by the sight of the physiotherapist Lucia, played by Monica Belluci applying the healing therapy recommended by Dr.Marvin Gaye to the paralysed survivor of a car crash,as by that of another jumbo sized snack attacked colleague informing him that she had been assigned to his out-patient treatment-including massage.turning his nose up at her, comparing her to our jumbo sized cetacean cousins,it seemed to me this guy had more than stars in his eyes.More like rocks in his head. It ain't over till the fat lady does her things . This lady and a half looked like she could do a whale of a job relieving my aches and my mind.As looked Jerry Seinfeld’s squeeze ,Jody to him,when his strained neck felt as if someone was behind pulling on wires.A professional masseuse,Jody quashed Jerry’s desperate advances to her, hinting that she massage this highly stressed joint.In response she made it plain she just wanted a straightforward sexual relationship ,no wires attatched.
Sometimes I wish I were in the hooves of those cattle that get fed beer and are regularly massaged to yield the Japanese their tenderest beef. They eat whales, don’t they? Maybe they’d fancy sinking their teeth into this lentil munching primate, someone lower on the food chain, provided they allow another thirty years for my flesh to improve in the necessary maturing process.
The Prognosis
Boy, you're gonna carry that weight
Carry that weight a long time. [ The Beatles]
How permanent is this impairment? Am I too far gone? How far can I pull through and mend? Will I be back in full action? Can I bring about a step change?What is my expected life’s new time frame? Can the brain cells banged up during a bleed regenerate themselves? Can new neural pathways be established? How plastic is the brain? This all depends on which part of the nerve centre is affected and on the severity of the stroke.In the light of mine,my general practitioner calls me The Miracle Man.
When he put his
stethoscope on my chest,I asked him, ‘Doctor,how do I stand?’
He replied,
‘that’s what amazes me.’
The medical specialists tend to give less optimism than the paramedical workers who back them up. I ask myself constantly whether I can ever border on normality again through exercise and nutrition. I hear stories of people who have amazing recoveries but I suspect their condition is less severe. The survivors I have befriended with similar effects to mine don’t express much improvement. But I’m not ruling out further miracles. Like that of Forrest Gump who throws off his leg brace and starts running. Or that of Dr Strangelove who gets out of his wheelchair to announce “Mein Führer! I can walk’.
Feet don’t fail me now.
This is not my first bash at rehab.You might say I’m a double adaptor.I don’t much take to death. I was in the wars in 1974 after receiving electric shock and diddling death for the first time. I received grafts on my fingers and was hospitalized for some weeks. The difference with that was that after the burns this live-wire healed with time and bounced back unflappably. After a stroke like mine, recovery usually tapers off after the first months. It is an agonizingly slow road to recovery and you don’t know if you will improve much more. Other stroke sufferers with effects similar to mine express the same plateauing of progress. In spite of this ultimately I have no choice but to take it on the chin and come out swinging because if I don’t I’m guaranteed to degenerate. I must avoid the avoidance of using my impaired limbs that behaviour called learned non-use . As they say, ‘use it or lose it!’I will avoid keening like that of Peter Griffin,staggering along the road,bowed down by his dead weight:’I hate being so strokey.If there was only some way I could be like everyone else again’.
There’s no point in this.If I go downhill,deeper into vegetative meltdown, it won’t be from lack of trying or holding onto hope.How could I? With my muse and musos like Kate Bush in my catercorner urging me constantly ‘Don’t Give Up’.As the going gets tough,I’ll just stare despair in the face with my brave grin,bear up and push it aside. And if I cry out, I'm gonna push it, push it, push it some more.I’ll just pick myself up, dust myself off and start all over again. A forced march of the mind.Miles and miles and miles of heart.Phew!
There’s no point in this.If I go downhill,deeper into vegetative meltdown, it won’t be from lack of trying or holding onto hope.How could I? With my muse and musos like Kate Bush in my catercorner urging me constantly ‘Don’t Give Up’.As the going gets tough,I’ll just stare despair in the face with my brave grin,bear up and push it aside. And if I cry out, I'm gonna push it, push it, push it some more.I’ll just pick myself up, dust myself off and start all over again. A forced march of the mind.Miles and miles and miles of heart.Phew!
Life is indeed a miracle.It leaves the alternative for dead.Better to be stiff than to be a stiff.Better to make groans than to be bones.Better to be ‘over the hill’ than under it.
I’ll survive even if it kills me.Survival is the prime command, the first thing that we are always commanded to look upon as the be-all and end-all of what we’re about. You can break all the laws as long as you can save lives. And if you don’t save lives, it’s not worth staying alive for. You know, this may be very naive, and it makes
me sound like a do-gooder. I am not only a do-gooder, I am also a pragmatist. I know that it takes a lot of hard work to do the right thing and to believe in the right thing and to defend what you believe in. But that’s what I do, and that’s what I’ve been doing all my life. And I’ve got to keep doing it until I no longer can.
I suffer from a certain angst, but I’m not making a life's work of it.
Hope springing eternal, I have to draw upon- without platitudes- the most profound lesson I have learned from it-- the resilience of the human spirit in extremis.Best expressed simply by Charlie who wrote this evergreen.
Smile, though your heart is aching,
Smile, even though it's breaking.
When there are clouds in the sky-
You'll get by.
If you smile through your fear and sorrow,
Smile and maybe tomorrow
You'll see the sun come shining through
For you.
Light up your face with gladness,
Hide ev'ry trace of sadness.
Although a tear may be ever so near,
That's the time you must keep on trying,
Smile, what's the use of crying?You'll find that life is still worthwhile,
If you just smile.
Intimacy with death carries with it a corresponding new intimacy with life. You drink in the passing moment the colours of trees, fragments of conversation, and yes, the bite of a decent beer.
Jokes are funnier, green is greener,songs sound sweeter. In such circumstances you can't help but love. You love the miracle of your own enduring capacity for love. You love your family, the crickets chirruping outside, falafels on the stove, your pulse, your future -- everything that might be lost or never come to be.
I wake many times in the deep silence of the night, filled with the realisation that, one day, I really will die. The thought - recognised and held in my imagination for a fleeting moment - fills me with fear: I will cease to exist. Then the sun comes up, I step out of bed into the light and the bustling music of living - my family chatter, traffic, birds, the boiling kettle - and the knowledge is again suppressed. That we find it impossible to hold on to the fact of our own effacement is not abnormal; it is natural. It may even be what enables us to have a life.
It is difficult for us to think about our own death, except as a kind of puppet show, with ourselves watching as a spectator. To fear and abhor it is rational. We only die once; there's no scope to practise: it is the abyss. Recommendations that we accept death, bring it into life, see it as natural, discuss it openly and frequently, are easily uttered platitudes that ignore what it is to be human. In some ways, they, too, are a denial: of the enormity of death.
Reach for the Sky.
‘Lean on me, when you're not strong
And I'll be your friend
I'll help you carry on
For ,it won't be long
'Til I'm gonna need
Somebody to lean on.’
[song by Bill Withers]
I have always found inspiration from the struggle of others through the trials and tribulations of life. Now I look for the solace that comes from this – for comfort from distress. It is with greater urgency that I now consider how people get through afflictions that are hard to bear. My own father, a former air force crewman, incurred terrible leg injuries when his car veered off the road and down an embankment after a black out. His recovery, assisted by good ex-serviceman’s support, was arduous and protracted. Whether I take after him I can not so safely say. Totally and permanently incapacitated physically , he busied himself in local government politics and playing real life monopoly with some capital from his own fathers estate, he invested in a string of rental properties. This took his mind off his pain.
A fine swag of veterans returning from World War II – including my uncles-in-law, instilled in me the importance of putting up a good fight. It was Leonard Cheshire the former ace pilot who put to me the proposition that nothing is worthwhile without a struggle.
While I can think of lots of things that would be worthwhile without one, for many nothing comes without having to shoulder some heavy burdens.And that’s no lie.
Leonard flew over 100 bombing missions over Europe during World War II. Hitting the mark,his valiant operations were the result of careful planning, brilliant execution, and supreme contempt for danger.With enemy fighters flashing in, machine-guns shattering in violent flurries, explosions of flak flying over the targets,his Mustang plane would shudder as he dropped his deadly cargo.
He developed new low-level techniques that dramatically increased bombing accuracy. One occasion he flew his kite above a target obscured by clouds using a slow figure of 8 to act a guiding mark for the squadron. He demonstrated how in fighting you have to be totally focused and committed.
He observed the atomic destruction of Nagasaki. Watching the mushroom cloud affected him deeply. He later wrote: “At the moment I first saw it, it was like a ball of fire 3,000 feet high … a churning boiling bubbling cloud getting large and larger. I think if there was a first impression that I had, it was that you cannot fight this weapon. If you enemy has the weapon then you cannot fight it….”
He later wrote: “Not even the enormity of the spectacle nor the certain knowledge that the war against Japan was over was enough to obliterate the horror at so vast an extermination”.
The measure of this man is that after the war, he devoted himself not to a life of greater personal comfort or indulgence, but to helping the disabled.
He applied the same gallantry and determination he displayed earlier—and straight shooting about his regrettably destructive role in total war for which fascism had left no alternative- to bring about greater understanding of the disabled, and to set up an international organization to serve us.In his finest hours he worked to bring us dignity and self respect, and to remind people of the consideration that ‘there for the grace of God go I’.
He said “As I reflect on the years I have so far spent among disabled people, I see them as men and women who are in the forefront of our common struggle, just as in different ways were those amongst whom I served during the war. I find unique the example they set to rise above adversity, of how to forget what might have been and concentrate on making the most of what is left. I find we need that example if we are to stop taking so much for granted our good health and our many other blessings, and if we are to stop taking so seriously the little setbacks and the minor irritations of daily life”.
Leonard’s world was ultimately thrown into a tailspin, his body sabotaged by gremlins when he contracted motor neuron disease, many of the symptoms of which – such as paralysis – are similar to those of stroke survivors. This fighting angel appreciated my good wishes to him. A convert to Catholicism in which Christ’s suffering and austerity is a prominent theme, he endured his own tribulation with great spiritual fortitude. Roger Waters from the band Pink Floyd described him as ‘the only true Christian I’ve ever met!’
Leonard asked Roger to help him raise money for his Memorial Fund for Disaster Relief. Roger agreed and on July 21, 1990 staged a massive performance of the album ‘The Wall’ near the remains of the Berlin Wall.
Everyone should be inspired by the eloquent words coming from the pen of this man among men:
“We need a vision, a dream. The vision should be the oneness, the essential and organic solidarity of the human family. The dream, that we each in our own way make our personal contribution towards building unity and peace among us”. Leonard Cheshire from his book - The Hidden World.
Imbued with the same fighting spirit if not religious conviction was Burt Lancaster, the topflight actor who had sent me his warmest regards.
I had wished him good health, It nosedived when he had his stroke with similar effect aged 76. The
prognosis wasn’t good but Burt leavened his sensitivity with his gamely set jaw, that street wise toughness, he had brought to his solid dramatic roles. He had grown up in those streets of urban USA where nobody gives you the time of day.Where something is happening all the time,mostly unsolved.
He was amongst other things a former circus acrobat. He had played this daredevil role in the film ‘Trapeze’. One of his demands when on location was to have a high bar set up so he could perform acrobatics and stay fighting fit.Allez oop, he wasn’t about to waste away in bed. He had both physical and speech therapy four or five days a week, his wife Susie said “because he wanted to get better and work. He was strong inside and out”. Director Sydney Pollack’s reflection on his visits to Burt after this, best sums up the actors fierce spirit: “The last time I left him, he doubled up his fist like a fighter’s. Then he shook his fist as if to say “I’m going to beat this.It was a heart attack in 1994 Burt would die from aged 80. He had had a quadruple bypass surgery in 1983 so his later years were an ongoing battle. I’m confronting mine with the same attitude and have the advantage of being younger than Burt without his foregone heart trouble. It’s a knife-edge high wire act keeping all of my six feet above the ground but I won’t go down the slippery slope without a fight.I’ll do my level best to stay in one piece.’
prognosis wasn’t good but Burt leavened his sensitivity with his gamely set jaw, that street wise toughness, he had brought to his solid dramatic roles. He had grown up in those streets of urban USA where nobody gives you the time of day.Where something is happening all the time,mostly unsolved.
He was amongst other things a former circus acrobat. He had played this daredevil role in the film ‘Trapeze’. One of his demands when on location was to have a high bar set up so he could perform acrobatics and stay fighting fit.Allez oop, he wasn’t about to waste away in bed. He had both physical and speech therapy four or five days a week, his wife Susie said “because he wanted to get better and work. He was strong inside and out”. Director Sydney Pollack’s reflection on his visits to Burt after this, best sums up the actors fierce spirit: “The last time I left him, he doubled up his fist like a fighter’s. Then he shook his fist as if to say “I’m going to beat this.It was a heart attack in 1994 Burt would die from aged 80. He had had a quadruple bypass surgery in 1983 so his later years were an ongoing battle. I’m confronting mine with the same attitude and have the advantage of being younger than Burt without his foregone heart trouble. It’s a knife-edge high wire act keeping all of my six feet above the ground but I won’t go down the slippery slope without a fight.I’ll do my level best to stay in one piece.’
Stroke didn’t halt the comeback of Burt’s lifelong friend and co-star Kirk Douglas. He drew upon Burt’s example after a rocky start. In 1994 he made his first film since suffering his stroke four years earlier. Like me,feeling like one big palooka,he concluded’Why not finish off the job?’It’s a logical question to cross one’s mind. Kirk questioned how he could be an actor and not be able to talk?
Downcast,considering ending his life, he put his gun to his kisser and painfully knocked his teeth. Withdrawing the weapon he cracked up at his own dramatic gesture. Experiencing such relief vicariously helps us keep the black dog at bay.
I could weave all my loose ends into a noose. Thoughts of my transition have flashed through my mind when I make my way along the corridor leading to the gym at Balmain Hospital.There’s a break in the walled walkway where I could slide over the bannister go splat for a short cut to the mortuary. It’s the only place in my regime I know where I could wipeout so confidently.I wouldn’t be able to get down to put my head in the oven even if I wanted, and my distaste for sleeping pills, which would be my frontrunner choice for an exit strategy, is on record.All of these ways out,especially the higgledy piggledy one, would leave amongst those who have helped so much to put Humpty together again the wrong memory of me. The Human Stain.
Downcast,considering ending his life, he put his gun to his kisser and painfully knocked his teeth. Withdrawing the weapon he cracked up at his own dramatic gesture. Experiencing such relief vicariously helps us keep the black dog at bay.
I could weave all my loose ends into a noose. Thoughts of my transition have flashed through my mind when I make my way along the corridor leading to the gym at Balmain Hospital.There’s a break in the walled walkway where I could slide over the bannister go splat for a short cut to the mortuary. It’s the only place in my regime I know where I could wipeout so confidently.I wouldn’t be able to get down to put my head in the oven even if I wanted, and my distaste for sleeping pills, which would be my frontrunner choice for an exit strategy, is on record.All of these ways out,especially the higgledy piggledy one, would leave amongst those who have helped so much to put Humpty together again the wrong memory of me. The Human Stain.
We have to avoid these tipping points,when the balance of judgment of life over death swings the other way.Fortunately I’m nowhere near that state yet .Still got my lust for life-touch wood!
I probably could
never commit suicide even if my life depended on it.
If I ever do my favoured point of departure would be that of Remy,the diehard,unreconstructed socialist in the film ‘The Barbarian Invasions’. After enduring the bureaucratic absurdities of the run-down overstretched Quebecois public hospital system he rooted for so strenuously,this erstwhile philanderer riddled by terminal cancer finds final release in the embrace of his family and fast friends in the lakeside retreat he so loved,sent off with his one and only, first and final medically administered hit of heroin.I hope I never have to grapple with such a decision,never ‘surviving’ like Ariel Sharon.
We have to talk freely with family and friends about this,the weightiest of questions. This is the only way to shoot off our mouths.
Kirk’s film ‘Diamonds’ tells the story of an aging boxer who suffered a stroke but insists on going on a treasure hunt with his son and grandson. “This picture is part of me”, said Kirk whose stroke affected his ability to speak. “I think his biggest fear was that people would not understand him”, said the films producer Patricia T. Green. Kirk spoke of the rehabilitative property of working on the film: “Never give up”, he said. “Acting helped encourage me to keep working and improving my speech.Your brain can sort of atrophy. You have to use your brains and your muscles, and then I did a movie. I am working at my trade”.
As is Jean-Paul Belmondo, adored by fans as an athlete who did most of his own stunts in his action-packed films. Sharing some of Kirk’s post-stroke symptoms, he has stoically shed the image of the charming gangster and cocky seducer he played in films decades ago insisting on his last-‘A Man And His Dog.’- show him as the old, disabled man that he is now .
“It’s me,” he said of his new image, “without any special effects.”
Reportedly asked how old he felt,he replied, ‘I’m only as old as the woman I feel.’
To prove he hasn’t lost his old touch, he showed all cock a hoop he could pull off yet another cunning stunt. A 33-year-old, raven-haired, tanned Italian in hoop earrings and a low-cut strapless dress.
Ready, Willing and Disabled
A serious stroke in 1974 left the artist and photographer Cecil Beaton unable to use his right hand.I had wished him continuing success in his work for which he thanked me.
Nevertheless, whilst on holiday in Tangier he began to paint again, using his left hand. Some of his left handed paintings – were remarkably successful. When, in the spring of 1979 the Paris couture collections proclaimed a “return to elegance”, it was naturally to Cecil Beaton that French ‘Vogue ‘turned. With women such as Paloma Picasso and Princess Caroline of Monaco as his models, Beaton re-evoked the mood and style of his fashion photographs of the twenties and thirties.From his unique insider’s perch he had captured the widest range of images throughout the decades, portraying high society celebrities, including royalty, Hollywood stars and the black cabaret performers of Harlem.
He designed scenery and costumes for many ballets, operatic, theatrical and film productions including ‘Gigi’ and ‘My Fair Lady’. Cecil was happy that I derived pleasure from this work. He died in January 1980 three days after his seventy sixth birthday.
Caught out,belly up,holding no currency,frayed around the edges,I envy the economic leeway of talented people such as Burt and Cecil based on their past achievements. Unlike Burt I don’t have much of a safety net to cushion my fall. Unlike Cecil I am not one iota ‘well’ connected. I am hamstrung because of the nature of the work I have undertaken. In education I never produced great financial return, this profession having a large altruistic component.With this territory comes the chance to pursue loftier dreams--those of achieving social harmony and tolerance.. I ended spreading myself very widely over all academic areas as a result of teaching in NSW state schools.As a freelance educational troubleshooter,my raison d’etre, I created resources on an ambitious scale that satisfy a strong community need. But marketing these – difficult as it was working self employed and mobile – has proved impossible since I can’t manipulate my material or move my wares around and show them to people. This has put paid to my chances of being paid in the manner I had expected.Losing my competitive edge,my golden chances pass me by.Without the fruit at the end, I have ended up out on a limb. How to limber up?How to pull myself up by my bootstraps when I can hardly reach them?How to pack up my troubles when I can’t reach my old kit bag?How to wriggle out of this static sticky wicket without wiggle room?How to bow out gracefully when I can’t bow?
Write On.
'Happiness is beneficial for the body,but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.'
[Marcel Proust]
Having confronted hitherto unknown expectations, rejections, hopes and disillusionments,I have crossed abruptly over that thin line between adulthood and old age. And once over that threshold, nothing is like it was before.
I had travelled on the ‘live now,pay later’ scheme: ‘Adventure before dementia.’
I had enough money to last me the rest of my life... unless I had to buy something.
Now when it comes to buying meals outside ,the restaurateurs insist I pay upfront.
Caught short,flat busted,I had no nest egg set aside , all my earlier ones having been cracked in the one basket.The only thing I had set aside for a rainy day was my umbrella.
Racking my brain,what plan can Rip Van Winkle hatch up now after awakening? Conceding the extent of my injury,I have to adjust my sights one last time. Having lost totally the world of paper I lived and worked in,I now had to enter the completely new digital age. In future shock, feeling time and tide rocket past me, I’m determined,if I’m going through the wringer to squeeze out every last drop of life from this spent frame.In one last fling, I’m reliant on my only useful ability left.For the life of me,by a process of elimination, I can’t see further reprieve other than through good old time honoured story telling.
‘What’s your angle?’,you might ask.
‘It’s like this’ I reply. ‘To buy time.’
Just as as it did for Scheherazade, her life spared day by day by the sultan,hanging on her every word, eagerly anticipating more of her story.Unlike her,I can’t do this sitting cross legged.It buys time for me just as it did for the greatest Indonesian writer,Pramoedya,exiled for three thousand and one nights .A wonderful raconteur, he fought against cruelty, disease and creeping insanity by telling true stories to his fellow prisoners, stretching them a little bit to make them a bit more interesting for people.. It kept hope alive for him and them. As they listened,their heads tilted to one side, the prisoners momentarily forgot their fate. As it was—if ever so briefly -- for Jean-Dominique Bauby who pinned his hopes on his short bestselling book ‘The Diving Bell and The Butterfly ‘forming the basis of the astounding movie of the same name. . Unlike Isaac Asimov who said he’d type faster if he had only six months to live, J.D. couldn’t type, even if his life depended on it.His massive stroke left him unable to move anything but his left eye. Making a virtue of necessity,he dictated the story by blinking while a secretary ran through the alphabet.Immensely inspired by Jean—Dominique, I’m aiming for a one hit wonder like his – hopefully pre-humously --rather than post.A case of publish and/or perish.. I can blink both severely stinging, astigmatic,cataracted eyes, stagger to the computer and,hunting and pecking singlehandedly cobble together a long story. It’s shift work.
If I had nine of my fingers missing, I wouldn’t type any slower.
If I had nine of my fingers missing, I wouldn’t type any slower.
Words are the only things I’ve got going for me. I put it to you that if,bolstered by a way with them, a nifty turn of phrase and some running gags, imagine the kind of runaway success I can expect to
chalk up.Not to mention silk dressing gowns and interviews
by appointment.Of course Jean-Dominique’s coinage as an editor in the publishing industry held him in good stead.Then again I am under the auspices of a good woman - Leonor, who encouraged me to write as a therapy, as an outlet for my feelings and ideas.
My mind still concentrated if not wonderfully, with a new slant on things,I have to take advantage of my condition,take stock of myself, assess and appreciate my life,come from nowhere and peak immediately as did ultimately Alan Sillitoe with his first novel.Slow and unsteady wins the race. Alan took up writing while recuperating from a debilitating bout of tuberculosis when serving with the RAF in Malaya which left him not up to much for anything else apart from writing. Alan wished me the best of luck.Having lived to tell my taut tale, I need it now more than ever.Hopefully some of his well turned invention and skill –his lifeforce- rub off on me. I already have the trappings of a tortured yet dogged reclusive writer in his elegaic anecdotage, holed up in my book sanctuary, crammed with books at the outset.A ghost writer in residence if you may, writing from within,drawing on his many experiences,the highs and the lows-the flickering candle. A belated baleen writer ,trawling back through the years, I’m totally wired. That antenna is always out there. Filtering out words from the air and the slick glowing sheen of my mainstay screens, I listen and read for ideas and experiences that correspond to mine,for language that best expresses it,and reject that which doesn’t. A could-be reaching for a star,or at least a has-been, better than a might- have- been by far,for a might-have been has never been,I tease out their meaning and plough in my predigested education mish-mash. Down the hatch to dissect,blend and digest fully this eclectic hotch potch.
Reconstituting the lot,jogging my trace memories,triggering a kaleidoscope of flashbacks.Piecing together my condensed reminiscences of both high points and seemingly mundane moments. Blending high and low politics with accounts of the ebb and flow of everyday life, of friends, relatives, aches and pains, chance encounters, street life and the weather.
Containing something unknown yet familiar,finding the extra in the ordinary, revealing to people things they knew but did not know they knew. In the spirit of the truth, fleshing out the bare bones of my tale,grafting elements of various genres, laced liberally with references reverential:
I'll send an SOS to the world
I hope that someone gets my
Message in a bottle.’
The Police
and otherwise..
Plugged in,reconstructing my course in life,I’ve become aware how frail and distorting memory can be. Memory can be a tricky thing because, after a few years, the mind can mentally conflate one’s own footage with that cranked out by those behind the cameras, merge two incidents into a better story.Like rebuilding an ancient ruin ,the result can be aesthetically becoming but not dead-on. When checking clear impressions against actual writings and photographs,I have found some long-treasured images in my magpie mind quite different from the facts. Who wouldn’t scratch their head trying to remember exactly what they and others spoke a half century earlier?
We do see our lives as a story.It’s something instinctual,something human.Of course,its not true. Life is not like a story.It’s full of unresolved mysteries, many loose ends and lack of closure.However we perceive it as a story and construct it as one.When we remember the past we change it unconsciously,we manipulate it.Between the literary and the literal,biography is an invention .Life does not have that pattern but we need a pattern.
Bearing this this in mind,keep in mind that this is a story based on my life and times. Stone by stone, bone by bone,very close to the reality in parts- some memories are fixed absolutely in time – and others are fleshed out more loosely, embroidered in various degrees for dramatic and comedic purposes . These and these only are the liberties I have taken.No names have been changed .The dialogue and actions are aimed at being at genuine to the characters.
While nobody can challenge it’s veracity,it’s a story to which I’m very much indebted to others too numerous to cite-others whose lives have paralleled mine in parts, whose writings I have drawn upon and sampled liberally because of my handicap.Their footprints are all over my story.We share respective collective pasts and terrifying current national states of affair.In some cases I cannot know the difference from their contributions and mine and could never excise them even if I wanted .This is not an academic exercise,nor one in which I seek self-aggrandisement,nor to steal anyone else’s thunder.It is a story of survival. If I’m to be judged,it’s as a teacher manqué, from a system you’ll know from the horse and dray.
This is an epic, not in the familiar swords-and-sandals sense of Ben Hur, but in the classical, poetic sense of the term.It relates to a tale in which the main character undertakes a journey, faces diverse situations and characters; and, learning from his experiences, achieves a new worldview and comes to some moral revelation along the way.
We do see our lives as a story.It’s something instinctual,something human.Of course,its not true. Life is not like a story.It’s full of unresolved mysteries, many loose ends and lack of closure.However we perceive it as a story and construct it as one.When we remember the past we change it unconsciously,we manipulate it.Between the literary and the literal,biography is an invention .Life does not have that pattern but we need a pattern.
Bearing this this in mind,keep in mind that this is a story based on my life and times. Stone by stone, bone by bone,very close to the reality in parts- some memories are fixed absolutely in time – and others are fleshed out more loosely, embroidered in various degrees for dramatic and comedic purposes . These and these only are the liberties I have taken.No names have been changed .The dialogue and actions are aimed at being at genuine to the characters.
While nobody can challenge it’s veracity,it’s a story to which I’m very much indebted to others too numerous to cite-others whose lives have paralleled mine in parts, whose writings I have drawn upon and sampled liberally because of my handicap.Their footprints are all over my story.We share respective collective pasts and terrifying current national states of affair.In some cases I cannot know the difference from their contributions and mine and could never excise them even if I wanted .This is not an academic exercise,nor one in which I seek self-aggrandisement,nor to steal anyone else’s thunder.It is a story of survival. If I’m to be judged,it’s as a teacher manqué, from a system you’ll know from the horse and dray.
This is an epic, not in the familiar swords-and-sandals sense of Ben Hur, but in the classical, poetic sense of the term.It relates to a tale in which the main character undertakes a journey, faces diverse situations and characters; and, learning from his experiences, achieves a new worldview and comes to some moral revelation along the way.
It is realist according to the Brechtian directive: ‘Realism is not a matter of showing real things,but of showing how things really are.’
Now for this literary late bloomer, johnny-come-lately catcher in the wry to come up with the goods, painting my way out of this corner with a vast spellbinding canvas of varied texture,laid out in broad
strokes.A portrait of the short period of my existence,shots and slices evoking an acute sense of time and space, uncoiling the narrative spring, with oodles of oomph and a fresh spin.
A worthwhile convincing saga,not just another overripe one that’s been done to death already. Rising above the pedestrian, standing on it’s own, lots of kick,abuzz with words leaping from the text.A weighty pageturning yarn leavened with displays of ironic wit,erudition, painterly precision and engaging punchy,snappy badinage that doesn’t fall flat.Making you want to read fast so you can find out what will happen and making you want to go slow so as to relish the writing. One that finds the balance between tension and humor.As ripping and involving as that of Robert Evans,who, floored by his stroke,assured his company ‘There’s never a dull moment around here.’ .
strokes.A portrait of the short period of my existence,shots and slices evoking an acute sense of time and space, uncoiling the narrative spring, with oodles of oomph and a fresh spin.
A worthwhile convincing saga,not just another overripe one that’s been done to death already. Rising above the pedestrian, standing on it’s own, lots of kick,abuzz with words leaping from the text.A weighty pageturning yarn leavened with displays of ironic wit,erudition, painterly precision and engaging punchy,snappy badinage that doesn’t fall flat.Making you want to read fast so you can find out what will happen and making you want to go slow so as to relish the writing. One that finds the balance between tension and humor.As ripping and involving as that of Robert Evans,who, floored by his stroke,assured his company ‘There’s never a dull moment around here.’ .
Touching the Right Chord
Courage is to look for
truth, and to speak it out. Courage is understanding one’s own life, deepening
it, making it more precise and grounded, while synchronising it with life
at large. Courage is moving towards the ideal while understanding the real.
Jean Jaures
Having thus far aroused,drawn you in and held your interest in such banal horror and pep talk, I, this shadow, now invite you to look on as I put myself back in my former self.On my changing fortunes in this unfolding saga leading to my folding up.From go to woe,from ‘goo’ to ‘whoa’,from Baby Boom to Bust- and Beyond- in a stream of consciousness embracing intimately observed events all in a flow.
To make a long story short, I trace back the course of my wondrous odyssey and the pivotal events thereof. The tracks I,Metaphor Man, went along: the beaten, the less trodden, the side one I was driven into and that which I stopped dead in. The trails I followed blazed by a host of luminaries: around the antipodes and in between, through the mill,the big end of town and the barricaded neighborhoods; over burning bridges, over thin ice, past the writing on the wall. The waters flowing on my way: the smooth and the troubled, the deep and the back, those under the bridge, and those I cast bread upon. Going overboard for love, missing the bourgeois boat, paddling my own canoe, swimming against the tide, being sold down the rivers,crossing the Rubicon, ending up the proverbial creek, stranded high and dry.
I am focusing on this activity with the same assiduity as Jacob Wepfer, who wrote about the brains he picked at the University of Padua in the 17th Century. While dissecting corpses there in the morgue he linked the mystery of stroke to the observable disruption to the blood supply.
I am focusing on the meaningful events and people in my life and how I came to be involved with these. Players in the front seat through whose eyes I came to navigate the cultural and political roadmap of the 20th Century, a period that has passed forever.Bit players and backroom boys, those working behind the scenes with whom I had dealings.The good,the bad and the beautiful. Sharing with me events, stories, hopes, and fears about our lives, marriages, and children. Steering me clear of the many obstacles in life’s course.Or setting them up.In literary cameos,identities whose lives interweave seamlessly with each other and mine, both fleetingly and deeply, to form an intricate social fabric. By picking their brains and relating their experiences to my own and to each others, I absorbed and processed their ideas.Acting as signposts, theirs’ informed my own . Unless I indicate otherwise; the ideas registered in these bumper pages are ones I am in agreement with.I experienced imaginatively what this cast of memorable characters had gone through. Success. Failure. Loyalty. Betrayal. Pain. Pleasure. Full-blown war. Cold War. In particular the fear that was engendered in this protracted standoff. In my account I consider how this complex crippled relations between my country and others, between people in my country, especially teachers and others, and between members of my parental family.How it enabled Big Brother and Big Sister to selling me short-persona non grata- and renouncing me so peremptorily for my prescience,declining a battle of wits, settling for a high stakes drawn out withering double whammy Getting away with covering up matters of grave concern I raised, damming up my slow burning outrage,playing me like a grand piano, helping me lay the wallwork for the premature bloody breach. In this retrospective I aim to level with the reader, delving into the underlying forces affecting my outlook and and actions and those of others towards me.
The title for this book “In Letter and in Spirit”, has a double meaning.It takes account of both the snail mail variety of lively letter in longhand that features in my story and the expression itself. In the expression ‘Letter’ refers to the building blocks making up the words that spell out our responsibility as members of a specific social grouping or of society at large to carry out our required role. The expression refers to us not just going through the motions of fulfilling our role, doing it not perfunctorily, but rather with dedication and fervour.Doing it with our all- not merely because it’s the thing to do,but because we believe in it and want to.To the best of our ability. To the highest standard. Acting more than agreeably to the fitness of things. Paying more than lip service.Above and beyond the call of duty.Part of a greater plan.
In profiling myself, members of my generation and those of my parents’, I raise this as a matter for consideration.
The first person I remember hearing use it was none other than good ol’ George W. Bush, who stated that under his watch the U.S. was respecting the rights of its political prisoners according to the Geneva Conventions both in ‘spirit and letter’ (sic). Readers can judge for themselves the sincerity of his extra-ordinary rendition.
I want those who read what I write to appreciate it as did those with whom I corresponded. I want readers to appreciate it as have those who read the bluechip education material I compiled.A limited readership, it was part of a service directed to the widest range of abilities ,including semi-literates. Now with a product, I’m aiming to attract a narrower,but more global literary readership.For the older reader,the various episodes will be reminiscent of the past.For younger readers they will help to develop a greater understanding of the cultural heritage we all share. Now to get weaving!
Foremost amongst those who appreciated my writing to him was Andre Chamson.
He was Director General of French Archives and International President of the PEN, the writers association. I thanked this writer for his fight with republican partisans fighting Franco, and his highly decorated involvement in the French Resistance during the German occupation. All too aware of the Nazi and Vichy policy of ill-treating and isolating writers they considered subversive, he saw the writer as a socially committed person who strives for the highest ideals. I encouraged him through his association to lobby successfully for the freeing of political prisoners such as the Indonesian writer Pramoedya Aranta Toer-persecuted in the years after the Japanese occupation.
- Boom Boom Baby
- I was fortunate to grow up in the period after the Japanese military threat towards Australia had been halted.Nine months after one small after explosion ,I was one of millions come to replace those who had just died.When I was born I was so surprised about all this I didn't talk for a year and a half.
- Dad had served on Catalinas, twin-engined flying boats used extensively for patrol and rescue duties in the band of islands and peninsulas to our north. Now forming Malaysia,Indonesia and Papua New Guinea,this region came to be Canberra’s primary strategic concern after the war. The presence of my father (his head framed by the two biggest boys) and his comrades was welcomed by the locals in
Borneo.
He would tell me the story of the war and I was deeply marked by it.I felt particular compassion for people who had had bombs rained upon them.
Dad illustrated his account with his own photographs and those taken by Cecil Beaton to widen the scope. Beaton was officially employed by the British Ministry of information. He recorded the war at home and abroad,preserving moments that changed the face of the earth forever – the bomb damage on the streets of London and the night operations on RAF stations; injured children in hospital and
wounded men in the desert; WRNS officers in Greenwich and Gurkha snipers on the Western Front.
Raised on World War II, in which virtually everything I saw was heroic, I looked up to, was proud of and would aim to measure up to my father, W.B. Davis, number 61245, Australian Air Force, Roman Catholic as stated on his metal dog tag, my only lasting keepsake of him, along with these few photos.
It was a German song of all things ‘O Mein Papa’ that expressed my early feelings about him:
‘Oh my papa, to me he was so wonderful
Oh my papa, to me he was so good.
‘How do you put up with this,’I asked her.
‘It’s awful,I know, but with time you get used to it.’
I never could have.I had all the comforts of a decent home.Hers was the kind of poverty and destitution portrayed by Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo. The sight of my beloved nanny, one of
the true working poor, fossicking through such waste was one that became burned indelibly into my young brain.I became colour blind.
While her roots ran deep and straight, my scorched earth mother was not officially an Australian. The name of her tribe who lived in the area, the Kamilaroi (or Gamilaraay) means ‘having not’. The name of the town derives from their word for ‘place of white stones’.Rose told me where they were they used to be. A sizeable outcrop of white stone where the public school stands.
‘My people used them as tools.’said Rose. ‘For them,they were sacred.They put them in places where they were essential to survival.’
During construction the white stony outcrop was covered up – as were feelings for their loss. Her people hit rock bottom.They would not collect at the start. As they had come into the world,so they would go out.Every inch of the land that they could see,all that lay beneath it belonged to someone else.
There were no vestiges of tribal life to beckon Rose. For most her people were largely forgotten, except for local place names and tourist references. Strangers in their own country.A country with a a black history , whitewashed when the wagons were corraled.The legends illustrated with paintings,acted out with dance and accompanied by music- and going back longer than anyone else’s were not being told. Sacred songs and performance of ritual had strengthened survival. Rose’s mob had lived a nomadic existence around the Namoi River since time immemorial,when all our ancestors were in the Stone Age. True children of nature, they lived in harsh harmony with the environment,not overly tampering with the natural balance, their ecological footprint modest. Feeding voraciously during the all too rare rainy seasons, they built themselves up to survive the lean, skimpy years of drought.
In the dry months of the year,Rose told me, they built a yard of boughs and brambles at a river spot. Then at flood time they would go out in their canoes and,spotting a shoal of fish,drive them as one would a herd of cattle into the yard where they would be an easy target for their spears.
They believed they were given the sacred land in trust. Their society had no school but children were educated by elders of the group and developed their skills by taking part in the group’s activities. The elders had the ability to read the environment and know when shortage of food or water or some other life-giving force was imminent. They were a caring and sharing people.
The 1830s was the beginning of the end for their traditional life, achieved through what Don Bradman called uncompromisingly ‘murder’ and ‘plunder’ of their tribal lands by his forebears and mine. They would lose their sense of direction. The combination of land and culture had provided them with their “compass’ to life. They would lose access to common land as inexorably did the forebears of the poor white settlers. Most would feel that they had been sold down the river. These have-nots would rub shoulders on the fringe of society. Where they had scattered chips of stone used for making tools, now there were just chips on their shoulders. They were all litterlouts according to the stoniest of hearts.
My abhorrence at this degradation of one as worthy as Rose formed the basis of my lifelong identification with those living on the margin and my concern for the fundamental values of human life .
Both feet on the ground,developing developing both social and resourceful sides of my forbearing character, I engaged in enterprises reflecting these as my stock-in-trade. ‘Waste not,want not,Al.It’s a sin to waste food. In Asia they’re as hungry as the wolf felt when he met Red Hiding Hood, so finish what you’ve got,’Dad always told me at the table. Trundling around the town and environs with my billycart I scoured the scene for empty beer bottles. Fetching a penny each, recycled they would be filled with industrial fluids. With methylated spirits and turpentine these would often slosh down the same desperate glugging gullet as the original contents.
Another useful cargo was manure obligingly deposited on the roads by stockmens’ horses and in stables I cleared . Sprinkled on our strawberries a bushel and a peck – in the loam, naturellement- they made for big juicy fruit. Ever on my toes to the opportunity of combining pleasure with business, I stumbled upon a nice little earner, an offbeat financial sideline – selling the wool from dead sheep I came across. However this busy bee’s main job was working alongside my family. Open all hours, my parents had a general store,although customers could buy anything specific.I remember a local with a hearing problem come into the shop and ask, ‘May I have a bar of soap, please?"
‘Do you want it scented?’ I enquired .
‘No’,he replied. I’ll take it with me now’.'
In the old fashioned way, we dealt in groceries at first and later alcoholic liquor and all kinds of raw produce and fuel for the home and farm.. I helped serving people, keeping stock and helping hold the fort until I left school. My orderly approach for storing both objects and ideas was established here:
A place for everything and everything in its place.I made sure they stayed there til the right moment. What customers came in for was their business. With customers like B.O.Plenty what they he went out with was our business.
One day B.O. entered the store and said: ‘Ten gallons of red ned please.’ As well as bottles we a sold it in bulk straight from the cask.
‘Did you bring a container for this?’I asked.
‘You're speaking to it.’
As this retail trade became more self service based,we still had to inform customers about the products they were buying. One customer fronted up and said: 'I want to make a complaint - this vinegar's got lumps in it.'
I corrected him: 'Those are pickled onions.'
I got to know the area well as we delivered supplies to customers both in town and country. In a small town where everyone knows everyone, I got to meet lots of people from different backgrounds and picked up on the differences between the classes, the perceptions, the privileges, the taboos. The distinction between the classes seemed pretty clear to me-based on education,religion,accent,where they lived and how they . These were groups of people with a common relationship to the means of production,with a common consciousness of identity and a common interest in opposition to those of other classes. Watching them go about their business,I observed their different lifestyles keenly.The owners of the stores, salespeople, doctors,dentists,nurses,builders and clerical staff.The butchers,the baker,the undertaker. Wealthy squatters on their large properties, the old money social set at the top of the pile, centred on the town,with their balls,polo matches and picnic races. The farmhands who worked for them and the shearers who were contracted to clip the wool.
We were often the only visitors some cow and wheat cockies or farmers on the land saw the livelong
week. They greeted us with open arms,particularly in the summer. we could see them as we approached,waving their arms constantly. The great Australian salute to keep away the flies.
We went for weekend drives around the surrounding countryside.We never got bored. We engaged in guessing games as we travelled on long excursions. Unlike kids and parents so often today we played as kith and kin.
I paraphrased Father Peyton’s slogan, ‘The family that plays together stays together.’I replaced the r’ with a ‘l’.Now wouldn’t that have appealed to a Japanese speaker.
This was a community where work and friendships firmly interlocked.Tenderfoot me spent school breaks on the land, plenty of room to swing a rope, with our friends, the Roberts of Kelvin dabbling in bush skills,rolling up my shirtsleeves,putting my back into it, having a crack at everything.Lyle managed the property with his offsider brother Col, as spare as the bush itself,his quarry facedstubbled mush full of leathery old lines, all wrinkly,his hair as knotty as the jumbucks he drove. Col’s humble hut, where he batched was unconnected to electricity,lit by smoky oil lamps and discouragingly limp candles. . He would bring a battery into town to be charged so he could listen to the radio during the week.
‘Why do I need electricity? he reasoned. 'It's nothing more than organized lightning. I get plenty of that out here.’
The hut was without indoor plumbing. The cesspit was out at the backside.Pieces of newspaper hung on a nail for toiletary purposes. Washing was done in the outhouse- with a boiler, mangle, starch and blue bags.The wooden kitchen floor slanted left to right. He cooked on a coal stove and had no refrigerator, but somehow he made do, like the pioneers, fashioning his situation to his needs ,whether it be making a rough sawn table for the kitchen from a piece of unplanned timber, building a shelter in the scrub from bark and branches,or husbanding a fire when the leaves were damp.I had my own go at improvising. Col wondered why I was pulling on and off my pullover repeatedly and vigorously.
‘Static electricity’,I answered,producing that crackling sound, ‘to make things run more easily.’ I never could work out how to harness it for cooking.
The Roberts had one of the bovine ilk. One end was moo, the other, milk. The cow, had a lovely and tolerant nature, and would allow me to milk her. We often drank straight from her. Any left over was churned into butter.While ruminating on the origins of milking, the inevitable question was posed to me: ‘Who discovered we could get milk from cows, and what did he think he was doing at the time?
Col and Lyle worked very long hours. ‘Remember’,said Col, ‘the earlier we start the better.We work from from ‘can’t’ to ‘can’t.’
‘What times are they ?’
‘From ‘can’t see in the morning’ til ‘can’t see at night’.’
Sharing the hut gave me an insight into the backbreaking, dawn to dusk life of a weathered rough and ready farm labourer.Joining him ringbarking trees, clearing scrub for pasture land, mending fences, sinking a dam, rounding up the sheep and cattle. The rootinest, tootinest, shootinest, hootinest little sidekick around, singing ‘move 'em on, head 'em up, head 'em up, move 'em on,count 'em out, ride 'em in, ride 'em in, count 'em out’.Rattling my dags, I threw myself fully into this enterprise.Wrangling the herd towards the corral , we caught each pregnant ewe with a crash dive into the dust.
With little schooling, thrown on his own resources,Col’s childhood ended early when he had to shove off from home to grub and sweat for his keep. ‘I went a waltzing matilda everywhere, every day on rough,dusty bush tracks looking for work.Somedays there would be no work and the tramping would have been for nothing.Things were crook on the land. For every job, so many men.So many men no-one needed. Another day,another nothing. When I could I rode a horse. The same did duty between the shafts of a sulky when it came time to choof off. I was always without two shillings to rub together.But we always managed to find grub. We lived on rabbit stew.’
‘Boy oh boy,you’ve been a real battler,Col’,I said.
‘Bloody oath’he said. I’ve never turned a hair at a bit of hard yakka,’he skited,tall in the saddle .
‘ Don’t you feel cut off from life, here in the scrub?’ I asked Don’t you ever feel like a shag on a rock?’
‘No bloody fear,’he said,resisting the obvious play on my innocent words. ‘No one raises my hackles or bosses me around here . I like the peace and quiet where a man isn’t crowded.’
Wilderness, farmland, desert and country towns, the bush is a place where some people live and others never go. Even though most Australians were going to the surf and turf rather than the bush,It was the mateship and collectivist outlook forged through such isolated hardship which retains a transcendent place in the Australian ethos.
Then there was the commercial class who operated stores and businesses, and workers who provided the labour for them and for the coal mine and abattoir.Stifled by the permeating stench of ammonia from waste in the air,I watched the slaughtermen at work, herding cattle to their deaths, then stringing them up on a conveyor belt, cutting their throats, watching them bleed. Later throwing away their inner parts, a hard and horrible job.But for them above all a job which they could demonstrate their strength and value . I observed these workers engaged in their series of daily routines, in the striving and succeeding and failing that make up a life in which, because of poverty, there is little freedom of choice. The quiet nobility of their lives lived with values but without great opportunities.After knocking off work,there was just time to lay that bit of lino on the floor or work on the car before having a few middies and a game of two up at the back of the pub.
My knowledge of such hardworking people,parents of my mates, led me to the credo that work itself be elevated to a place of pride and esteem and, even if you happened to be in a lower paid or manual job, you were valued for the work you did which was necessary for the functioning of society. Never
touching it, my father made more boodle selling coal than the miners who, busting their gut,confronting cave-ins and the deadly black damp deep below the earth’s surface,dark as a dungeon,their lungs full of noxious phlegm,coal dust pitted in their skin, tore it out of the coalface. ‘Gas leaks,fire and water are our daily enemy’ said my friend Colin’s father.’It was while I was in my friend Andy Dall’s house one cold snap I learned about overproduction in the capitalist economy.Shivering he asked his father,lying on the couch, ‘Why is it so cold in the house?’
‘We don't have any coal’, he said,rugged up like the Michelin Man.
‘But why is there no coal?’, Andy wanted to know.
‘Because I got laid off for the rest of the month’, he replied.
Still unsatisfied, he asked one more time—‘And why did you get laid off?’
To which he answered, ‘Because there is too much coal.’
Of course,it wasn’t that there was too much coal.It was just that it was all in the hands of his employer, the company that owned it.
It was just the wisp of an idea at first.Then slowly but surely I came to the conclusion that workers, who produced the goods we needed,who built the town,the railway,ploughed the fields,without whom nothing can move,were the underlying motor and buttressing social stanchions of society and should be placed at the forefront .It was those who did heavy manual work, like miners or farm workers, the salt of the earth, who should enjoy certain privileges, better wages and health care than those in less strenuous or dangerous professions, like office work or managing-and above all those who made money off their backs by merely owning.
When these backs rested, their thrones were less than regal.I avoided using the outhouse toilets at the houses of some mates. Unconnected to the sewerage, such ‘thunderboxes" were not built over pits. Instead, waste was collected into large cans, or "dunny-cans", which were positioned under the toilet,
to be collected by contractors or "nightsoil collectors" hired by the local council. Collected waste matter would then be removed from the premises and disposed of elsewhere.
My inchoate political leanings grew into a deep commitment to overcoming the big chasm between those who have and those who don't.
There are two kinds of people.Those who divide the world into two kinds of people and those who don’t.I’ll leave it to you,the reader to work out which one I am.
Some of these business and working people were immigrants from The Old Dart and some were from Europe, the latest arrivals to wash ashore.The English were given a particular warm welcome.
They felt at home right away.
They kept their wits,not their nits.
the local language
And the native fauna.The friendly
And the not so friendly.
The newcomers were fitted to the jobs required.
Many were prepared to venture outside the city.
To take to the sky.
A long way from home.
Skilled, enterprising and happy to please, these ten pound poms and new australians fitted in quickly and were highly valued -more or less.
One bushy who made a packet gambling went to Europe on a holiday.When he returned,I asked him: ‘How did you find it? Would you live there?’
‘It was bonzer,Allan.Such a ripsnorting variety of landscapes-the Mediterranean, Black Forest,fjords and all those interesting old buildings.I even saw the dancers at the Bolshoi.’
‘What were these Russians like?’
‘You know what the most amazing thing about them was? They've two legs like everyone else.’
‘Would you live in Europe?’
‘You know there’s one thing I would find hard to hack about living there.’
‘And what’s that?I asked.
‘There’s too many New Australians.’he replied.‘But if I had to, I could live in Switzerland,though it’s very expensive.'
‘What would be the best part about living in Switzerland,that peaceful country whose greatest achievement is----the cuckoo clock!?? The chocolates,the mountains,the fresh air?’
‘I’m not sure, but the flag is a big plus.’
I became most inquiring about what people had to say and how they got to where they were.With an incipient searching point of view, I wanted to know everything about everything.
Oh my papa, to me he was so wonderful,
Deep in my heart I miss him so today.
I was much taken by the instrumental version of trumpeter Eddie Calvert. Like my father with me, it reached number one.
He bore no ill will towards the Japanese and the Germans. While proud to display his badge of service he didn’t wear his heart on his sleeve. He didn’t particularly like marching in the annual Anzac Day parades and the attendant boozing and gambling. He was aware that most people longed for peace. He wrote as seeing himself having largely influenced my ideas. He was always respectful to my mother.
My earliest distinct recollections were happy ones whiled away basking in the fond embrace of my family, filled with a sense of protective wellbeing. Tweedly tweedly tweedly dee. The essential advantages that life could bestow on me.
I was the apple of my father’s eyes. Mum thought the sun rose and set on me. From my very beginning,it was ‘darling Allan this,darling Allan that’ from her. From day one I received what would be a wealth of encouragement from others which continued throughout the passing years.These sentiments I would in turn pass on to others.
Like many families being started up at the end of the war, ours had been put on hold. As a baby boomer my childhood was played out against a most propitious period, the years of the long postwar boom which historians have come to call capitalism’s golden age. Throughout the Western world high rates of economic growth coincided with low inflation and negligible unemployment, favourable conditions for political compromise and “consensus.” If you were white and well off,it seemed like paradise. Fed by the spoils of victory,I was bred with the haste and dispatch and muscle flexing of a nation giving bridle to it’s own success and good fortune.
Getting back on their feet, my parent’s generation, emerging from this war, could hardly be called lost.The desparate shortage of virtually all goods and services triggered a situation where there were more jobs than people to fill them. As the postwar austerity measures were fading they saw fit to establish a business in a country town in northern New South Wales. After being demobbed,Dad had become an employee of Australia’s largest confectionery company based in Tamworth.Allen’s Sweets.How could I resist with such a name? Such sweet memories for me. Boiled sweets,bullseyes,all days suckers. Goody, goody gumdrops! Driving their bright red van around and distributing their products enabled him early in the peace to reccy the area and look out for the best prospects.
After giving it the once over,he decided upon Gunnedah, a prosperous town in the backblocks settled by squatters in the 1830s. They had followed in the tracks of the explorers,hewing a path with wagons and cattle,putting down their loads, claiming this rich soil and grazing land as their own. This common clay had lost every perch and rod of their own ancestral lands, their forebears having been forced off following the English enclosure acts. Initially unauthorised, they had the right of pasturage from the government on easy terms.
Stuffing all our belongings under a canvas stretched across our flat truck bed, westward we rolled to our new home.
Like many families being started up at the end of the war, ours had been put on hold. As a baby boomer my childhood was played out against a most propitious period, the years of the long postwar boom which historians have come to call capitalism’s golden age. Throughout the Western world high rates of economic growth coincided with low inflation and negligible unemployment, favourable conditions for political compromise and “consensus.” If you were white and well off,it seemed like paradise. Fed by the spoils of victory,I was bred with the haste and dispatch and muscle flexing of a nation giving bridle to it’s own success and good fortune.
Getting back on their feet, my parent’s generation, emerging from this war, could hardly be called lost.The desparate shortage of virtually all goods and services triggered a situation where there were more jobs than people to fill them. As the postwar austerity measures were fading they saw fit to establish a business in a country town in northern New South Wales. After being demobbed,Dad had become an employee of Australia’s largest confectionery company based in Tamworth.Allen’s Sweets.How could I resist with such a name? Such sweet memories for me. Boiled sweets,bullseyes,all days suckers. Goody, goody gumdrops! Driving their bright red van around and distributing their products enabled him early in the peace to reccy the area and look out for the best prospects.
After giving it the once over,he decided upon Gunnedah, a prosperous town in the backblocks settled by squatters in the 1830s. They had followed in the tracks of the explorers,hewing a path with wagons and cattle,putting down their loads, claiming this rich soil and grazing land as their own. This common clay had lost every perch and rod of their own ancestral lands, their forebears having been forced off following the English enclosure acts. Initially unauthorised, they had the right of pasturage from the government on easy terms.
Stuffing all our belongings under a canvas stretched across our flat truck bed, westward we rolled to our new home.
Stone Broke.
As a nipper in
Gunnedah I had an aboriginal nanny, Rose Watley
who lived in a hut at the edge of the town.It was a step up from a humpy,but oh the location! location! location! Without electricity, running water or proper drainage,it was at the edge of the local rubbish tip where refuse was burned off.
‘How long does the burning go on,’ I asked her.
‘The garbage is always glowing, even at night, and you hear popping sounds. I think it's batteries exploding.’
The dump was her shopping centre.It furnished her hut, made of timber, corrugated metal and old tarpaulins scavenged from the dump site. Surrounded by toxic smoke, this modern hunter gatherer picked over the garbage, careful not to step on rusty nails and broken glass, salvaging bottles, listening for the sound a prong makes when it finds a plastic container,searching the rot for glints of light-silver spoons,tin cans, pieces of machinery and whatever could be sold as scrap metal .These would all be recycled,an essential task.
Standing there watching cars and trucks trucks arrive and leave, I tried not to breathe in the stench of everyday household waste as it gently rotted. Around noon in summer as the hottest part of the day approached, the fumes and the smell of the dump circulated. A constant black writhe of flies covered every moist surface, forcing you to speak with clenched teeth. The smell was so strong that it got into your throat. You could taste the smell. Your eyes watered.
‘Every morning I wake up,’said Rose, stuffing lead pipe into a sack, ‘ my throat is burning and my chest is tight.I have difficulty breathing. I just have to wait until it goes away.’‘How long does the burning go on,’ I asked her.
‘The garbage is always glowing, even at night, and you hear popping sounds. I think it's batteries exploding.’
The dump was her shopping centre.It furnished her hut, made of timber, corrugated metal and old tarpaulins scavenged from the dump site. Surrounded by toxic smoke, this modern hunter gatherer picked over the garbage, careful not to step on rusty nails and broken glass, salvaging bottles, listening for the sound a prong makes when it finds a plastic container,searching the rot for glints of light-silver spoons,tin cans, pieces of machinery and whatever could be sold as scrap metal .These would all be recycled,an essential task.
Standing there watching cars and trucks trucks arrive and leave, I tried not to breathe in the stench of everyday household waste as it gently rotted. Around noon in summer as the hottest part of the day approached, the fumes and the smell of the dump circulated. A constant black writhe of flies covered every moist surface, forcing you to speak with clenched teeth. The smell was so strong that it got into your throat. You could taste the smell. Your eyes watered.
‘How do you put up with this,’I asked her.
‘It’s awful,I know, but with time you get used to it.’
I never could have.I had all the comforts of a decent home.Hers was the kind of poverty and destitution portrayed by Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo. The sight of my beloved nanny, one of
the true working poor, fossicking through such waste was one that became burned indelibly into my young brain.I became colour blind.
While her roots ran deep and straight, my scorched earth mother was not officially an Australian. The name of her tribe who lived in the area, the Kamilaroi (or Gamilaraay) means ‘having not’. The name of the town derives from their word for ‘place of white stones’.Rose told me where they were they used to be. A sizeable outcrop of white stone where the public school stands.
‘My people used them as tools.’said Rose. ‘For them,they were sacred.They put them in places where they were essential to survival.’
During construction the white stony outcrop was covered up – as were feelings for their loss. Her people hit rock bottom.They would not collect at the start. As they had come into the world,so they would go out.Every inch of the land that they could see,all that lay beneath it belonged to someone else.
There were no vestiges of tribal life to beckon Rose. For most her people were largely forgotten, except for local place names and tourist references. Strangers in their own country.A country with a a black history , whitewashed when the wagons were corraled.The legends illustrated with paintings,acted out with dance and accompanied by music- and going back longer than anyone else’s were not being told. Sacred songs and performance of ritual had strengthened survival. Rose’s mob had lived a nomadic existence around the Namoi River since time immemorial,when all our ancestors were in the Stone Age. True children of nature, they lived in harsh harmony with the environment,not overly tampering with the natural balance, their ecological footprint modest. Feeding voraciously during the all too rare rainy seasons, they built themselves up to survive the lean, skimpy years of drought.
In the dry months of the year,Rose told me, they built a yard of boughs and brambles at a river spot. Then at flood time they would go out in their canoes and,spotting a shoal of fish,drive them as one would a herd of cattle into the yard where they would be an easy target for their spears.
They believed they were given the sacred land in trust. Their society had no school but children were educated by elders of the group and developed their skills by taking part in the group’s activities. The elders had the ability to read the environment and know when shortage of food or water or some other life-giving force was imminent. They were a caring and sharing people.
The 1830s was the beginning of the end for their traditional life, achieved through what Don Bradman called uncompromisingly ‘murder’ and ‘plunder’ of their tribal lands by his forebears and mine. They would lose their sense of direction. The combination of land and culture had provided them with their “compass’ to life. They would lose access to common land as inexorably did the forebears of the poor white settlers. Most would feel that they had been sold down the river. These have-nots would rub shoulders on the fringe of society. Where they had scattered chips of stone used for making tools, now there were just chips on their shoulders. They were all litterlouts according to the stoniest of hearts.
My abhorrence at this degradation of one as worthy as Rose formed the basis of my lifelong identification with those living on the margin and my concern for the fundamental values of human life .
Are
You Being Served?
As a cheery chirpy lad, dry behind the ears, I took
pride in the buckled belt holding up my pants.Eventually my pants would have
belt loops holding up the belt.
What would be going on here? Who would be the real hero? Both feet on the ground,developing developing both social and resourceful sides of my forbearing character, I engaged in enterprises reflecting these as my stock-in-trade. ‘Waste not,want not,Al.It’s a sin to waste food. In Asia they’re as hungry as the wolf felt when he met Red Hiding Hood, so finish what you’ve got,’Dad always told me at the table. Trundling around the town and environs with my billycart I scoured the scene for empty beer bottles. Fetching a penny each, recycled they would be filled with industrial fluids. With methylated spirits and turpentine these would often slosh down the same desperate glugging gullet as the original contents.
Another useful cargo was manure obligingly deposited on the roads by stockmens’ horses and in stables I cleared . Sprinkled on our strawberries a bushel and a peck – in the loam, naturellement- they made for big juicy fruit. Ever on my toes to the opportunity of combining pleasure with business, I stumbled upon a nice little earner, an offbeat financial sideline – selling the wool from dead sheep I came across. However this busy bee’s main job was working alongside my family. Open all hours, my parents had a general store,although customers could buy anything specific.I remember a local with a hearing problem come into the shop and ask, ‘May I have a bar of soap, please?"
‘Do you want it scented?’ I enquired .
‘No’,he replied. I’ll take it with me now’.'
In the old fashioned way, we dealt in groceries at first and later alcoholic liquor and all kinds of raw produce and fuel for the home and farm.. I helped serving people, keeping stock and helping hold the fort until I left school. My orderly approach for storing both objects and ideas was established here:
A place for everything and everything in its place.I made sure they stayed there til the right moment. What customers came in for was their business. With customers like B.O.Plenty what they he went out with was our business.
One day B.O. entered the store and said: ‘Ten gallons of red ned please.’ As well as bottles we a sold it in bulk straight from the cask.
‘Did you bring a container for this?’I asked.
‘You're speaking to it.’
As this retail trade became more self service based,we still had to inform customers about the products they were buying. One customer fronted up and said: 'I want to make a complaint - this vinegar's got lumps in it.'
I corrected him: 'Those are pickled onions.'
I got to know the area well as we delivered supplies to customers both in town and country. In a small town where everyone knows everyone, I got to meet lots of people from different backgrounds and picked up on the differences between the classes, the perceptions, the privileges, the taboos. The distinction between the classes seemed pretty clear to me-based on education,religion,accent,where they lived and how they . These were groups of people with a common relationship to the means of production,with a common consciousness of identity and a common interest in opposition to those of other classes. Watching them go about their business,I observed their different lifestyles keenly.The owners of the stores, salespeople, doctors,dentists,nurses,builders and clerical staff.The butchers,the baker,the undertaker. Wealthy squatters on their large properties, the old money social set at the top of the pile, centred on the town,with their balls,polo matches and picnic races. The farmhands who worked for them and the shearers who were contracted to clip the wool.
We were often the only visitors some cow and wheat cockies or farmers on the land saw the livelong
week. They greeted us with open arms,particularly in the summer. we could see them as we approached,waving their arms constantly. The great Australian salute to keep away the flies.
We went for weekend drives around the surrounding countryside.We never got bored. We engaged in guessing games as we travelled on long excursions. Unlike kids and parents so often today we played as kith and kin.
I paraphrased Father Peyton’s slogan, ‘The family that plays together stays together.’I replaced the r’ with a ‘l’.Now wouldn’t that have appealed to a Japanese speaker.
This was a community where work and friendships firmly interlocked.Tenderfoot me spent school breaks on the land, plenty of room to swing a rope, with our friends, the Roberts of Kelvin dabbling in bush skills,rolling up my shirtsleeves,putting my back into it, having a crack at everything.Lyle managed the property with his offsider brother Col, as spare as the bush itself,his quarry facedstubbled mush full of leathery old lines, all wrinkly,his hair as knotty as the jumbucks he drove. Col’s humble hut, where he batched was unconnected to electricity,lit by smoky oil lamps and discouragingly limp candles. . He would bring a battery into town to be charged so he could listen to the radio during the week.
‘Why do I need electricity? he reasoned. 'It's nothing more than organized lightning. I get plenty of that out here.’
The hut was without indoor plumbing. The cesspit was out at the backside.Pieces of newspaper hung on a nail for toiletary purposes. Washing was done in the outhouse- with a boiler, mangle, starch and blue bags.The wooden kitchen floor slanted left to right. He cooked on a coal stove and had no refrigerator, but somehow he made do, like the pioneers, fashioning his situation to his needs ,whether it be making a rough sawn table for the kitchen from a piece of unplanned timber, building a shelter in the scrub from bark and branches,or husbanding a fire when the leaves were damp.I had my own go at improvising. Col wondered why I was pulling on and off my pullover repeatedly and vigorously.
‘Static electricity’,I answered,producing that crackling sound, ‘to make things run more easily.’ I never could work out how to harness it for cooking.
The Roberts had one of the bovine ilk. One end was moo, the other, milk. The cow, had a lovely and tolerant nature, and would allow me to milk her. We often drank straight from her. Any left over was churned into butter.While ruminating on the origins of milking, the inevitable question was posed to me: ‘Who discovered we could get milk from cows, and what did he think he was doing at the time?
Col and Lyle worked very long hours. ‘Remember’,said Col, ‘the earlier we start the better.We work from from ‘can’t’ to ‘can’t.’
‘What times are they ?’
‘From ‘can’t see in the morning’ til ‘can’t see at night’.’
Sharing the hut gave me an insight into the backbreaking, dawn to dusk life of a weathered rough and ready farm labourer.Joining him ringbarking trees, clearing scrub for pasture land, mending fences, sinking a dam, rounding up the sheep and cattle. The rootinest, tootinest, shootinest, hootinest little sidekick around, singing ‘move 'em on, head 'em up, head 'em up, move 'em on,count 'em out, ride 'em in, ride 'em in, count 'em out’.Rattling my dags, I threw myself fully into this enterprise.Wrangling the herd towards the corral , we caught each pregnant ewe with a crash dive into the dust.
With little schooling, thrown on his own resources,Col’s childhood ended early when he had to shove off from home to grub and sweat for his keep. ‘I went a waltzing matilda everywhere, every day on rough,dusty bush tracks looking for work.Somedays there would be no work and the tramping would have been for nothing.Things were crook on the land. For every job, so many men.So many men no-one needed. Another day,another nothing. When I could I rode a horse. The same did duty between the shafts of a sulky when it came time to choof off. I was always without two shillings to rub together.But we always managed to find grub. We lived on rabbit stew.’
‘Boy oh boy,you’ve been a real battler,Col’,I said.
‘Bloody oath’he said. I’ve never turned a hair at a bit of hard yakka,’he skited,tall in the saddle .
‘ Don’t you feel cut off from life, here in the scrub?’ I asked Don’t you ever feel like a shag on a rock?’
‘No bloody fear,’he said,resisting the obvious play on my innocent words. ‘No one raises my hackles or bosses me around here . I like the peace and quiet where a man isn’t crowded.’
Wilderness, farmland, desert and country towns, the bush is a place where some people live and others never go. Even though most Australians were going to the surf and turf rather than the bush,It was the mateship and collectivist outlook forged through such isolated hardship which retains a transcendent place in the Australian ethos.
Then there was the commercial class who operated stores and businesses, and workers who provided the labour for them and for the coal mine and abattoir.Stifled by the permeating stench of ammonia from waste in the air,I watched the slaughtermen at work, herding cattle to their deaths, then stringing them up on a conveyor belt, cutting their throats, watching them bleed. Later throwing away their inner parts, a hard and horrible job.But for them above all a job which they could demonstrate their strength and value . I observed these workers engaged in their series of daily routines, in the striving and succeeding and failing that make up a life in which, because of poverty, there is little freedom of choice. The quiet nobility of their lives lived with values but without great opportunities.After knocking off work,there was just time to lay that bit of lino on the floor or work on the car before having a few middies and a game of two up at the back of the pub.
My knowledge of such hardworking people,parents of my mates, led me to the credo that work itself be elevated to a place of pride and esteem and, even if you happened to be in a lower paid or manual job, you were valued for the work you did which was necessary for the functioning of society. Never
touching it, my father made more boodle selling coal than the miners who, busting their gut,confronting cave-ins and the deadly black damp deep below the earth’s surface,dark as a dungeon,their lungs full of noxious phlegm,coal dust pitted in their skin, tore it out of the coalface. ‘Gas leaks,fire and water are our daily enemy’ said my friend Colin’s father.’It was while I was in my friend Andy Dall’s house one cold snap I learned about overproduction in the capitalist economy.Shivering he asked his father,lying on the couch, ‘Why is it so cold in the house?’
‘We don't have any coal’, he said,rugged up like the Michelin Man.
‘But why is there no coal?’, Andy wanted to know.
‘Because I got laid off for the rest of the month’, he replied.
Still unsatisfied, he asked one more time—‘And why did you get laid off?’
To which he answered, ‘Because there is too much coal.’
Of course,it wasn’t that there was too much coal.It was just that it was all in the hands of his employer, the company that owned it.
It was just the wisp of an idea at first.Then slowly but surely I came to the conclusion that workers, who produced the goods we needed,who built the town,the railway,ploughed the fields,without whom nothing can move,were the underlying motor and buttressing social stanchions of society and should be placed at the forefront .It was those who did heavy manual work, like miners or farm workers, the salt of the earth, who should enjoy certain privileges, better wages and health care than those in less strenuous or dangerous professions, like office work or managing-and above all those who made money off their backs by merely owning.
When these backs rested, their thrones were less than regal.I avoided using the outhouse toilets at the houses of some mates. Unconnected to the sewerage, such ‘thunderboxes" were not built over pits. Instead, waste was collected into large cans, or "dunny-cans", which were positioned under the toilet,
to be collected by contractors or "nightsoil collectors" hired by the local council. Collected waste matter would then be removed from the premises and disposed of elsewhere.
My inchoate political leanings grew into a deep commitment to overcoming the big chasm between those who have and those who don't.
There are two kinds of people.Those who divide the world into two kinds of people and those who don’t.I’ll leave it to you,the reader to work out which one I am.
Some of these business and working people were immigrants from The Old Dart and some were from Europe, the latest arrivals to wash ashore.The English were given a particular warm welcome.
They kept their wits,not their nits.
They learned about the local culture,
And the native fauna.The friendly
And the not so friendly.
The newcomers were fitted to the jobs required.
Many were prepared to venture outside the city.
To take to the sky.
A long way from home.
Skilled, enterprising and happy to please, these ten pound poms and new australians fitted in quickly and were highly valued -more or less.
One bushy who made a packet gambling went to Europe on a holiday.When he returned,I asked him: ‘How did you find it? Would you live there?’
‘It was bonzer,Allan.Such a ripsnorting variety of landscapes-the Mediterranean, Black Forest,fjords and all those interesting old buildings.I even saw the dancers at the Bolshoi.’
‘What were these Russians like?’
‘You know what the most amazing thing about them was? They've two legs like everyone else.’
‘Would you live in Europe?’
‘You know there’s one thing I would find hard to hack about living there.’
‘And what’s that?I asked.
‘There’s too many New Australians.’he replied.‘But if I had to, I could live in Switzerland,though it’s very expensive.'
‘What would be the best part about living in Switzerland,that peaceful country whose greatest achievement is----the cuckoo clock!?? The chocolates,the mountains,the fresh air?’
‘I’m not sure, but the flag is a big plus.’
I became most inquiring about what people had to say and how they got to where they were.With an incipient searching point of view, I wanted to know everything about everything.
Articles of Faith
As you might have guessed, ours was a political household. From a tender age politics and history were food and drink to me.It was my grocer father who was the purveyor both of articles of sustenance and of faith.He doled them all out with care : ‘Here's a half a pound of reasons,’he told us, ‘and a quarter pound of sense, a small sprig of time and as much of prudence.’
My mother, his right hand woman, went along with whatever he dished up to all intents and purposes.
Items of knowledge about the tea, butter, flour, sugar, spices, tinned foods he trafficked in, were served up at the dinner table as a matter of course, as were the names of those responsible for producing and marketing them.My mother, his right hand woman, went along with whatever he dished up to all intents and purposes.
He told me a great tale about how marketing can work wonders in boosting sales.
‘You know how we sell much more red salmon than pink.’
‘Sure.Red has much more flavour.’
‘Well the advertising men turned this insurmountable handicap around into an overpowering advantage.Their client,a cannery stuck with a glut of less marketable pink salmon boldly labelled their product as "Guaranteed not to turn red in the can!’
I read the labels on various packaging to sharpen my own wits.
‘Dad, how a product could be labelled as ‘new and improved’ ? ‘If it’s new there has never been anything before it.If it’s an improvement there must have been something before it.’
Bandied about at our table were the names of the various companies, their workers, the politicians who represented them and what was at stake in their disputes. Coming up for discussion most often was the question of who was running the country, whether it be Ben Chifley, the leader of the Australian Labour Party, who had spoken of the Light on the Hill, or Robert Menzies, protector of imperial values, leader of the Liberal Party, which governed in coalition with the Country Party.
It was Menzies whose nodding acquaintance I made early in 1953-December 10 to be precise, Chifley, having been laid to rest. The formidable Ming as he was known dominated the Australian stage like no one ever has done. My father took his chip off the old block to witness his performance on his whistle stop visit to Gunnedah.On the black stump,he was coming to endorse the government candidates in an upcoming by-election. He could be guaranteed a good turnout in this part of the sticks, seeking assurance of its importance on its part. It wasn’t everyday that such a notable man of affairs dropped into the state’s northern wheat belt and while my father was from a different faith, he knew the good sense of hearing out disparate voices. After all this was the died-in –the wool
conservative heartland where his business interests required him to tread on eggs as well as sell them.
Waiting to file into the town hall, we were at the end of the long queue that reached the side entrance when the bestriding figure loomed up. Jumping jellybeans,there was no mistaking this famous head,large as life bending down and up every so slightly, its dewlaps as pendulous as a sealion’s, it’s dark bushy eyebrows even more luxuriant than its crowning white cap. You could tell this was a man who commanded authority by the close attention paid by his minders and the obeisance displayed by those in attendance. Along his path his minions fell over themselves bowing, scraping, curtsying or moving their heads to express their assent.
Not known as ‘a man of the people’, this redoubtable father figure was nevertheless moved by my civic minded presence to bequeath to me words of wisdom. ‘Good evening young fellow, what’s the good word?’ he enquired, ‘Are you winning?’‘Well, Mr Menzies’, I replied,clearing my throat, eager to make an impression, ‘I’m top of my class at school,I’m happy to say.I get lots of holy cards.Lots for spelling.’I was on a winning scholastic streak at this stage with pats on the back. ‘Mum and Dad call me a walking encyclopedia.
‘That a boy’.he said. ‘ And do you help your parents?’
‘I assist them in our grocery shop’ I replied, my father beaming beside me.
‘Well done,if I don’t say so myself. So did I. Whatever you do in life always strive to do your best,’ he advised, ‘and you’ll go a long way.You be good now.’
As he proceeded into the hall,festooned with flags and bunting, my father said to me teasingly,with his usual term of endearment: ‘You should take him at his word,Allypal.You never know, you might well wind up in his shoes one day’. Alas little did my dad know how true this would be,at least in the physical sense.
Know for his rapier wit and razor tongue – even among his colleagues – in the hush of a large, mostly loyal audience, this heavyweight could lower his guard and leave them sheathed. Those beetlebrows could rest unruffled with no one to bristle at. No one would have dared heckle him. While I did not follow all of his references, his clear simple English and re-cap of the points he was making enabled me to get the drift.He conveyed his views forcefully in his sonorous baritone voice, striking a distinctive pose with his right hand raised and clenched, his other hand on his hip. Absolute silence during his pauses. Most of his address was self-congratulatory directed towards those who showed the clear solid values that he stood for: industriousness, thriftiness, self-reliance and commitment to family life, parliament and the Queen. He exalted the home as where the life of the nation was to be found and emphasized the role of women as custodians of this site. To the cheer of ‘Hear,Hear!’, he referred to the audience as ‘the forgotten people – not Rose Watleys mob – but the middle class, whose neglect he put at Labour’s door. Trumpeting his government’s sound management, ‘What we have done is right for Australia’,he said that the proof of the pudding was in the eating. While Australia’s famous ride on the back of the sheep
Doc Comes To Town.
Hot on the heels of Menzies’ flying visit was that of the larrikin leader of the federal opposition,on his barnstorming tour to drum up support for the Labor candidates. The outcome being important for the balance of power, for one week the ticklish national issues were being thrashed out not in Canberra but at our own parish pump.Dad took me to hear out this son of a country publican at the well attended street meeting the following Friday.
On the way we passed the Commonwealth Bank to which he had accompanied me the previous week,toting my money box.
Those Faraway Places.
The railroad track ran through the middle of Gunnedah, punctuating the day. There were two services to Sydney at that time, the morning run and the other which went through about 8:00 at night.Those times of the day were of of greatest excitement. I got increasingly restless whenever I heard the whistle of a train . Like the horn of a ship or the roar of a plane,this is one of the most romantic-or loneliest- sounds.
Angling for Compliments.
There was one creature I would continue to kill - but with good reason. Its flesh was double delicious. One of my more rewarding pastimes was ‘fishing’ for yabbies, fresh water crayfish in a pond adjacent to the Namoi River. It was remarkably simple-even simpler than the way Elvis had sung about in”Crawfish,’ dispensing with his big long hook and a big long pole, By dangling a piece of meat tied to a length of string in the water, I would soon attract a yabby who would nab the piece in
its claws and try to make off with it. I had to make sure the meat wasn’t me.
When it pulled the string tight, I would pull the grasping yabby slowly back to the bank, with it determinedly maintaining its hold onto the meat. All I had to do was
to scoop it out with a net and take it back home to the pot. Tout de suite, the claws so succulent, the meat so sweet .
My family's menu consisted of two choices: take it or leave it.The standard dish was steak with mash and veggies,albeit with 57 varieties.Followed the next day by lamb chops with bubble and squeak .Served with a simple salad,my yabby dish was a nice break.
I would pass on my knowledge of this unique savoir fare to Andre Simon, the doyen of writers on wine and food after he sent me his good wishes.
He wrote the best selling ‘A Concise Encyclopedia of Gastronomy’ and scores more. Keen as mustard on catering to the refined palate of this illustrious veteran of the Great War, I invited the grand old man of literate connoisseurship to come and savour some mouth-watering bush tucker. Knowing this anglicized Frenchman’s love of language I wanted to regale him with my debonair impression of Clouseauese, that mimicking by Peter Sellers of the French who can’t quite get their tongues around certain English words. My greetings would have been something like the following ‘Monsieur Simon, we welcome yeu (you) to our arse (house) make yeuerself (yourself) at heum (home)’.
While preparing a real slap-up meal , I was to have have invited him into our kitchen to demonstrate and pass on the butchering and vocal skills of the bush poissonier,bursting through the tough shell of this hardy crustacean and into my smooth cover of Elvis’ Crawfish:
Whenever I saw the images in books,I longed to have my own copy.Not alone, I had that envy of those who had the luck of the draw.
I accumulated a humongous repository of comics. Starting with a few, I swapped small ones for bigger ones and bigger ones for more smaller ones until shazam!I had a huge stock to marvel at.Popular items included Dick Tracy with his futuristic wrist phone that now seems so commonplace, and the nose thumbing Mad Magazines with its keen joy in exposing the fakery behind the images the ever more powerful mass media were pumping into our lives. It was magical, objective proof to kids that we weren't alone,that there were people who knew that there was something off beam, phony and funny about a world of bomb shelters, brinkmanship and toothpaste smiles. The magazine gradually instilled in me a habit of mind, a way of thinking about a world rife with false fronts, small print, deceptive ads, booby traps, treacherous language, double standards, half truths, subliminal pitches and product placements; it tried to warn me that I could be merely the target of people who claimed to be my friend; it prompted me to be alert to to mistrusting authority, to read between the lines, to take nothing at face value, to see patterns in the often shoddy construction of movies and TV shows,to cut through the schmalz.
One of my finds was a classic copy of ‘Flash Gordon’, the space cowboy series which featured the evil emperor, Ming the Merciless. This was the cognomen given to Menzies (who pronounced his own name ‘Mingzies’) when he tried to deport an anti-fascist, anti-war immigrant to Europe before the war, my dad informed me.
Among my favourite reads was the popular comic strip Li’l Abner set in the fictional backwoods community at Dogpatch, U.S.A. This hillbilly world became familiar caricatures of American life. Sunday mornings would see me dashing along Conadilly Street to the newsagent to make sure I didn’t miss out on the newspaper with it’s comic supplement. Cars swerved to miss me as I sprinted across the roads , pedestrians avoided bumping into me as I walked back slowly along the street poring over the latest instalment.
The characters featured in this syndicated strip- Li’l Abner,his gal Daisy Mae, Mammy Yokum and others- satirized famous persons and customs.I took a particular interest in Daisy Mae’s voluptuous charms ,much of it visible thanks to her famous polka-dot peasant blouse and cropped skirt. Hubba hubba.
This strip created by the cartoonist Al Caplin, who abbreviated his name to Al Capp, included Charles Chaplin amongst its admirers.
Appearing intermittently as a strip-within-a-strip was ‘Fearless Fosdick”, a spoof of Dick Tracy, set in an unnamed American metropolis lousy with crime, where you shouldn't make a sudden move. Its urban setting filled with tough guys, burnt-out buildings everywhere, narrow alleys, rubble spilling out over the sidewalks, cheap bars, greasy diners, people living on top of each other, their expressions reflecting the destitution of their
surroundings.. So tough it was said you could walk six blocks without leaving the scene of the crime.So tough it was said even the muggers walked around in pairs .So tough when you go to buy silk stockings,the shop assistant wants to know your head size.So tough anytime you put your hand in some wet cement you felt another hand. So tough every time you shut the window you hurt somebody's fingers. So tough at Easter time the children have little porcupines instead of bunnies.So tough if everyone’s seen to be smiling at once,it must be Halloween.
This all stood in stark contrast to Li'l Abner's rural Dogpatch.In combatting crime Fosdick was himself responsible for astronomical collateral damage,
Making for twice as much reading fun,Li'l Abner bookended the offbeat Fosdick sequences as a narrative framing device. Abner himself serves as a rustic Greek chorus-to introduce, comment upon and sum up the Fosdick stories. Typically, a spun up Abner would race frantically to the mailbox or to the train delivering the morning newspapers, to get a glimpse of the latest cliffhanger episode. Every so often I would walk back from the newsagent reading about Lil Abner walking away with his latest copy,reading about Fearless Fosdick.
Subsequent instalments of L’il Abner would reinforce his obsessive immersion in the unfolding Fosdick continuity while at the same time recapping the story-within-a-story. Oblivious to the surrounding "real" world Abe would walk off a cliff or into the path of an oncoming train, or inadvertently ignore one of Daisy Mae's perilous predicaments. Occasionally the gullible, bumbling and impossibly dense Fosdick's adventures would directly affect what came down the pike to Abner, and the two storylines would artfully converge. The story-within-a-story often ironically paralleled and or parodied the story itself. Also, by having the comically obtuse Abner “explain” the strip to Daisy Mae, Capp would use Fearless Fosdick to self-reflexively comment upon his own strip, his readers, and the nature of comic strips and "fandom" in general, resulting in an absurd but overall structurally complex and layered satire.
I can now,after a fashion,walk along my risky city floor reading about me walking along the risky country streets of Gunnedah reading about L’il Abner walking along the risky country streets of Dogpatch reading about Fearless Fosdick walking along the risky streets of the city.A story-within-a-story-within a story.It remains for some literary critic to write about my writing to extend the layers.
Sparing no-one his merciless needle, Al targeted all kinds of mossbacks, radicals and liberals. Some sharply satirical episodes of Li’l Abner were censored in early strips.
In any case the times were a changing.My aunt Colleen pointed out to me in 1960 the ecumenical milestone reached by Geoffrey Fisher, Cantuar of the Church of England : ‘The courtesy call by Pope John XXIII on Pope John XXIII by the Archbishop of Canterbury, is the first meeting between a
‘As Anglicans we have no faith of our own.’replied my aunt. We sit in the "middle way" between Catholicism and outright Protestantism. Our statements of doctrine and liturgies contain, and have always deliberately contained, elements of both. Anglicanism has no Scriptures of its own, no sacraments of its own, no holy orders of its own – just those of the one Holy, Catholic, Apostolic Church that we have received.’
‘The same rituals, half the guilt,’I said.
‘These creeds we hold without addition or diminution. Geoffrey Fisher says we stand firm on that rock.”
‘What about all the issues that led to the great schism? What about the 39 Articles adopted by the English Church after its break from Rome in the 16th century?’
‘These must be put to the side. Our high priests don’t have much choice than for our churches to come closer together.We can’t go back but we must move forward together. They’re looking for a common front in the face of what they see as increasing materialism. The Archbishop thinks that of the Soviets cruder than the more refined Western variety. And more likely to triumph.’
Both the head of state of Vatican City and the primate and metropolitan of all England were presiding over their respective communions during a momentous transition in modern culture and society: from deference, dependence, and duty to indifference, insecurity, and mass individualism. As the Empire was ending, the masses at home enjoyed the welfare state. Revolutions in higher education, health, and consumer spending gradually gathered pace. The end of conscription, emerging feminism, and comparative affluence further eroded the old order. The Anglican Church and all Western Christian churches faced a new intractable problem- wealthier leisured classes rather than poverty.
This was a shock for many but it softened any discomfort for me settling into my new high school.The first day,I felt like a pig in Tehran. However while most students were nominally Protestants, the secular nature of the system soon proved congenial and,having a natural affinity for hitting the books, I settled down to two years of preparation for the university entrance examination. I absorbed the required knowledge like a blotter.
A tisket a tasket,something was missing from my matriculation basket.Physics and chemistry,the scientific end, which hadn’t been available at the parochial school when I was there- another factor influencing my father’s decision.It was too late to pick them up when I got to the local high school although I did study biology which I lapped up .My remaining subjects were deemed to have sufficient cognitive demand to provide what I needed. A suitable preparation for future university studies in economics and the humanities, ones which could normally be studied further once I got there.All going well I would be the first member of my father’s clan to make it there, Having invested so much vicariously in my career path,I would be embodying his own cherished aspiration.
‘I never got the chance to go to university,Al. But if I had, I would have wanted to take all my tests at a grocery store.’
‘Why’s that Dad?’’
‘ Because the customer is always right.’
Stage-struck.
It was during this time that I would be introduced to the works of the Bard of Stratford on Avon,the high priest of literature with his fabulous felicity of language. Plenty of it went right over my head, wouldn’t you know it, but that's part of what made it attractive and valuable. Things that go over your head can make you raise your head a touch higher.
Where others were turned off,I worked my own sweet way through the arcaneness, interpreting the words we don’t recognize anymore. Once I broke through the language barrier, the experiences and emotions Shakespeare wrote about spoke to me. Their timelessness,their distilled representation of life lodged deep in my skull and never left me. Despite his having lived in a different society,in a different time,the same emotional dynamic infused and animated society as it was doing around me.I could see the lust for power, the hunger for love and what it does to people in his plays alive and well around me. Each of his plays showed in terms of thinking about what it is to be human,what it is to live in society,and above all,what it’s like to live in personal relationshps,men and women together,families,Shakespeare really worked these out in a profound way. What I learnt from him is that theatre is a sacred art and not some fringe pursuit.
The most important thing he taught me is that we're not alone. There are some experiences that are so subjective that you might believe you are the only mad person in the world that has actually felt that way or thought that way. Shakespeare's ability to articulate those ideas into something an entire audience can feel, too, is what theatre is all about.
Mining through his works,indulging my emotions,flexing my vocal muscles, delivering my lines, I developed a strong lifelong taste for theatre.Being shy,introspective, guarded in nature, without too much to say for myself,public speaking had left me a quaking jelly of self consciousness,my tongue sticking to the dry roof of my mouth, afraid of fluffing my lines.Dressed up in tights and garters,greasepaint and masks while moving around, acting enabled me to break the ice, open up and express myself more freely. I didn’t know I had it in me.While we parsed ‘As You Like It” and ‘The Tempest’, better still we mounted performances of them as Shakespeare intended. I followed Laurence Olivier's approach. I aimed to find the external look, walk, speech of the character and then come on to his inner thoughts and feelings. In ‘The Tempest’ I lent my lungs to the role of Gonzalo, the ‘honest old counsellor of Naples."Knowing he was good hearted,and wearing a grey streaked beard,I began my character development from there. From that everything flowed. The moment I was dressed, the costume and the make-up made me feel the person he was. Walking slowly,calmly, stroking my beard,I thought of myself as none other than the wise and generous counsellor with an optimistic outlook on life. Staying positive, breaking up arguments,I was the only character able to see the deformed Caliban as more than a demonic beast. The one who reminds my fellow shipwreck survivors else that they should be celebrating because they're alive: "Beseech you, sir, be merry. You have cause, So have we all, of joy; for our escape is much beyond our loss" (2.1.1).
If our audience didn’t get some of the words, the puns or even some of the characters, if our lines were well delivered, using spontaneous, comprehensible, natural speech patterns, they got enough of them to enjoy the play. We avoided laying on Ye Olde Englande over-coloured, overt musical, poeticised stuff .
After so many exits and entrances, I would put such board treading behind me, never to come to a theatre near you.I would further my understanding of Shakespeare through my reading and writing.I would keep not my costume, but my pencil sharp, to see the point. The main question that would remain for me: ‘What kind shall I use? 2B, or not 2B?"
However this drama tragic, away from the footlights' glare, remained eager to witness the commanding presence that others could impose on such works,others who could convey the sheer poetry of his language, it’s sheer descriptive quality,those who had a sui generis perspective on the man known as the greatest writer and dramatist in the English language.
On a Good Wicket
Another facet of my schooldays was an activity somewhat akin to drama. Based on conflict, guile and deception it involved lengthy periods of inactivity while us players choreographed into position and posture, circled each other, watching and waiting. We made our entrances, we made our exits as honorable opponents; we were bound by a code of fair play. Seated waiting for my entrance I kept the benchmark in mind. The player who had held the stage unchallenged.
It’s Not Golf
The water tank at the back of our house sat on a wooden platform and was close to a shed. It needed to have a round brick base and be less confined for my purposes. I needed to be able to hit a golf ball against the base with a cricket bat and hit it back when it rebounded at any angles. This is how Don Bradman, the greatest cricketer and batsman of the 20th Century honed his remarkable powers of co-ordination, concentration, unnerving judgment, fast footwork and decisive powerful bat motion. Hitting the golf ball in the garage where I threw bolt bombs would suffice. There,game faced I replicated the Dons technique for sharpening his reflexes and developing his strokes. The bombs had already taught me to be nimble. Unlike the Don who had to practice in the absence of friends, I had ample opportunity to train with my school mates. There was nothing like the smack of leather on a willowy blond to let us know that summer was coming. Not that I had an overriding sporting career ambition in mind. I simply went in for the fun and action of this gentlemanly game. Nevertheless I aimed to focus as did its near flawless exponent as I stepped up to the wicket – keeping calm and still while awaiting the bowler’s delivery, sizing up the ball in a flash and exploding into action, dispatching their fieldsmen to all parts of the park.Touching base with the Don, a humble man,I said to him ‘Good on you,Sir Don, you’re a real beauty.’.I told him that his admirable personal qualities were ones I wanted to emulate. Being part of a team yet standing out, knowing just what was needed to be done to achieve a roaring success. The Australian people, hit for six during the Great Depression, kept in fine feather when excitement over his tally of runs reached fever pitch.Hats went in the air as he hit balls round the boundary.
I told this national treasure his contribution transcended sport for which he thanked me.
This Sporting Life.
Over these years, taking part in organized sport was naturally de rigueur. For a couple of hours a week,our little town,one community,lived and breathed as a single being.This was during the weekly game of rugby league ,the town’s overriding religion. In a country where men were men and if boys knew what was good for them,they were men too. Weathering nicks, abrasion, bruises, collisions and concussion, with crowds roaring on the touchline, I engaged in this gladiatorial game at school. On
the wing,I would wait cautiously, feet astride, crouching, my arms pushed out protectively, while some bruiser ran at me and shoved out his fist. Grievous bodily harm was an ongoing curse.Like death, tax evasion,and of course shipping and handling too, it was inevitable.
Each week I would brace myself for another clash in which my gangly frame would get roughed up and flattened again and,black and blue,dinged and dented, I would ache like the devil. After which it was time to bounce back to the end of the line – on the wing.We usually got thrashed by the bigger boys from Tamworth,some of whom repeated their final year to stay on top. Going down to them yet again,we once did a lap of disgrace.
All and all It was goodly for my sense of esteem, but a relief when the time came to hang up my boots.I had shifted my gaze, becoming a keen observer of another far more chilling blood sport.
Clear and Present Danger.
In 1962 I braced myself for a clash of the most unimaginable sort, one which overshadowed my
‘An eye for an eye,a tooth for a tooth’,said Dad. ‘Everybody will be blind and gummy as well as microwaved.’
‘ I don’t know what the world’s coming to’ , said Mum. ‘ Scientists say we’ll be blown to bits this time.God made the world in one week but we can unmake it in one minute.It seems like it’s human nature to want to kill.’
‘Mum if that’s human nature,we’d better change it or there won’t be anything human left to change.We’d better get ready with our thinking,not just our bombs.’
Dad said ‘When everyone around the world talks war,what we’ll get is war.’
‘War will come, want it or not’,said Mum.We have to make provision for it.’
‘ My word,you’d think this was the Last Supper.’she said soon after that, noting my gargantuan appetite at the time. ‘Where do you put it all? You’re a bottomless pit,Greedy Guts.Eating us out of house and home.And store.’
‘Armageddon ready to meet the storm,’ I replied, ‘building up my reserves in case we have to go without.’
We were better placed than most. We didn’t have to stock up. We already had a decent doomsday supply of canned foods, biscuits, dried hams and potatoes stowed to tide us over while we sheltered. After the electric supply went down, I would console myself over a world pulverised by polishing off our tubes of ice cream as if there were no tomorrow. Bags of grain and coal would do the job of sandbags around our perimeter.As if these would have done much good.
As it turned out matters were within the grasp of the respective leaders. The U.S.Secretary of State Rusk said: "We're standing eyeball to eyeball, and the other fellow just blinked." The Kennedys were able to resist the calls by some generals and White House top advisers for an immediate all – out unprovoked invasion of Cuba, a move virtually certain to precipitate a war with the Soviets. A ring of US Navy destroyers was sent to blockade the island until the Soviets agreed to return their missiles. Rather than a full scale war, this more limited and measured response afforded the Soviets enough time of their own to reconsider and give ground, saving face by declaring they had saved Cuba from invasion. As well they may have done. Castro had good reason to fear an invasion by the US.
This was no straightforward victory. Missiles were used as a bargaining chip in negotiations for withdrawal. The US would back off their plan to bolster their offensive nuclear installations in Turkey. At the time the sainted Kennedy was riding high in my estimate and looking back on this man I give him credit for arriving at good judgment and opening up lines of communication with the Soviet leadership. In light of Nixon’s comments that he would have dropped the Big One,that he didn’t give a damn about the civilians he bombed, the better man by far won in their neck and neck contest.
Eventually,a lifetime away, the US would even strike up a quiet conversation with the Cubans, irrespective of their leadership.
The Band Begins to Play.
Finding my musical feet, I stepped up to the bandstand – in Wolseley Park, and other venues – as a fully kitted member of the Gunnedah Municipal Band, a bastion of the town’s civic pride. Like Eddie Calvert, I saw the brass band as the logical place to pick up musical skills without fees,my father’s business going through a rough patch.
‘The music world would be a lot poorer if there were no such subsidized tuition’,our highly regarded
devoted bandmaster Iven Laing pointed out to me . ‘We may never have known the brilliance of Benny Goodman. The King of Swing’ owed his training to his father sending him to music classes at
the local synagogue. Buckshee.His father could not have done otherwise shovelling animal parts in the stockyards on sweatshop wages.’
Being unnoteworthy, with more enthusiasm than finesse, , my humble part was to chime in with the ‘
oompah’,tooting my melodious cornet. I played all the right notes, but not necessarily in the right order.My ability on the cornet was legendary;everybody knew I had little. During one of my early bandstand performances,we were playing a very sad hymn. I noticed a man in the front row of the audience near me with tears running down his face. When we were finished, I approached him and asked, ‘Are you a devout Christian?’
He replied ‘No I’m a devout musician.’
‘So what sin have I committed?’
‘You're supposed to follow the music, not chase it all over the place.’
It didn’t take long for me however to stand out as someone to take note of.There was one especially memorable moment after the wrong music sheet was handed to me at practice. When I began a very difficult passage from ‘Colonel Bogey’, everyone in the band turned and looked at me in wonder and amazement.They were playing ‘Eine kleine Nachtmusik at the time.’
The bandhall adjoins sporting facilities.It’s next to the town’s basketball court.
When I played Mozart. Mozart lost.
To teach me embouchure and the mechanics of this brass instrument properly was the lot of our principal solo cornettist,John Hinton. ‘There’s nothing to it,buggerlugs’, he advised. ‘Just watch me and it’ll all become clear.Just do it the Wright way’ ,he smiled,referring to Tommy Dorsey’s female vocal:
‘ I blow thru here
The main source of music in the town, the traditional British brass band was at the service of the community. In our “lion tamer’ uniforms with peaked caps and gold braid,we led the solemn Anzac Day march . Ahead of the army reserve we moved in step as a unit and in formation, coordinating the movements of close order drill with precision, with the correct beat or cadence, sounding off between full-band pieces.
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We entertained local people through concerts, parades, park performances, opening events, ceremonial occasion, church fetes and a wide variety of public engagements. Eat your heart out, Mick Jagger! I have read that Sir Mick has ruled out the idea of writing his memoirs as he considered his life too ho hum. It must have been, increasingly restricted to huge overcrowded gigs with an avalanche of anonymous faces straining to see the stage. Boring! When I consider the extremely diverse repertoire of the Gunnedah Municipal Band performing classical, contemporary, sacred and military music, I feel frightfully sorry for this frustrated Rolling Stone reeling out his rock and roll standards over and over again. Boring! And can you possibly blow and toot and pound drums up and down the streets to the strain of ‘Jumping Jack Flash’. Then there’s the matter of the audiences – did Sir Mick ever experience the intimacy of gigs where the bandsmen outnumbered the audience.Did he ever see grateful pensioned off geezers and blue rinsed matrons charmed, get their ya-ya’s out, a twinkle in the eyes as their toes got tapping,tearing into favourite melodies.
Our kingpin bandmaster Iven Laing had been pointed out to me when I first saw them performing. Moving my teenage head to see if I could recognize him,I had asked someone which one Iven was.
‘That’s him’,they nodded, ‘The one in the way.’
Joining the group,I demonstrated a basic musicological fundamentals from the word go.As I made my first grand entrance into the bandhall, Iven was just quizzing the guys as to which scale they were playing in.Tripping over a tangle of electric cord,landing on my back, I gave cornet player Bill Syphers the very prompt he needed: ‘A flat minor.’
I felt rather diminished.After a brief interval Iven augmented the situation advising me, ‘You’ll have to be more sharp in future.’
Under Iven’s baton our ensemble rehearsed long ahead for the competition circuit sweating it out, keeping in time with him. While the townsfolk were splashing around cooling off in the adjoining swimming pool, Iven never faltered, working himself up into a solid lather putting us through our paces.
‘All right,’he’d say, ‘now once again from the beginning and remember guys, only the once.Time is tight,time is very tight.’
Orchestrating the talents of seasoned players of a high standard playing alongside the like of kids like me demanded the patience of Job. As it was Iven was just the job. His expert ear would detect when anyone was playing louder or softer than they should: ‘Gentlemen let’s not strike any false notes here.We want a melody,not a malady.Remember, it’s all about the team, not the individual’, he drummed into us unremittingly, pushing our musicianship and personal level of performance higher ‘I’m not going over all this again.Your parts seem to be all rests. You’re better than this,’he would habitually interrupt,tapping his stand, just as we had struck up,‘now straight ahead, and strive for tone’.
One wintry evening he interrupted play when my music stand went flying. ‘What’s up now?’,he demanded. ‘I taut I taw a puddy tat a creepin' up on me,’I tweeted,
‘I did! I taw a puddy tat as plain as he could be!’
Then we all spotted the culprit,a pussycat that had strayed in from the street. Shooing away this varmint briskly, Iven was being a bit too finicky I taut. ‘Take it easy,Iven,’I said. ‘There’s no ladder in here. This cool cat just wants to hear some hot sounds close up’.
‘It’s not that I’m superstitious,Allan’,he explained.This is no place for our feline fans.Sylvester has to vamoose.I don’t care to fetch up with Bernstein’s Allergy.’
‘What in dickens is that,?’ I asked.
‘As a young man Leonard Bernstein once had difficulty seeing the music while being tested in his conducting class.Of all things he was coming down with an allergic reaction to a tabby tom..I can’t afford the remotest chance of furball fever.What with the contest coming up.’
It was the cut and thrust of band contesting that took us to regional centres and cities. Our aim was to fly to faraway places. It led me to value the camaraderie of amateur musicians from all walks of life. Passionately committed to his musical ensemble, Iven encouraged me to widen my musical education. ‘Whatever you’ve learned here won’t be lost on you.You might branch out into some other kind of music. Look at Paul McCartney.His dad took him to brass band concerts when he was a tot.Look where young Macca is today.He filtered these influences of the people’s music through his own experiences. You yourself might just want to appreciate music more deeply.It doesn’t matter if you don’t go on beyond that.Build on your experience with us.Music is the international language.Wherever you go,whatever you want to say,say it with music.’
Iven swelled with pride over our new band hall, it’s walls lined with cups and trophies,mementos from past accomplishments. Looking up at these awards after I practised with them several years later, I told Iven “You must be proud of having built up this flourishing band. Was this what you always wanted to do?”
Iven replied “Band music is in my blood,laddie. This outdoor kind of music has been beating inside me since I was knee high to a grasshopper. One of my first memories was when our family joined the throngs waving streamers, lining the ticker taped streets to welcome home the troops from the Great War. Togged up in our Sunday best to attend band concerts in the park – weather permitting. It was on these occasions I realized the power of music to stir men. To march into battle. To supply entertainment where there was a dearth. To allow us to enter an inner world.To reach emotions that go beyond words.So I wanted to form the best band in the bush.”
The cat’s whiskers you might say.’I replied with a mischievous wink. ‘Did you consider going beyond leading a small town amateur band?”
“I long nursed an ambition to do something on a grander stage, something more elaborate, more orchestral – produce glorious symphonic sounds – with clarinets, saxophones, French horns, soaring violins, crashing cymbals and thundering tubas – the whole kit and caboodle.”
“Something like Sergeant Peppers’,I suggested,referring to the fictional psychedelic marching band, highly popular at the time.’
‘We’d really turn on the locals in our garish satin bib and tucker, dyed in funky day-glo colours,’chortled Iven.
‘Growing moustaches beards and long hair’,I added, ‘spelling out our name with flowers. What about you, John?,I asked of John Hinton.
‘ Some like it hot’ he replied. ‘The jim-jam-jump with the solid jive,
Makes you nine foot tall when you're four foot five’.
‘ Well, twirl my turban, man alive!Here comes Mister Nine to Five.’
‘I‘ve long hankered to be more adventurous, bopping and jazzing it up with loose bluesy,ricky ticky numbers, rocking dance pieces-- and sounds to soothe the soul. ‘Four beats to the bar-and no cheating’to quote Count Basie. Catering to the widest and deepest range of emotions and impulses. If our bands are going to keep being a draw, we have to widen our appeal and keep up with the times.Our music just doesn’t do it for younger people.We can’t afford to be seen as stick-in-the mud.
We have to break away from our traditional stylings, add other elements to our repertoire. It don't mean a thing, if it ain't got that swing.’
‘We should try some. Show it off when we go by plane.Can we do Glenn Miller?’I asked him. ’
‘What,fly off in the fog. Perish the thought.Seriously though,the best music in creation does come from fusion.We can learn a lot from the New Orleans brass bands.That’s where Satchmo’s pubescent cheeks first swelled out- blowing his cornet.These hepcats improvise, blending our heavy metal martial music with the African folk music brought to the Americas by slaves. Of course, you need a special personnel for such magic and they are far and few between. With what we’ve got, we’ve got to make do. Salagagoola mechicka boola bibbidi-bobbidi-boo.’
I pictured these two guys swinging together a generation back, balancing this partiality for free,joyful improvisation while maintaining recognizable melodies.Swinging high ,swinging low.It was not surprising that we concurred on who we rated our favourite big band player. Benny Goodman- that most technically proficient jazz clarinetist, the first jazz musician to gain a reputation as a soloist with symphony orchestras.
It was in the idyllic bush setting of the University Of New England where, with a straight bat, I would embark uninterrupted on my maiden voyage of self discovery. I had never seen so much corduroy in the one place.Putting away my childish things, this was where my world view would seriously take shape. Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, I grazed contentedly on my chosen fields of knowledge,betaking myself ahead to where I wanted to go in leaps and bounds, like the kangaroos I passed on the way to classes.In this natural progression, I completed studies in Economics, English, History and in
Education where I would begin to bring all my catholic ideas together.For me it was just as important to to understand the world around me and why it wagged as it did, as it was to understand myself and my place in it.
In history my interest lay in understanding the origins of man and ancient society particularly in South and South East Asia, in understanding the global forces at play in shaping international relations, and in following the progress of the space race.History in the making.
The first rural university in Australia, UNE, an offshoot of the University of Sydney, has gained its own share of prestige, particularly in the agricultural sciences. My professional grooming there would afford me qualifications recognized at home and abroad. At the heart of its success is the traditional collegiate system which is an integral part of its character. It introduced freshfaced callow me to a body of bright and brainy young sparks drawn from a broad spectrum of schools and countries – eligible by dint of our common capacity to swot. This was a community in which scholarship flourished as best could be expected,where we could put our heads together to sift through ideas and opinions and hammer out our convictions in an atmosphere of tolerance and friendship. To say nothing of some getting off on having their heads hammered together in a scrum.
Because of its small size and emphasis I was afforded supportive personal attention in my initiation and progress in the academic environment. Moreover consideration was paid to my personal welfare. Such encouragement helped me find my feet. Enabling my smooth transition from the high school regimen of compulsion to one where I was left to my own devices,it was the cornerstone of my fair to middling undergraduate attainments.I appreciated this tremendously and was determined to make the most of it. Strongly motivated,proficient, but no whiz kid, I had no time to fritter away with fiddle faddle. I came to study and study I did. I couldn’t afford to flop or flounder in this demanding new world.For every student with a spark of brilliance,there are several others with ignition trouble. After proving I was sound in wind and limb as well as sound in mind and character,I hoped to be accepted as a trainee teacher by the Department of Education.
The first student residence to be built on the campus, Wright College, named after the university’s founder, was to be my home for the next four years.The colleges function as the primary housing, dining, and social organization for undergraduate students. Wright’s five white double storey wooden blocks, named after the first five Greek letters, were only intended as makeshift accommodation but their use by date kept being stretched forward in time. Their windows opened but onto what had to one of the most impressive backyards in Australia – green, spacious attractively landscaped grounds blending into playing fields and seventy four hectares of heritage parklands , effectively running less than one student to the acre, with the beautiful Booloominbah at the centre and heart of it all.
All conducive to tackling both intellectual problems and sporting opponents. This bucolic setting belied the fact that the main university facilities lay within a hop,step and a jump. Classes were small. This was no degree factory.Scholars have rarely had it so good.
A cross-section of the parent university – with the lamentable exception of the fairer sex – Wright College prided itself on its esprit de corps. It built this up through a wide range of activities – sporting matches, balls, dinners and debates.
In early 1965 the Colonel had told members of our Company in a briefing:
‘Word has it we’re sending combat troops to Vietnam. A battalion. Our instructors have been preparing the way.’
‘What’s the go with conscription ?’he was asked.
‘Our military need supplementary personnel’,said the Colonel. ‘We have to build the Australian Army to a size where enough infantry battalions are available to rotate into the war and then return home for retraining and equipping.
We face a serious threat from our north. The Soviet Union and China have regional designs.China, so large, looms over our neighbours’ frontiers. The fall of the South Vietnamese government would lead to other allied governments going bung like ‘dominos’. The takeover of this country would be a direct military threat to Australia and all the countries of South and South-East Asia’, he intoned . Totalitarianism would follow suit below the seventeenth parallel, replacing Western oriented governments.
It must be seen as part of a thrust by Red China between the Indian and Pacific Oceans. President Kennedy says it is part of a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that if it achieves its ends in Laos and Vietnam, “the gates will be opened wide.”
This won’t be anything like the siege of the Boxers at Peking that Mao praises so highly. This will last more than 55 days if we just fold our arms and yield to them. It’s our duty to support our American brothers in arms to bolt the gates. To keep Australia safe and inviolable.We have to take the fight to them. We must fight them over there so that we do not have to fight them here.
Westmoreland’s the one holding the line,’ he said holding up the cover of Time’ magazine showing him as ‘Man of the Year’. ‘The thin red line as it were. Mark my words, his fighting men are all that stands between battalions of Chinese on the move,thrusting downwards towards us. His men are a tripwire,our first line of defence’
Westmoreland certainly looked the part of such a commander: a textbook version of how a general should look: ramrod straight, well over 6ft tall, with a purposeful jut-jawline and always confident of victory.
‘What’s his military background?’I asked.
‘‘He saw action in North Africa, Sicily and Europe during World War II. He attained the rank of colonel by the time he was 30.As commander of the 34th Field Artillery Battalion fighting German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, he earned the loyalty and respect of his troops for joining in the thick of battle rather than remaining behind the lines at a command post. He later led troops in conflicts in France, Germany, and Belgium.
‘You would have heard a lot about him,wouldn’t you,Colonel’,I said.
‘His reputation preceded me when I was stationed on the Rhine after the War. He faced particularly brutal times when his division was able to capture and hold the last standing bridge on the Rhine River, the bridge at Remagen. He and his men had to defend it from enemy troops for two weeks; this gave the Allies time to build their own bridge. Their actions helped end World War II in Europe. Kennedy picked him for Vietnam when he was superintendent of West Point.’
‘He must inspire confidence’.
'He’s a force to be reckoned with.A man of his word. We need to come through for him. To be on the front foot. To stand fast.Think of it as a down payment for US help if Australia were ever attacked’,continued the Colonel.
‘ An insurance policy’,I suggested.
‘You could put it that way’,he said. ‘War is one of those possible unfortunate events for which we have to pay a premium to protect ourselves against.’
‘How do you remember the world war yourself?’ I said,still having in mind the gleaming white battleship in front of which Eleanor Powell, backed by an extravagantly costumed chorus, sings and dances “Swingin’ the jinx away’, culminating in a patriotic salute, and finally a blast of cannon fire.
‘As an amateur theatre production.Unrehearsed and over long.We must never leave our defences down again.Never be caught napping.Never let the enemy draw first blood.We must get any combat over and done with swiftly and decisively.’
Under such influence and those of my provenance, I went along with the war in it’s initial phase,an ever so brief dalliance. I started out with generally conventional views formed by global containment and the sense that the flow of refugees was east to west. I was increasingly critical of the U.S. government's tactical failures, the ridiculously disproportional bombing campaign, but not its gambit. ‘Can we get away with it?’was my commonly asked question. American forces often went into these battles in helicopters,beating a hasty retreat the way they had come but leaving many to wonder why ground won with such difficulty could be surrendered with such ease. I took it as read the war could be won if only the right tactics were used. I was wary of any large conventional combat commitment. There was little discussion of right or wrong.We were training to be steely eyed dealers of death, disfigurement and dismemberment.
At a lecture given at one of our basic training classes,a senior officer explained the nature of the war we were entering:
‘A word of warning to all you would be warriors.This conflict and those our fathers fought are chalk and cheese. In those both sides had huge citizens armies,men in uniform who volunteered for the duration of the war.The boundaries were clearly drawn, there were rules and codes of conduct for both soldiers and civilians. The enemy was clearly distinguishable and there were clear procedures to follow if you were either captured or wounded.Today we have a relatively small professional standing army .We are up against a well equipped, elusive human enemy,the NVA, with supplies filtering through from China and Russia as well as the NLF,the “Viet Cong” who blend invisibly with the local population until they chose to fight. The enemy has no size,no shape and no rules.Nailing them is like trying to pin jelly to a wall.Like an apparition,they appear and disappear at will. They use the population as a source of recruits, food, taxes and intelligence on enemy movements . They own the country at night, hiding in the shadows,picking at ARVN scabs til they bleed.’
‘How do you counter such an elusive enemy?’ I asked. ‘How do we shoot if we don’t know where they’re going to be?’
‘As hunters we have to flush these cunning foxes out of their coverts into open ground. They’re not fireproof.So we fumigate.Smoke them out of their hidey-holes.Fire in the hole! We entice them into showing their hand. We have to deny them access to the people by mounting intensive ambuscades and patrolling around populated areas. Eventually, the insurgents are forced to come out and fight to maintain access to the population.At that point we can hit them with all we’ve got.We deliver the deathblow.They don’t know what’s hit them.’
‘How can they counter this?’I asked. ‘
‘They have an ace in the hole. You never knew who is the enemy and who is the foe. They all look alike. They all wear the same garb. You never know if they’re going to help you or shoot you in the back.’
‘Who decides who is Charlie and who is not.”I asked. ‘From pictures I have seen of him,I wouldn’t know him from Adam.Or from Madam.’
‘It’s up to the individual soldier to decide’,he replied. ‘I know what you’re thinking. Innocent civilians get rubbed out in this game of hide and seek. Of course sometimes we have to use a little gentle persuasion.It’s up to the V.C. to stop using civilians to hide behind. They’ve got extensive staging areas and infiltration routes impervious to permanent denial by our air or ground forces.Their’s are generally indistinguishable from the village population we are meant to protect.They don’t wear uniforms and blend into the people and the countryside.
‘You don’t know where you stand,’I commented.
‘Or what you’re standing on.The enemy includes women and children who might be implicated in setting lethal ambushes and maiming booby traps as well as landmines.They are fierce,skilled,well organised fighters and don’t stand and fight on conventional terms, offering targets. They don’t stick around and generally they fight on ground of their own choosing.They know it like the back of their hand.They feint, use quick hit-and-run tactics, and, when fighting pitched battles, only engage us at close quarters to make it hard for us to use our air superiority. Often after combat the only trace of the enemy is a blood trail. The Viet Cong are known to lift mines we have planted and used them as a source of supply in their own operations. When the VC find we aren't using the tracks but fanning out through the jungle,they re-position these toe poppers and bouncing betties so we will trigger them ourselves. The easy way is always mined. Meanwhile the VC use the jungle trails like highways, because they know the tracks are free .You’ve got to imagine the whole country like this. One complete area of operations.No front line.The next turn can be the wrong turn.Death can come from anywhere,at any time. In past wars the soldier endured major campaigns and battles with periods of respite.Today he’ll endure a shorter tour of duty with constant irregular sequences of skirmishes with little or no respite. Sleep comes in irregular and ill-timed little chunks to those on operations.It’s a combination of intense stress, fear and endless boredom.Much of his time comprises pumped up, enervating patrols, clad in clothes and boots that are dabby for days on end, with constant threats from foul water, unsafe local food, composite rations, skin eruptions, intestinal disorders,and malarial infection . His campaign comprises an irregular sequence of skirmishes in which apparent successes are measured by ground half-secured and counts of enemy dead, which might again be innocent villagers.On top of all this is friendly fire?’
‘No guesses from where’, I remarked. ‘There’s an World War II saying,’:"When the British shoot, the Germans duck, when the Germans shoot, the British duck, when the Americans shoot, everybody ducks....." We hear stories of Americans moving through the jungle smoking cigarettes and listening to the radio.Is this for real?’I asked, ‘in light of our national servicemen being able to be sent to Vietnam for secondment to American forces.
‘Australians fight a different war to the Americans,’was the reply. ‘Less thunder and lighting- but better . We fight fire with fire.With mundane search and destroy missions, ambush patrols, the constant stress of slow movement through the bush, taking even several hours to cover a few kilometres,grid square by grid square, constant stopping, listening for enemy activity and then moving on again.Our huckleberry friends, on the other hand, often mount large scale actions supported by immense artillery and air support, are highly mobile and use different tactical doctrine. At the same time they have exposed themselves to lethal ambushes that have claimed so many dead.When our patrols give chase to the guerrillas often covering the same ground and running into similar enemy emplacements our response is different.The Americans would do well to follow our example’.
‘How do they learn this?’I asked.
‘They’ll never know unless we tell them,’came back the reply.
I passed on my critical support to Westmoreland.
The Night Of The Long Knives.
On September 30, 1965, a portentous event took place in Java that would embolden those who believed that Communism should and could be physically defeated.
A stillborn military coup led to the abduction and murder of six generals. Abdul Nasution escaped this fate when armed men entered his home and tried to arrest him, but his infant daughter was killed.
The event convulsed Indonesia and was a turning point which eventually led to the replacement of the non-aligned President and a change in the direction of the country towards the capitalist West.During this time Indonesia became quite cut off from the world and one heard of serious numbers of of killings.
As rumours trickled through that something big was going down in the north, David spoke to me about the frightening picture taking shape and it’s effects here.
“Our Indonesian friends feel a great sorrow. These events are very much to their detriment. We can expect that there will be an impact, both personal and academic, on anyone from there” David said. “Their families have all been affected. They must be worried sick about their safety in the wake of this turmoil. It’s hard for them to talk about it expansively as the situation back home is so muddied and perilous. The least we can do is to help them put their minds to rest about their studies while they get through this tragedy”.
We redoubled our efforts paying special attention to their needs. I enjoined Rick Lay to take a breather at my place in Gunnedah which he took me up on. He responded to my family’s warm hospitality with great gaiety, clearly enjoying the region’s peaceful calm.
Too calm deemed some,trumpeting with loud clangour. Lulled into a false sense of security, moves were afoot to rouse us with a clarion call to arms.
The Land of Nod.
What did you learn in school
today,
Dear little boy of mine?
What did you learn in school
today,
Dear little boy of mine?
I learned our Government
must be strong;
It's always right and never
wrong;
Our leaders are the finest
men
And we elect them again and
again.
Pete Seeger.
conservative heartland where his business interests required him to tread on eggs as well as sell them.
Waiting to file into the town hall, we were at the end of the long queue that reached the side entrance when the bestriding figure loomed up. Jumping jellybeans,there was no mistaking this famous head,large as life bending down and up every so slightly, its dewlaps as pendulous as a sealion’s, it’s dark bushy eyebrows even more luxuriant than its crowning white cap. You could tell this was a man who commanded authority by the close attention paid by his minders and the obeisance displayed by those in attendance. Along his path his minions fell over themselves bowing, scraping, curtsying or moving their heads to express their assent.
Not known as ‘a man of the people’, this redoubtable father figure was nevertheless moved by my civic minded presence to bequeath to me words of wisdom. ‘Good evening young fellow, what’s the good word?’ he enquired, ‘Are you winning?’‘Well, Mr Menzies’, I replied,clearing my throat, eager to make an impression, ‘I’m top of my class at school,I’m happy to say.I get lots of holy cards.Lots for spelling.’I was on a winning scholastic streak at this stage with pats on the back. ‘Mum and Dad call me a walking encyclopedia.
‘That a boy’.he said. ‘ And do you help your parents?’
‘I assist them in our grocery shop’ I replied, my father beaming beside me.
‘Well done,if I don’t say so myself. So did I. Whatever you do in life always strive to do your best,’ he advised, ‘and you’ll go a long way.You be good now.’
As he proceeded into the hall,festooned with flags and bunting, my father said to me teasingly,with his usual term of endearment: ‘You should take him at his word,Allypal.You never know, you might well wind up in his shoes one day’. Alas little did my dad know how true this would be,at least in the physical sense.
Know for his rapier wit and razor tongue – even among his colleagues – in the hush of a large, mostly loyal audience, this heavyweight could lower his guard and leave them sheathed. Those beetlebrows could rest unruffled with no one to bristle at. No one would have dared heckle him. While I did not follow all of his references, his clear simple English and re-cap of the points he was making enabled me to get the drift.He conveyed his views forcefully in his sonorous baritone voice, striking a distinctive pose with his right hand raised and clenched, his other hand on his hip. Absolute silence during his pauses. Most of his address was self-congratulatory directed towards those who showed the clear solid values that he stood for: industriousness, thriftiness, self-reliance and commitment to family life, parliament and the Queen. He exalted the home as where the life of the nation was to be found and emphasized the role of women as custodians of this site. To the cheer of ‘Hear,Hear!’, he referred to the audience as ‘the forgotten people – not Rose Watleys mob – but the middle class, whose neglect he put at Labour’s door. Trumpeting his government’s sound management, ‘What we have done is right for Australia’,he said that the proof of the pudding was in the eating. While Australia’s famous ride on the back of the sheep
had come to a halt and prices of world and other agricultural exports were plummeting from their record levels,there were plenty of jobs.If only the unions would toe the line.In their selfish pursuit of greed, they were forcing up costs and stopping competition.They were bullying every worker to become a member.And their ringleader, none other than the leader of the opposition,Dr.Evatt who promoted compulsory unionism.A hypocrite,charged Menzies, because while President of the General Assembly of the United Nations he had championed it’s Declaration of Human Rights.It declares: ‘No person shall be compelled to join an association”.
In his peroration, Menzies reminded people that they were now foremost in the mind of his government, and that things would pick up even more. Waving glittering promises before their eyes, he told this rural audience that if they worked hard they would be rewarded accordingly.
During the course of his address his audience gave forth great guffaws when he said his opponents had invaded the area like grasshoppers. ‘It is up to you to find out how destructive they are,’he added.He claimed that the Labour Party led by Dr.Evatt had had their tongues hanging out in the hope of another depression. I picked up on his view that the Communists he said we had on the run in Korea were not to his liking and that ‘we are dealing with them’.As to what he meant, a nod was as good as a wink to a blind horse.
He knew how to tap into the mood of genial provincial optimism that had settled over middle Australia during these years of unprecedented prosperity.
The funny thing is Dad had a grudging consideration for Menzies. ‘He advanced himself as a self made man-although he would have been wise to get some help.’His own beginnings were not unlike that of Menzies: “He wasn’t born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Menzies father ran a grocery store in a country town”, he pointed out to me. “And things weren’t easy. Like you Menzies lived in rooms at the back of the shop”. Typical of Scots of humble origins, Menzies senior respected schooling and nudged his son to avail himself of a scholarship to rise in the world.
My fathers own father had had a saddlery business, a farm and investments in property.Neither my father nor mother completed the final years of their secondary schooling However his experience of the hardships of the Depression and of working for others had affected him deeply. ‘This man made calamity swept across this rich country like a plague. Time was when banks and businesses folded.Farmers,bothered with mortgages, debts, unable to pay their bills lost their plots of land.Workers lost their jobs. Debt collectors and money lenders hammered on their doors. So many hands were available that wages were pushed steadily downward . Opportunities for most people dried up.Many of the displaced migrated wherever in search of work’.
Like most people,what concerned him was that once the slack of wartime shortages had been taken up,dole queues,soup kitchens and swagmen vainly scrounging up work would boomerang to the land again. You can guess what I'm going to say next. In the long run he was right ,but it would take another thirty years for the capitalist economic engine to start running into big troubles again.
Experience of this crucible convinced him of the value of children,every last one of them, having the best education of which he or she is capable. This would also of reduce social and economic inequalities. Menzies grandfather, a trade unionist miner, taught his grandson the same, but the second part didn’t seem to take root as deeply. That’s where Menzies needed more help .
These things engrained in my father’s thoughts the true belief that through both self improvement and greater equality Australians could ensure that war and depression not happen again. He saw the ALP as the engine of change, His hero had been Ben Chifley, who rose from being a railway engine driver to becoming Labour Prime Minister during the last year of the War. I often saw Chifley in photographs and even in newspaper cartoons staring intently through white twirls of pipe smoke..Somehow this suggested to me he was a benevolent,wise man , a man who would not rush into doing harebrained, worrying things.
‘There are others who see the way forward to a classless society differently’,he told me when I asked after the subject of a magazine cover. ‘They take a different road than us.There’s been no end of argument about this.’
‘What is this argument about?’
'It’s an argument about means,not ends.They don’t rule out a violent overthrow of the ruling class whereas we work on the hustings with the ballot box .’
While I was helping renovate our living quarters, peeling back a layer of old linoleum covering the floor, this stripling historical archaeologist unearthed engrossing yellowing,mottled old newspapers used for insulation purposes,including a faded cover of the establishment Australian Women's Weekly.It had not seen the light of day for a decade. The portrait , that of a fleshy faced,mustached avuncular man in uniform,pipe in mouth,was labelled Joseph Stalin.
‘He’s the ruler of The Soviet Union,the largest country in the world. He heads up the Communist Party which rules the country without opposition.He says Communists are the only ones who can bring peace and prosperity to the world -through wraparound state ownership of wealth and the means of distribution.’
‘What does this mean,Dad?’
‘It means their government will see to every need.Stalin says they’ve already demolished class differences.He says they will do away with hunger and greed.’
‘Is he really good or bad,Dad?,’I asked,studying this image of an avuncular,thoughtful figure. ‘He looks like someone you can bank on and trust. But Mr.Menzies talks about Communists as our enemy.’
‘During the war when the Soviets were our powerful ally we used to call him "Uncle Joe".Before the War he many saw him as a monster. As the 1940s was a fretful time with war and economic difficulties, it seemed good to have such a man in charge of of our ally’s affairs.He brought his country from nowhere to become very powerful.His Chinese allies are doing the same. Foreign visitors are struck by the abundance of fruits, vegetables and poultry in all the cities. Beggars, barefoot children, men or women dressed in rags, are now seen only in a blue moon.People there now live with more dignity The Archbishop of Canterbury,Geoffrey Fisher, put it this way when he visited Australia. It’s creed appeals to peoples which have throughout the ages known nothing but poverty,semi-starvation and poverty and see here a promise of delivery and hope.’
‘Does this mean the Archbishop approves of Communism?I asked.
‘No fear.He suspects their intentions .’
‘Weren’t the Communists on the same side as us during the War?’
‘ The Soviet Union and the Chinese Communists were our allies when America was still neutral.The sacrifices of their people helped to turn the tide against the Axis.With the war all over bar the shouting, we were suddenly led to believe it was the Soviets who wanted to dominate the world.’
‘Do you believe this,Dad?I asked.
‘I go along with Doc’,he said.He believes the Soviets are only establishing defensive zones of influence in Eastern Europe, not unlike what he has been trying to get Australia to do in our north.He believes we should develop a positive relationship with the Soviet Union.’
‘So what about Stalin?’
‘That’s not to say Stalin’s a good guy by any means. It’s London to a brick on he was never the kindly man the Woman’s Weekly showed him as. Is he as bad as they say he is now? There are too many horrible stories coming out the Soviet Union to say otherwise. Behind this mask lies a cruel man who knows nothing of honour or conscience.They are quite unknown to him.He rules with an iron fist’,he said,closing his hand,bending his fingers to the palm. ‘The problem is the Communists-like the publishers of The Women’s Weekly- don’t put up with newspapers saying it as it is. The Packer press accuses The A.L.P. of being in bed with the Communists. Their newspaper barons and the companies have so much dough to keep the Liberals and silvertails in power,it seems to grow on trees.’
By bringing to light this paper,something clicked.It was an early lesson for me about political flip flop, how history can be turned on its head,how by blowing hot and cold, yesterday’s buddies can become today’s baddies.How yesterday’s baddies can become today’s buddies.
During the course of his address his audience gave forth great guffaws when he said his opponents had invaded the area like grasshoppers. ‘It is up to you to find out how destructive they are,’he added.He claimed that the Labour Party led by Dr.Evatt had had their tongues hanging out in the hope of another depression. I picked up on his view that the Communists he said we had on the run in Korea were not to his liking and that ‘we are dealing with them’.As to what he meant, a nod was as good as a wink to a blind horse.
He knew how to tap into the mood of genial provincial optimism that had settled over middle Australia during these years of unprecedented prosperity.
The funny thing is Dad had a grudging consideration for Menzies. ‘He advanced himself as a self made man-although he would have been wise to get some help.’His own beginnings were not unlike that of Menzies: “He wasn’t born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Menzies father ran a grocery store in a country town”, he pointed out to me. “And things weren’t easy. Like you Menzies lived in rooms at the back of the shop”. Typical of Scots of humble origins, Menzies senior respected schooling and nudged his son to avail himself of a scholarship to rise in the world.
My fathers own father had had a saddlery business, a farm and investments in property.Neither my father nor mother completed the final years of their secondary schooling However his experience of the hardships of the Depression and of working for others had affected him deeply. ‘This man made calamity swept across this rich country like a plague. Time was when banks and businesses folded.Farmers,bothered with mortgages, debts, unable to pay their bills lost their plots of land.Workers lost their jobs. Debt collectors and money lenders hammered on their doors. So many hands were available that wages were pushed steadily downward . Opportunities for most people dried up.Many of the displaced migrated wherever in search of work’.
Like most people,what concerned him was that once the slack of wartime shortages had been taken up,dole queues,soup kitchens and swagmen vainly scrounging up work would boomerang to the land again. You can guess what I'm going to say next. In the long run he was right ,but it would take another thirty years for the capitalist economic engine to start running into big troubles again.
Experience of this crucible convinced him of the value of children,every last one of them, having the best education of which he or she is capable. This would also of reduce social and economic inequalities. Menzies grandfather, a trade unionist miner, taught his grandson the same, but the second part didn’t seem to take root as deeply. That’s where Menzies needed more help .
These things engrained in my father’s thoughts the true belief that through both self improvement and greater equality Australians could ensure that war and depression not happen again. He saw the ALP as the engine of change, His hero had been Ben Chifley, who rose from being a railway engine driver to becoming Labour Prime Minister during the last year of the War. I often saw Chifley in photographs and even in newspaper cartoons staring intently through white twirls of pipe smoke..Somehow this suggested to me he was a benevolent,wise man , a man who would not rush into doing harebrained, worrying things.
‘There are others who see the way forward to a classless society differently’,he told me when I asked after the subject of a magazine cover. ‘They take a different road than us.There’s been no end of argument about this.’
‘What is this argument about?’
'It’s an argument about means,not ends.They don’t rule out a violent overthrow of the ruling class whereas we work on the hustings with the ballot box .’
While I was helping renovate our living quarters, peeling back a layer of old linoleum covering the floor, this stripling historical archaeologist unearthed engrossing yellowing,mottled old newspapers used for insulation purposes,including a faded cover of the establishment Australian Women's Weekly.It had not seen the light of day for a decade. The portrait , that of a fleshy faced,mustached avuncular man in uniform,pipe in mouth,was labelled Joseph Stalin.
‘He’s the ruler of The Soviet Union,the largest country in the world. He heads up the Communist Party which rules the country without opposition.He says Communists are the only ones who can bring peace and prosperity to the world -through wraparound state ownership of wealth and the means of distribution.’
‘What does this mean,Dad?’
‘It means their government will see to every need.Stalin says they’ve already demolished class differences.He says they will do away with hunger and greed.’
‘Is he really good or bad,Dad?,’I asked,studying this image of an avuncular,thoughtful figure. ‘He looks like someone you can bank on and trust. But Mr.Menzies talks about Communists as our enemy.’
‘During the war when the Soviets were our powerful ally we used to call him "Uncle Joe".Before the War he many saw him as a monster. As the 1940s was a fretful time with war and economic difficulties, it seemed good to have such a man in charge of of our ally’s affairs.He brought his country from nowhere to become very powerful.His Chinese allies are doing the same. Foreign visitors are struck by the abundance of fruits, vegetables and poultry in all the cities. Beggars, barefoot children, men or women dressed in rags, are now seen only in a blue moon.People there now live with more dignity The Archbishop of Canterbury,Geoffrey Fisher, put it this way when he visited Australia. It’s creed appeals to peoples which have throughout the ages known nothing but poverty,semi-starvation and poverty and see here a promise of delivery and hope.’
‘Does this mean the Archbishop approves of Communism?I asked.
‘No fear.He suspects their intentions .’
‘Weren’t the Communists on the same side as us during the War?’
‘ The Soviet Union and the Chinese Communists were our allies when America was still neutral.The sacrifices of their people helped to turn the tide against the Axis.With the war all over bar the shouting, we were suddenly led to believe it was the Soviets who wanted to dominate the world.’
‘Do you believe this,Dad?I asked.
‘I go along with Doc’,he said.He believes the Soviets are only establishing defensive zones of influence in Eastern Europe, not unlike what he has been trying to get Australia to do in our north.He believes we should develop a positive relationship with the Soviet Union.’
‘So what about Stalin?’
‘That’s not to say Stalin’s a good guy by any means. It’s London to a brick on he was never the kindly man the Woman’s Weekly showed him as. Is he as bad as they say he is now? There are too many horrible stories coming out the Soviet Union to say otherwise. Behind this mask lies a cruel man who knows nothing of honour or conscience.They are quite unknown to him.He rules with an iron fist’,he said,closing his hand,bending his fingers to the palm. ‘The problem is the Communists-like the publishers of The Women’s Weekly- don’t put up with newspapers saying it as it is. The Packer press accuses The A.L.P. of being in bed with the Communists. Their newspaper barons and the companies have so much dough to keep the Liberals and silvertails in power,it seems to grow on trees.’
By bringing to light this paper,something clicked.It was an early lesson for me about political flip flop, how history can be turned on its head,how by blowing hot and cold, yesterday’s buddies can become today’s baddies.How yesterday’s baddies can become today’s buddies.
Doc Comes To Town.
On the way we passed the Commonwealth Bank to which he had accompanied me the previous week,toting my money box.
About a bank I learned that it’s a place where they lend you an umbrella in fair weather and ask for it back when it begins to rain.
About money,I learned very early there was never enough of it,that some people had more of it than others,that it determined in many cases how people looked at you,talked to you and treated you.
‘Good for you’he said.You know what I say about rainy days.’ How could I forget.It had been on such a day when we had taken shelter in the bank’s classical building in Sydney.It was in it’s likeness that my uniquely designed Heritage pressed tin container was printed and shaped.
‘ People recognise this model,like the bank ’,he said,squeezing the sides of the tin without being able to bend them, ‘as something substantial, constant, and reliable.
These boxes were sealed,without an opening for small fingered temptation.Unlike today when personal savings count for little and financial credit and spending for everything,people were encouraged to actively put aside. Upon my handing the tin to the teller,he proceeded to rip it open and disgorge the contents.He then handed me a new one.
Dad told me on the way home, ‘Like your box, unlike the private banks, The Commonwealth belongs to the Australian people. Chifley and Evatt tried to have them all publicly owned.They moved to nationalize them to serve as a model.They wanted the elected government,not the private bankers, to direct the course of the nation’s economy. They had done this to steer us through the war.And what direction would that be that?’
‘Straight ahead,on the up and up’,I said stretching my arm forward and curving it upwards.
‘Too right.’
‘And how do you think the bankers responded?’
‘I bet they didn’t like that.’
‘They kicked up one hell of a stink’he said,pinching his nose.‘So strong,I wouldn’t wrap fish in it.
Before the last election these enemies of Labour made much it as signs of--- ‘creeping Communism,he said putting on a scary voice and face.’ They spent big bikkies in a publicity campaign to scare people. They marshalled bank clerks to demonstrate in the street and at public meetings. Supporters feared being stabbed to death by a fountain pen.’he jested.‘Even though it was popular-many people remember the bankers from the Depression as greedy bloodsuckers who drove people out of their homes for not making their payments,shylocks who produce nothing.Labour lost.’
‘So Menzies had the private bankers in his corner’.I said. ‘Always circling each other, he and Evatt must be very different kinds of men’.
‘On the face of it,they are alike.Like Menzies, Evatt is a legal eagle .Both chose public life instead of enriching themselves through the law. They are both silks,having reached the acme of their profession.But there the similarity stops. Menzies is as cunning as a fox.He can pull a swifty as niftily as Doc’s dad could pull a beer.His appeal is to what he sees as the great sober middle class,the ‘forgotten class’ he talks of. He credits them as the real Australians, having the strong arms of "lifters" ‘,he said,flexing his biceps, ‘instead of the flabby bellies of "leaners". He plays them off against those he portrays as the monied and powerful on the one hand, and the unionised working class on the other.He wants better paid workers to see themselves as middle class.’
‘ ‘The working class can kiss my arse, I’ve got the foreman’s job at last’, I said, getting the drift, echoing and amplifying cynical comments I had picked up around the traps. ‘ ‘Working class!These lazy layabouts can’t even spell it. Like those employed by the council. Those bludgers have never done an honest day’s work in their lives.People say nothing is impossible,but they do nothing every day.Yet they want something in return. Work fascinates them - they can look at it for hours! Where are those elbows and backs? They wouldn’t work in an iron lung,’ I said,bunging it on. ‘They lean on their shovels in the fresh air while honourable accountants sweat in their offices lifting their pens and businessmen break their backs lifting their takings.’
‘ You’ve got it,Al,’ he said,a little surprised at my precocious parroting. ‘Seriously though,Doc is in principle dedicated to doing away with poverty and unemployment.He sees them as the worst menace to peace. Menzies wants things to be kept the same through free enterprise.Free of government control. Evatt wants social change to be achieved through a strengthened central government.’
‘ Like in the Soviet Union?’I asked earnestly.
‘Nowhere to that extent,’he answered. ‘I share Doc’s faith and reliance in our existing political and legal order. I am of the firm belief that we can achieve social and economic reform within our institutional framework.We can legislate socialism into existence and capitalism out of it.’‘What has Doc done in the way of improving things?’I asked.
‘ He’s really shone on on the world stage.As Australia’s foreign minister, he worked to make Australia an independent nation in the Asia Pacific region, with it’s own voice.He learned during the war that we have to stand on our own two feet.Our American cousins promised him more planes for us but never came through with the delivery. Like piecrust their promises were meant to be broken. He discovered both Britain and America were committed to a 'beat Hitler first' strategy.They made decisions that affected us without consulting us.’
‘How did he help us stand on our own two feet?’
‘From his years in office,he has left two lasting contributions to our security that really stand out. The first was to swing Australia behind the Indonesian Republic,to help it become independent from the Netherlands.He believes creating fast stable allies near to home safeguards Australia's northern approaches and means a better defence for Australia. We can’t forget the little resistance the Japanese encountered as they marched down through Asia.I never want to see you having to go through what we did,’he assured me,putting his hand on my shoulder.
‘And the second?’
‘ Doc’s other big part was in the founding of the United Nations - especially his fight for the rights of the smaller powers. This gave the ‘big boys’ who stacked the odds against them the pip. They saw him as as impertinent.
‘How does Menzies see him,’I asked.
‘As for his main adversary,there’s no love lost between these two’,he said. ‘During the war Menzies and Co. dished the dirt that Doc was fleeing the Japanese when he attended talks with our allies.
‘Gosh,Dad that’s terrible’,I said.
‘He was there to argue Australia’s case. ‘He was there to argue Australia’s case. Never let it be said Doc was in in any way, shape, or form yellow’.he scoffed. ‘ He was constantly flying the Pacific in Navy planes that could be shot down at any time.And it wasn’t just that. He always attracted the worst kind of vicious scuttlebutt.From those who should have known better. Archbishop Duhig said in 1942 he regarded Evatt "as the most dangerous man in Australia, an out-and-out Communist in sympathy, anti-religious and particularly anti-Catholic". And the mud stuck. But who was he to talk? He and other knockers were all for Franco and Mussolini at the time.Because they were taking on the Communists.’
‘I thought Franco was on our side,’I said. ‘Some of the nuns and priests speak highly of him.’
‘Franco brought in Moorish infidel troops to put down the democratically elected Spanish government,’he replied. ‘Hitler sent his planes to bomb the loyalists, most of whom were Catholics in name.But he’s on our side.Work that one out.’
I did- but it would take a bit longer.The Church,I would learn, had a lot to answer for soft pedalling fascism.
We reached the designated meeting place where a crowd had gathered and we squeezed through for a ringside view.It was just about time for the return bout . We waited expectantly,me on tiptoes, for the bare-knuckle contender to take on Menzies, his reply in their stem-winding stoush.
It wasn’t over fashion.Just as well.In all his visits to London, Norman Hartnell’s had not been part of his itinerary.Clotheswise he was lagging,his suit it was sagging. The rumpled contender turned up,pressing the flesh, wearing a plain baggy grey suit that hung on him loosely, his hand clasping a large grey felt hat. After an introduction by the local ALP party representative,the Maitland Militant took up his position..His delivery platform was no less the tailgate of a utility vehicle.However as a speaker,Menzies had his match in Evatt. The stocky, broad-shouldered figure of earlier years was acquiring a paunch,but spoke with a punch,with a carefully cultivated broad, nasal,flat-toned, proletarian twang. In concise, understandable language,this stormy petrel parried Menzies’ earlier thrusts , getting stuck into the government’s policies and answering a host of curly questions bluntly with conviction. While Menzies was not present, a sprinkling of his barrackers were on hand to badger Doc.
‘We’ve got to stop the sale or sabotage of successful public enterprises’he cried,going on the attack.
‘Well stone the flaming crows,what’s it to you?’ one impudent heckler chiacked from the back.
‘ Most of us lose by it’,Doc said matter-of-factly. ‘In each case the area of exploitation is widened because the safeguards against monopoly-namely competition by sucessful undertakings-have been removed. These belong to the people.That’s about it’he declared. He didn’t hold back exposing the motives of his coalition rivals.He declared that despite their name changes,today more than ever they represented the almost unbridled financial power of a few wealthy trusts,combines and monopolies.
‘ What’s in it for you? ‘the heckler continued.
‘A wigwam for a goose’s bridle,’shot back The Doc ,realizing the extent of the heckler’s maturity.
‘Do you want to try it on?’
His offsider obviously did. This ruddy faced mug lair in gabardine riding breeches and polished riding boots craked , “What are ya? If you don’t like it here,go back to Russia!”
Without missing a beat,Doc ignored this,refusing to become unstuck by such distracting ratbaggery.‘You’re all about sharing wealth’,cried the lair. ‘If you had two cars, would you give me one.’
‘Nothing of the sort..But if I had two brains,I’d give you one,sport. Now where was I?‘Of course, this power is why these bigshots have imposed the ‘wool grab’ ’,The Doc picked up,referring to the tax on wool producers. ‘This is why they’ve broken their solemn promise to impose an excess profits tax on wealthy corporations. They’ve let prices run away. These groups believe in one freedom-the freedom to exploit the rest of the community.
‘Bullshit!’cawed the the first taunter raucously.
‘Ah ,my friends,we have an artist in our midst.I’ll come back to your chosen field of interest in a second ,Sir’,said The Doc.without batting an eyelid.
At the bidding of a few wealthy graziers, the Country Party has scuttled our policy of bringing more industry to the bush.The second moleskinned heckler cawed once again derisively, ‘ Bullshit!’
Unruffled, The Doc put him in his place: ‘ I assure you,old son,there’ll be more of this than you can handle.As with grain handling, we’ve decentralised slaughtering and this will continue. The Country Party is afraid this trend will tip the voting balance of power in our favour. ‘They’ve become the slave of the Liberals,hardly serving country interests at all. It’s nothing to crow about.’
Strong stuff indeed in these days of obsequious laborite subservience.Where it’s leaders say one thing and do another, their words not matching their deeds. Overall, most of the people who showed up to seemed to be Doc supporters. They applauded when he laid into the Liberals. And they gave him a thirty second standing ovation, as if to send word to Heckle and Jeckle.
Doc acknowledged their right to speak also. ‘I’ve come to listen,too’. He said he understood he made himself a target by putting forth a substantive plan that his opponents could use as a weapon against him.
As with that of Menzies’, the meeting was tremendously exciting for a whippersnapper like myself.Like Evatt up on the ute, the ideas were a bit above my head, but from my eye level, I was moved by the theatricality and emotion of the occasions, the sheer excitement that was generated in the good people all around me and the arguments that Dad explained to me on the way home.
‘Why did that clodhopper go and tell Dr.Evatt to go back to Russia,Dad?I asked.
‘ He’s pig ignorant,Al. Bert’s never been to Moscow. He’s a Maitland boy. Some yahoos presume those who are different to them ought to be living somewhere else.’
‘These wallies can always up fiddlesticks and go back to Woop-woop’,I suggested,citing that mythical Australian nowhere place’.
Such scenes are rare nowadays.These were not just some of the hand-picked, party- supporters-only events that pass for public meetings these days.Ones where the requirement for a campaign event to look good on the TV news, with candidates prepackaged like TV dinners, has killed a lot of spontaneity. As have the needs, real or imagined, of security.
Dad pressed upon me a strong honest work ethic and the belief that anything could be achieved through persistence.He sat me down in the back yard one day and spoke man to me man as follows: ‘Let me give you a slice of my advice for what it’s worth, Allypal.Whether in this line of work or in schoolwork,do it properly,not any old how. Never do things by halves.Whatever you go at,always give full measure.When you’re weighing spuds,seven pounds means seven pounds-or slightly over-never under.A small icecream means a full rounded scoop-not a half hearted scrape.People know if they’re getting short weight. Give them their money’s worth.Otherwise they’ll take their custom elsewhere.’
‘Up the road to Bruce Douglas’.I said,referring to our comparably sized competitor in the main street’.
‘The same goes at school,he went on. ‘Study up on everything that your teachers ask you.Put your mind to it.Keep your thinking cap on tightly. There’s a good boy.You’re as clever as anyone else,second to none. I’ve got such high hopes for you. With a good education you can have opportunities we never had.You’ll be amazed what you can do if you set your mind to it. No matter what,do the right thing and you’ll make the grade.That’s the way to go.All any father can expect.You’ll have the world on the end of a string’.
‘And I’ll do it’, I sang in my childish treble, standing up,reeling down my yo yo, ‘with a bing,bang,bong.'
‘Good for you’he said.You know what I say about rainy days.’ How could I forget.It had been on such a day when we had taken shelter in the bank’s classical building in Sydney.It was in it’s likeness that my uniquely designed Heritage pressed tin container was printed and shaped.
‘ People recognise this model,like the bank ’,he said,squeezing the sides of the tin without being able to bend them, ‘as something substantial, constant, and reliable.
These boxes were sealed,without an opening for small fingered temptation.Unlike today when personal savings count for little and financial credit and spending for everything,people were encouraged to actively put aside. Upon my handing the tin to the teller,he proceeded to rip it open and disgorge the contents.He then handed me a new one.
Dad told me on the way home, ‘Like your box, unlike the private banks, The Commonwealth belongs to the Australian people. Chifley and Evatt tried to have them all publicly owned.They moved to nationalize them to serve as a model.They wanted the elected government,not the private bankers, to direct the course of the nation’s economy. They had done this to steer us through the war.And what direction would that be that?’
‘Straight ahead,on the up and up’,I said stretching my arm forward and curving it upwards.
‘Too right.’
‘And how do you think the bankers responded?’
‘I bet they didn’t like that.’
‘They kicked up one hell of a stink’he said,pinching his nose.‘So strong,I wouldn’t wrap fish in it.
Before the last election these enemies of Labour made much it as signs of--- ‘creeping Communism,he said putting on a scary voice and face.’ They spent big bikkies in a publicity campaign to scare people. They marshalled bank clerks to demonstrate in the street and at public meetings. Supporters feared being stabbed to death by a fountain pen.’he jested.‘Even though it was popular-many people remember the bankers from the Depression as greedy bloodsuckers who drove people out of their homes for not making their payments,shylocks who produce nothing.Labour lost.’
‘So Menzies had the private bankers in his corner’.I said. ‘Always circling each other, he and Evatt must be very different kinds of men’.
‘On the face of it,they are alike.Like Menzies, Evatt is a legal eagle .Both chose public life instead of enriching themselves through the law. They are both silks,having reached the acme of their profession.But there the similarity stops. Menzies is as cunning as a fox.He can pull a swifty as niftily as Doc’s dad could pull a beer.His appeal is to what he sees as the great sober middle class,the ‘forgotten class’ he talks of. He credits them as the real Australians, having the strong arms of "lifters" ‘,he said,flexing his biceps, ‘instead of the flabby bellies of "leaners". He plays them off against those he portrays as the monied and powerful on the one hand, and the unionised working class on the other.He wants better paid workers to see themselves as middle class.’
‘ ‘The working class can kiss my arse, I’ve got the foreman’s job at last’, I said, getting the drift, echoing and amplifying cynical comments I had picked up around the traps. ‘ ‘Working class!These lazy layabouts can’t even spell it. Like those employed by the council. Those bludgers have never done an honest day’s work in their lives.People say nothing is impossible,but they do nothing every day.Yet they want something in return. Work fascinates them - they can look at it for hours! Where are those elbows and backs? They wouldn’t work in an iron lung,’ I said,bunging it on. ‘They lean on their shovels in the fresh air while honourable accountants sweat in their offices lifting their pens and businessmen break their backs lifting their takings.’
‘ You’ve got it,Al,’ he said,a little surprised at my precocious parroting. ‘Seriously though,Doc is in principle dedicated to doing away with poverty and unemployment.He sees them as the worst menace to peace. Menzies wants things to be kept the same through free enterprise.Free of government control. Evatt wants social change to be achieved through a strengthened central government.’
‘ Like in the Soviet Union?’I asked earnestly.
‘Nowhere to that extent,’he answered. ‘I share Doc’s faith and reliance in our existing political and legal order. I am of the firm belief that we can achieve social and economic reform within our institutional framework.We can legislate socialism into existence and capitalism out of it.’‘What has Doc done in the way of improving things?’I asked.
‘ He’s really shone on on the world stage.As Australia’s foreign minister, he worked to make Australia an independent nation in the Asia Pacific region, with it’s own voice.He learned during the war that we have to stand on our own two feet.Our American cousins promised him more planes for us but never came through with the delivery. Like piecrust their promises were meant to be broken. He discovered both Britain and America were committed to a 'beat Hitler first' strategy.They made decisions that affected us without consulting us.’
‘How did he help us stand on our own two feet?’
‘From his years in office,he has left two lasting contributions to our security that really stand out. The first was to swing Australia behind the Indonesian Republic,to help it become independent from the Netherlands.He believes creating fast stable allies near to home safeguards Australia's northern approaches and means a better defence for Australia. We can’t forget the little resistance the Japanese encountered as they marched down through Asia.I never want to see you having to go through what we did,’he assured me,putting his hand on my shoulder.
‘And the second?’
‘ Doc’s other big part was in the founding of the United Nations - especially his fight for the rights of the smaller powers. This gave the ‘big boys’ who stacked the odds against them the pip. They saw him as as impertinent.
‘How does Menzies see him,’I asked.
‘As for his main adversary,there’s no love lost between these two’,he said. ‘During the war Menzies and Co. dished the dirt that Doc was fleeing the Japanese when he attended talks with our allies.
‘Gosh,Dad that’s terrible’,I said.
‘He was there to argue Australia’s case. ‘He was there to argue Australia’s case. Never let it be said Doc was in in any way, shape, or form yellow’.he scoffed. ‘ He was constantly flying the Pacific in Navy planes that could be shot down at any time.And it wasn’t just that. He always attracted the worst kind of vicious scuttlebutt.From those who should have known better. Archbishop Duhig said in 1942 he regarded Evatt "as the most dangerous man in Australia, an out-and-out Communist in sympathy, anti-religious and particularly anti-Catholic". And the mud stuck. But who was he to talk? He and other knockers were all for Franco and Mussolini at the time.Because they were taking on the Communists.’
‘I thought Franco was on our side,’I said. ‘Some of the nuns and priests speak highly of him.’
‘Franco brought in Moorish infidel troops to put down the democratically elected Spanish government,’he replied. ‘Hitler sent his planes to bomb the loyalists, most of whom were Catholics in name.But he’s on our side.Work that one out.’
I did- but it would take a bit longer.The Church,I would learn, had a lot to answer for soft pedalling fascism.
We reached the designated meeting place where a crowd had gathered and we squeezed through for a ringside view.It was just about time for the return bout . We waited expectantly,me on tiptoes, for the bare-knuckle contender to take on Menzies, his reply in their stem-winding stoush.
It wasn’t over fashion.Just as well.In all his visits to London, Norman Hartnell’s had not been part of his itinerary.Clotheswise he was lagging,his suit it was sagging. The rumpled contender turned up,pressing the flesh, wearing a plain baggy grey suit that hung on him loosely, his hand clasping a large grey felt hat. After an introduction by the local ALP party representative,the Maitland Militant took up his position..His delivery platform was no less the tailgate of a utility vehicle.However as a speaker,Menzies had his match in Evatt. The stocky, broad-shouldered figure of earlier years was acquiring a paunch,but spoke with a punch,with a carefully cultivated broad, nasal,flat-toned, proletarian twang. In concise, understandable language,this stormy petrel parried Menzies’ earlier thrusts , getting stuck into the government’s policies and answering a host of curly questions bluntly with conviction. While Menzies was not present, a sprinkling of his barrackers were on hand to badger Doc.
‘We’ve got to stop the sale or sabotage of successful public enterprises’he cried,going on the attack.
‘Well stone the flaming crows,what’s it to you?’ one impudent heckler chiacked from the back.
‘ Most of us lose by it’,Doc said matter-of-factly. ‘In each case the area of exploitation is widened because the safeguards against monopoly-namely competition by sucessful undertakings-have been removed. These belong to the people.That’s about it’he declared. He didn’t hold back exposing the motives of his coalition rivals.He declared that despite their name changes,today more than ever they represented the almost unbridled financial power of a few wealthy trusts,combines and monopolies.
‘ What’s in it for you? ‘the heckler continued.
‘A wigwam for a goose’s bridle,’shot back The Doc ,realizing the extent of the heckler’s maturity.
‘Do you want to try it on?’
His offsider obviously did. This ruddy faced mug lair in gabardine riding breeches and polished riding boots craked , “What are ya? If you don’t like it here,go back to Russia!”
Without missing a beat,Doc ignored this,refusing to become unstuck by such distracting ratbaggery.‘You’re all about sharing wealth’,cried the lair. ‘If you had two cars, would you give me one.’
‘Nothing of the sort..But if I had two brains,I’d give you one,sport. Now where was I?‘Of course, this power is why these bigshots have imposed the ‘wool grab’ ’,The Doc picked up,referring to the tax on wool producers. ‘This is why they’ve broken their solemn promise to impose an excess profits tax on wealthy corporations. They’ve let prices run away. These groups believe in one freedom-the freedom to exploit the rest of the community.
‘Bullshit!’cawed the the first taunter raucously.
‘Ah ,my friends,we have an artist in our midst.I’ll come back to your chosen field of interest in a second ,Sir’,said The Doc.without batting an eyelid.
At the bidding of a few wealthy graziers, the Country Party has scuttled our policy of bringing more industry to the bush.The second moleskinned heckler cawed once again derisively, ‘ Bullshit!’
Unruffled, The Doc put him in his place: ‘ I assure you,old son,there’ll be more of this than you can handle.As with grain handling, we’ve decentralised slaughtering and this will continue. The Country Party is afraid this trend will tip the voting balance of power in our favour. ‘They’ve become the slave of the Liberals,hardly serving country interests at all. It’s nothing to crow about.’
Strong stuff indeed in these days of obsequious laborite subservience.Where it’s leaders say one thing and do another, their words not matching their deeds. Overall, most of the people who showed up to seemed to be Doc supporters. They applauded when he laid into the Liberals. And they gave him a thirty second standing ovation, as if to send word to Heckle and Jeckle.
Doc acknowledged their right to speak also. ‘I’ve come to listen,too’. He said he understood he made himself a target by putting forth a substantive plan that his opponents could use as a weapon against him.
As with that of Menzies’, the meeting was tremendously exciting for a whippersnapper like myself.Like Evatt up on the ute, the ideas were a bit above my head, but from my eye level, I was moved by the theatricality and emotion of the occasions, the sheer excitement that was generated in the good people all around me and the arguments that Dad explained to me on the way home.
‘Why did that clodhopper go and tell Dr.Evatt to go back to Russia,Dad?I asked.
‘ He’s pig ignorant,Al. Bert’s never been to Moscow. He’s a Maitland boy. Some yahoos presume those who are different to them ought to be living somewhere else.’
‘These wallies can always up fiddlesticks and go back to Woop-woop’,I suggested,citing that mythical Australian nowhere place’.
Such scenes are rare nowadays.These were not just some of the hand-picked, party- supporters-only events that pass for public meetings these days.Ones where the requirement for a campaign event to look good on the TV news, with candidates prepackaged like TV dinners, has killed a lot of spontaneity. As have the needs, real or imagined, of security.
Dad pressed upon me a strong honest work ethic and the belief that anything could be achieved through persistence.He sat me down in the back yard one day and spoke man to me man as follows: ‘Let me give you a slice of my advice for what it’s worth, Allypal.Whether in this line of work or in schoolwork,do it properly,not any old how. Never do things by halves.Whatever you go at,always give full measure.When you’re weighing spuds,seven pounds means seven pounds-or slightly over-never under.A small icecream means a full rounded scoop-not a half hearted scrape.People know if they’re getting short weight. Give them their money’s worth.Otherwise they’ll take their custom elsewhere.’
‘Up the road to Bruce Douglas’.I said,referring to our comparably sized competitor in the main street’.
‘The same goes at school,he went on. ‘Study up on everything that your teachers ask you.Put your mind to it.Keep your thinking cap on tightly. There’s a good boy.You’re as clever as anyone else,second to none. I’ve got such high hopes for you. With a good education you can have opportunities we never had.You’ll be amazed what you can do if you set your mind to it. No matter what,do the right thing and you’ll make the grade.That’s the way to go.All any father can expect.You’ll have the world on the end of a string’.
‘And I’ll do it’, I sang in my childish treble, standing up,reeling down my yo yo, ‘with a bing,bang,bong.'
The Great Divide.
My father’s reflexive support for the Australian Labour Party which claimed to represent the working class and the have-nots stemmed from consideration that went deeper than this. You see 20th Century political life in Australia was shaped as much by religious as class factors. My father grew up in a time of thriving sectarianism, when notions of being Catholic or Protestant, of religious discrimination, were of every day noteworthiness.
‘If you wanted a job in New South Wales in the thirties,’my father said, ‘ you had to put down what your religion was, and if you applied for a job in private enterprise and you were Roman Catholic you didn't get a job. That's why the public service was full of Catholics, both state and federal, because they had nowhere else to go to get jobs.’
If you trace the establishment in white Australia back in time, it can be seen as mostly British Protestant and middle to upper class in character which viewed with disdain and suspicion the significant Irish Catholic minority who gravitated to the ALP. Its leaders saw their Labour counterparts as exemplifying all the vices of the dictatorial Catholic Church and as being as beholden to it as to faceless trade unionist out to wreck the economy. They saw themselves as enshrining the notion of the individual, as representing the Protestant ideals of freedom of conscience and freedom of judgment. They regarded the requirement that Labour Party members sign the Pledge as something sinister and binding. They questioned the allegiances of its members when the bitter divide between Catholic and Protestant was starkly apparent during World War I.
“Where does your loyalty lie, to your King or to the Bishop of Rome?” my mother’s father was taunted when on leave from his military service as a motorcycle courier in France, “You have injured the honour and prestige of the Empire”, claimed some uninformed loyalists.
Fostering a similar moral sense of attachments to the organization as that by the Church, the ALP forged a remarkably cohesive alternative to the W.A.S.P.ish ascendancy. There were resonances between Catholic social thinking and the collectivist aspects of the ALP. Both were concerned with offsetting the harsh consequences of capitalism. The Irish connection brought with it a tradition of sympathy for the underdog and the colonized. Moreover the Party had a good reserve of prestige remaining after its wartime leadership.
“After the British garrison at Singapore fell to the Japanese, we were left largely undefended”. my father pointed out to me. “What’s more before the War, Menzies, or Pig Iron Bob as he got called, made matters worse by selling to Japan scrap iron which only got shot back at us. Only Curtin, could bail us out of this defeat”, he said referring to Australia’s wartime leader.
It would be the question of how far to go in fulfilling its social and economic objectives and the accompanying timetable that would test to the limit the cohesiveness of this labourite alliance of odd bedfellows – those of a secular tendency and those influenced by the Church.
Those who had started off the annual commemorative occasions culminating in the bonfire gatherings argued that this objective had already been achieved,but I was developing strong doubts about this.There were too many irons in this fire to control.
Commonwealth Day – or Empire Day as it was still known – a mostly British protestant enthusiasm and invention – was held to commemorate the triumph of civilization brought about where the British had held sway.The Empire which had imparted such great red swathes to the fading atlases in our classrooms. The aim of the day was to cultivate in us children a long table of virtues – such as temperance and politeness – said to have build the Empire. However I did pick up signs that not everyone was behind these aims. For starters those from an Irish Catholic background more lukewarm to its fading political purpose called it by a more palatable name – Cracker Night .
For all of us kids it was the wondrous day of whose coming we could talk of nothing else.An early release from school after lunch enabled us to get down to the real business of the day – testing of fireworks aplenty: extremely loud double bungers, jumping jacks under our feet and the screams as we jumped out of their way. catherine wheels pinned on a piece of wood which we had to struggle to get to spin, roman candles, star – showering rockets and all kinds of miniature home made bombs contrived from these.
Judging by the grizzling reported to the schools and in the newspapers of burns, injuries and larrikin atrocities such as exploding letterboxes, it seemed only a matter of time before this pyrotechnical feting of imperial virtues would phut and fizzle out.
For my part the fifties was a time of innocence, invention and imagination. Wacko the diddle-o,a free ranging time for that old gang of mine. Mother Nature had provided vast expanses in which we could
indulge in all kinds of diversions. We would shinny trees and go for a dip in the river. Even after the town swimming pool was built, we would still opt for the Namoi. You couldn’t beat swinging out from the bank on a rope and bombing each other. We dunked each other, holding each other under
water until eventually exploding out of the water in search of air. You couldn’t beat the freshness of running water without the addition of chlorine.
Some parts of the Namoi are much wider than others.At one particular spot I saw local tramps Jack Locock and B.O.Plenty on the opposite bank. ‘Yoo hoo!’ I shouted, ‘How can I get to the other side?’
Jack looked up the river then down the river and shouted back, ‘You ARE on the other side.’
‘What I mean is I want to get to the side you’re on.’
‘Wait on.I’ll come and get you.’He sculled over in an old rustbucket to collect me. ‘Row, row, row your boat,’I could hear him sing ,‘gently down the stream.Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,life is but a dream.’
‘Was this part of your dream,Jack,to have a fine vintage craft like this?’I asked. ‘It must have been launched when Long John Silver had two legs and an egg on his shoulder.’
‘It’s not mine.I’m just leasing it at present,but I have the option to buy.’
‘You used to be be quite well off,I believe,B.O..You were a stock and station agent and had a good income.What happened to it all?
‘I spent half my money on gambling, alcohol and taking out various women. The other half I wasted.’
‘Would it be so hard for you to dry out?’
‘I have been been sober for twenty days... just not all in a row’.
'Wouldn’t you like to live your life over,to start again from the beginning without making any mistakes?’
‘If I had to live my life over, I'd live over a saloon bar.But right now--I'm Popeye the Sailor Man, I'm Popeye the Sailor Man,’he sang as he skyed his oar, starting for his return voyage, ‘ I'm strong to the finish cause I eats me spinach. I'm Popeye the Sailor Man.’
My gang and I were adept at improvising various simple machines, devices machines, contraptions and whatnot. .My mates from up the lane helped me build the greatest billycart.We took turns on the slope of Mt.Porcupine.They had it downhill while I had it uphill. We built billy carts from all kinds of bits and pieces. Nothing got wasted then.Strike a light, I nearly did when I started making bolt bombs. I prepared these by tightly packing match heads into the cavity formed by two bolts and screwing them into a common nut. The detonating report I produced by slinging them onto the walls of an enclosed garage was invariably so loud it could waken the dead. The trajectory of the projectile – and my own – was more herky jerky.
As with the fireworks we played around with, with such abandon, this off-the-wall experimentation wasn’t geared to enhancing our nuts and bolts understanding of ballistics or combustions, as it should have been, but was just larking around. I almost copped the odd bolt from the blue on my own nut. I would just have to bide my time to use legally sanctioned explosives.Eventually I would go about trying to blow the lid off the biggest can of garbage in Australia.One officialdom would try to keep down tightly. ‘Cos I was doing it with words.But more of that later.
I then adjusted my sights to contriving missiles that could be guided better with less bang. On both counts I slipped up.By a long shot. The missile went right off the radar. The report, not at the point of discharge, rather at the point of landing, was thunderous.
Too Close For Comfort.
I had gotten into building a crossbow simply from a grooved plank used for flooring. Old bicycle tyres provided the thrust, nails the arrowhead. Pressing my lips together,I took a deep breath through my nostrils and steadied myself.Fire away! Poof!The first arrow I shot was like the one in the verse “I shot an arrow in the air, it fell to earth I know not where”.Gee whiz, I found out where the next day when the boys in blue came around. They were following up a report made by a neighbour quivering with trepidation. They were trying to get wind of the source of the arrow that landed next him, a block away. He was busy at his workbench, when the missile thudded into it. Jacob Enks, a local butcher, was nearly skewered himself by the Phantom Archer. My father assured them that I would never displease him by getting into such a fix.‘What happened to that archery you were so into?’he asked me later.
‘Never heard of it.’I had dropped it on the spot.T’was a fair cop. With other strings to my bow, it was then that I turned my interest to bicycles.
Home On The Range
.
Roaming unencumbered the wide open, sunburnt countryside with my mates, through paddocks of golden wheat and pastures of plenty, past sagging silos,we never rushed our fences.Whether on ground or pumping the pedals of our bikes, wherever our happy feet took us,the days seemed to
stretch endlessly in front.Each one a blissfully carefree day. Zip-a-dee-doo-dah, zip-a-dee-ay.
'Allan, why do you always get so dirty?’my mum would ask,taking care to scrub my feet.’
‘Well Mum, I'm a lot closer to the ground than you are.’
I developed an appreciation of seasonal change,it’s working on the human spirit as well as the landscape and the natural order of things. Each day brought an almost infinite number of sensual impressions of colour,sound smell taste and touch. We were introduced to the wonders of the
bush. Learning to recognise the different wild flowers and trees, we took wild flowers back to school or home to press and save.Learning first hand about local wild-life, we studied the copious insects crawling under the foliage and those preparing for takeoff.
Like Leo Cullum I could see things from the caterpillars point of view.They do all the ground work while the butterfly gets all the glory.
I told one of my mates ‘Did you know butterflies only live for about one month?’
He said, ‘That’s a myth.’
‘No, it’s definitely a butterfly.’
We looked for birds’ nests tucked in tree boughs,sometimes with newly hatched birds. We got to know which colour and size of egg belonged to which bird.
The birds in turn looked out for us.
Brimming over with vim and vigour, our style was cramped only by the occasional snake slithering through the grass and putting the wind up us. Any venom I would draw would come later in life from one of the local two legged variety.
As for these slippery legless customers my moving experience with them remains firmly embedded in my mind’s eye . After receiving an air rifle for my birthday I had the bright idea of sniping at sparrows on the bank of the Namoi River for target practice.As the slow, soothing motion of the river trickled through the reeds,I took potshots at any perched preeners. After an hour or so of this senseless massacre, I felt a rustling of grass underneath where I had taken up firing position. Looking down my heart was going like the clappers. Zounds! I was staring face to face with a brown snake. It’s beady eyed head was engorged with the bodies of the passing passerines I had demolished.My eye was on the sparrow.He was watching under me. Decamping gingerly, I vowed never again to kill willfully any creature, without good reason.
This was not a good time for sparrows. While I was on the rampage, Chinese sparrows were systematically being wiped out on the orders of Mao Zhe-dung. They were being targeted along with flies,mosquitoes and mice in the great campaign to rid China of pests.Not that anyone in our parts had any sympathy for these little critters.On the need to rid the land of pests which eat grain seeds , Australian farmers and the Chinese Communists were in agreement.Moreover they agreed on the importance of Australian sales of wheat and wool to China .We were feeding and clothing the reputed enemy.
‘If you wanted a job in New South Wales in the thirties,’my father said, ‘ you had to put down what your religion was, and if you applied for a job in private enterprise and you were Roman Catholic you didn't get a job. That's why the public service was full of Catholics, both state and federal, because they had nowhere else to go to get jobs.’
If you trace the establishment in white Australia back in time, it can be seen as mostly British Protestant and middle to upper class in character which viewed with disdain and suspicion the significant Irish Catholic minority who gravitated to the ALP. Its leaders saw their Labour counterparts as exemplifying all the vices of the dictatorial Catholic Church and as being as beholden to it as to faceless trade unionist out to wreck the economy. They saw themselves as enshrining the notion of the individual, as representing the Protestant ideals of freedom of conscience and freedom of judgment. They regarded the requirement that Labour Party members sign the Pledge as something sinister and binding. They questioned the allegiances of its members when the bitter divide between Catholic and Protestant was starkly apparent during World War I.
Fostering a similar moral sense of attachments to the organization as that by the Church, the ALP forged a remarkably cohesive alternative to the W.A.S.P.ish ascendancy. There were resonances between Catholic social thinking and the collectivist aspects of the ALP. Both were concerned with offsetting the harsh consequences of capitalism. The Irish connection brought with it a tradition of sympathy for the underdog and the colonized. Moreover the Party had a good reserve of prestige remaining after its wartime leadership.
“After the British garrison at Singapore fell to the Japanese, we were left largely undefended”. my father pointed out to me. “What’s more before the War, Menzies, or Pig Iron Bob as he got called, made matters worse by selling to Japan scrap iron which only got shot back at us. Only Curtin, could bail us out of this defeat”, he said referring to Australia’s wartime leader.
It would be the question of how far to go in fulfilling its social and economic objectives and the accompanying timetable that would test to the limit the cohesiveness of this labourite alliance of odd bedfellows – those of a secular tendency and those influenced by the Church.
The Light on the Hill
The brilliant glow lighting up the firmament over the generously named Mt. Porcupine [264m.] drew me and my friends like moths on this one night of the year with the promise of exciting and amusing goings-on. When I first saw it I plain wondered if this were the ‘Light on the Hill’ spoken about by Chifley and relayed to me by my father. A metaphor for the objective of crackerjack government, great happiness and prosperity, it was one whose accomplishment would come to dominate my life’s thoughts.Those who had started off the annual commemorative occasions culminating in the bonfire gatherings argued that this objective had already been achieved,but I was developing strong doubts about this.There were too many irons in this fire to control.
Commonwealth Day – or Empire Day as it was still known – a mostly British protestant enthusiasm and invention – was held to commemorate the triumph of civilization brought about where the British had held sway.The Empire which had imparted such great red swathes to the fading atlases in our classrooms. The aim of the day was to cultivate in us children a long table of virtues – such as temperance and politeness – said to have build the Empire. However I did pick up signs that not everyone was behind these aims. For starters those from an Irish Catholic background more lukewarm to its fading political purpose called it by a more palatable name – Cracker Night .
For all of us kids it was the wondrous day of whose coming we could talk of nothing else.An early release from school after lunch enabled us to get down to the real business of the day – testing of fireworks aplenty: extremely loud double bungers, jumping jacks under our feet and the screams as we jumped out of their way. catherine wheels pinned on a piece of wood which we had to struggle to get to spin, roman candles, star – showering rockets and all kinds of miniature home made bombs contrived from these.
Judging by the grizzling reported to the schools and in the newspapers of burns, injuries and larrikin atrocities such as exploding letterboxes, it seemed only a matter of time before this pyrotechnical feting of imperial virtues would phut and fizzle out.
Free Rein.
indulge in all kinds of diversions. We would shinny trees and go for a dip in the river. Even after the town swimming pool was built, we would still opt for the Namoi. You couldn’t beat swinging out from the bank on a rope and bombing each other. We dunked each other, holding each other under
water until eventually exploding out of the water in search of air. You couldn’t beat the freshness of running water without the addition of chlorine.
Some parts of the Namoi are much wider than others.At one particular spot I saw local tramps Jack Locock and B.O.Plenty on the opposite bank. ‘Yoo hoo!’ I shouted, ‘How can I get to the other side?’
Jack looked up the river then down the river and shouted back, ‘You ARE on the other side.’
‘What I mean is I want to get to the side you’re on.’
‘Wait on.I’ll come and get you.’He sculled over in an old rustbucket to collect me. ‘Row, row, row your boat,’I could hear him sing ,‘gently down the stream.Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,life is but a dream.’
‘Was this part of your dream,Jack,to have a fine vintage craft like this?’I asked. ‘It must have been launched when Long John Silver had two legs and an egg on his shoulder.’
‘It’s not mine.I’m just leasing it at present,but I have the option to buy.’
‘You used to be be quite well off,I believe,B.O..You were a stock and station agent and had a good income.What happened to it all?
‘I spent half my money on gambling, alcohol and taking out various women. The other half I wasted.’
‘Would it be so hard for you to dry out?’
‘I have been been sober for twenty days... just not all in a row’.
'Wouldn’t you like to live your life over,to start again from the beginning without making any mistakes?’
‘If I had to live my life over, I'd live over a saloon bar.But right now--I'm Popeye the Sailor Man, I'm Popeye the Sailor Man,’he sang as he skyed his oar, starting for his return voyage, ‘ I'm strong to the finish cause I eats me spinach. I'm Popeye the Sailor Man.’
My gang and I were adept at improvising various simple machines, devices machines, contraptions and whatnot. .My mates from up the lane helped me build the greatest billycart.We took turns on the slope of Mt.Porcupine.They had it downhill while I had it uphill. We built billy carts from all kinds of bits and pieces. Nothing got wasted then.Strike a light, I nearly did when I started making bolt bombs. I prepared these by tightly packing match heads into the cavity formed by two bolts and screwing them into a common nut. The detonating report I produced by slinging them onto the walls of an enclosed garage was invariably so loud it could waken the dead. The trajectory of the projectile – and my own – was more herky jerky.
As with the fireworks we played around with, with such abandon, this off-the-wall experimentation wasn’t geared to enhancing our nuts and bolts understanding of ballistics or combustions, as it should have been, but was just larking around. I almost copped the odd bolt from the blue on my own nut. I would just have to bide my time to use legally sanctioned explosives.Eventually I would go about trying to blow the lid off the biggest can of garbage in Australia.One officialdom would try to keep down tightly. ‘Cos I was doing it with words.But more of that later.
I then adjusted my sights to contriving missiles that could be guided better with less bang. On both counts I slipped up.By a long shot. The missile went right off the radar. The report, not at the point of discharge, rather at the point of landing, was thunderous.
Too Close For Comfort.
I had gotten into building a crossbow simply from a grooved plank used for flooring. Old bicycle tyres provided the thrust, nails the arrowhead. Pressing my lips together,I took a deep breath through my nostrils and steadied myself.Fire away! Poof!The first arrow I shot was like the one in the verse “I shot an arrow in the air, it fell to earth I know not where”.Gee whiz, I found out where the next day when the boys in blue came around. They were following up a report made by a neighbour quivering with trepidation. They were trying to get wind of the source of the arrow that landed next him, a block away. He was busy at his workbench, when the missile thudded into it. Jacob Enks, a local butcher, was nearly skewered himself by the Phantom Archer. My father assured them that I would never displease him by getting into such a fix.‘What happened to that archery you were so into?’he asked me later.
‘Never heard of it.’I had dropped it on the spot.T’was a fair cop. With other strings to my bow, it was then that I turned my interest to bicycles.
Home On The Range
Roaming unencumbered the wide open, sunburnt countryside with my mates, through paddocks of golden wheat and pastures of plenty, past sagging silos,we never rushed our fences.Whether on ground or pumping the pedals of our bikes, wherever our happy feet took us,the days seemed to
stretch endlessly in front.Each one a blissfully carefree day. Zip-a-dee-doo-dah, zip-a-dee-ay.
'Allan, why do you always get so dirty?’my mum would ask,taking care to scrub my feet.’
‘Well Mum, I'm a lot closer to the ground than you are.’
I developed an appreciation of seasonal change,it’s working on the human spirit as well as the landscape and the natural order of things. Each day brought an almost infinite number of sensual impressions of colour,sound smell taste and touch. We were introduced to the wonders of the
bush. Learning to recognise the different wild flowers and trees, we took wild flowers back to school or home to press and save.Learning first hand about local wild-life, we studied the copious insects crawling under the foliage and those preparing for takeoff.
Like Leo Cullum I could see things from the caterpillars point of view.They do all the ground work while the butterfly gets all the glory.
I told one of my mates ‘Did you know butterflies only live for about one month?’
He said, ‘That’s a myth.’
‘No, it’s definitely a butterfly.’
We looked for birds’ nests tucked in tree boughs,sometimes with newly hatched birds. We got to know which colour and size of egg belonged to which bird.
The birds in turn looked out for us.
As for these slippery legless customers my moving experience with them remains firmly embedded in my mind’s eye . After receiving an air rifle for my birthday I had the bright idea of sniping at sparrows on the bank of the Namoi River for target practice.As the slow, soothing motion of the river trickled through the reeds,I took potshots at any perched preeners. After an hour or so of this senseless massacre, I felt a rustling of grass underneath where I had taken up firing position. Looking down my heart was going like the clappers. Zounds! I was staring face to face with a brown snake. It’s beady eyed head was engorged with the bodies of the passing passerines I had demolished.My eye was on the sparrow.He was watching under me. Decamping gingerly, I vowed never again to kill willfully any creature, without good reason.
This was not a good time for sparrows. While I was on the rampage, Chinese sparrows were systematically being wiped out on the orders of Mao Zhe-dung. They were being targeted along with flies,mosquitoes and mice in the great campaign to rid China of pests.Not that anyone in our parts had any sympathy for these little critters.On the need to rid the land of pests which eat grain seeds , Australian farmers and the Chinese Communists were in agreement.Moreover they agreed on the importance of Australian sales of wheat and wool to China .We were feeding and clothing the reputed enemy.
The railroad track ran through the middle of Gunnedah, punctuating the day. There were two services to Sydney at that time, the morning run and the other which went through about 8:00 at night.Those times of the day were of of greatest excitement. I got increasingly restless whenever I heard the whistle of a train . Like the horn of a ship or the roar of a plane,this is one of the most romantic-or loneliest- sounds.
I watched the trains from the lookout on the hill behind the town. Mt Porcupine offers a vast panorama of the plains around the mountains to the North West. Gazing in this direction, a strong subliminal itch in my legs, I would often think about what lay beyond,over the hills and far away. Such a lot of world to see. For starters that Eurasian land mass with it’s strange sounding names was calling me. When would I would go there and what lay in store for me?
Straddling the Saddle.
In the meantime I was happy to breeze through these sweeping plains at my own pace graduating to a larger saddle, with the addition of horsepower.With a touch of bling,I painted the foot frames with gold paint. ‘Giddyup there,Treacle,’I’d whisper.My horse had golden stirrups.
The great outdoors, the properties of friends, saw me covering new terrain in a wide range of maneuvers- cantering up and down hills, jumping over ditches, making the dust fly, fording shallow creeks and climbing the surrounding embankments, the clop of hooves ringing on the hard black soil. All placing me in good stead for the gymkhana, the games on horseback.Combed,curried and washed behind the ears,I moved as one with my mount,sound in wind and limb, competing with the horsey set in all manner of races, individual, relay, weaving, and a variety of novelty events to demonstrate my horsemanship. Yippie-yi-yo-ki-yay. The real test was to decide what to do with all the ribbons that were generously awarded. The more practical minded made them into blankets and saddle clothes.
Straddling the Saddle.
In the meantime I was happy to breeze through these sweeping plains at my own pace graduating to a larger saddle, with the addition of horsepower.With a touch of bling,I painted the foot frames with gold paint. ‘Giddyup there,Treacle,’I’d whisper.My horse had golden stirrups.
The great outdoors, the properties of friends, saw me covering new terrain in a wide range of maneuvers- cantering up and down hills, jumping over ditches, making the dust fly, fording shallow creeks and climbing the surrounding embankments, the clop of hooves ringing on the hard black soil. All placing me in good stead for the gymkhana, the games on horseback.Combed,curried and washed behind the ears,I moved as one with my mount,sound in wind and limb, competing with the horsey set in all manner of races, individual, relay, weaving, and a variety of novelty events to demonstrate my horsemanship. Yippie-yi-yo-ki-yay. The real test was to decide what to do with all the ribbons that were generously awarded. The more practical minded made them into blankets and saddle clothes.
There was one creature I would continue to kill - but with good reason. Its flesh was double delicious. One of my more rewarding pastimes was ‘fishing’ for yabbies, fresh water crayfish in a pond adjacent to the Namoi River. It was remarkably simple-even simpler than the way Elvis had sung about in”Crawfish,’ dispensing with his big long hook and a big long pole, By dangling a piece of meat tied to a length of string in the water, I would soon attract a yabby who would nab the piece in
its claws and try to make off with it. I had to make sure the meat wasn’t me.
to scoop it out with a net and take it back home to the pot. Tout de suite, the claws so succulent, the meat so sweet .
My family's menu consisted of two choices: take it or leave it.The standard dish was steak with mash and veggies,albeit with 57 varieties.Followed the next day by lamb chops with bubble and squeak .Served with a simple salad,my yabby dish was a nice break.
I would pass on my knowledge of this unique savoir fare to Andre Simon, the doyen of writers on wine and food after he sent me his good wishes.
He wrote the best selling ‘A Concise Encyclopedia of Gastronomy’ and scores more. Keen as mustard on catering to the refined palate of this illustrious veteran of the Great War, I invited the grand old man of literate connoisseurship to come and savour some mouth-watering bush tucker. Knowing this anglicized Frenchman’s love of language I wanted to regale him with my debonair impression of Clouseauese, that mimicking by Peter Sellers of the French who can’t quite get their tongues around certain English words. My greetings would have been something like the following ‘Monsieur Simon, we welcome yeu (you) to our arse (house) make yeuerself (yourself) at heum (home)’.
While preparing a real slap-up meal , I was to have have invited him into our kitchen to demonstrate and pass on the butchering and vocal skills of the bush poissonier,bursting through the tough shell of this hardy crustacean and into my smooth cover of Elvis’ Crawfish:
See I got him, see the size
Come dinnertime with a soupcon of colonial etiquette, this cordon bleu was to place my honoured guest next to my Dad,the host.I was to do the honours, proudly unveiling this non-pareil culinary
delight with a sweep of my hand and a gallic flourish . ‘Voila- la piece de resistance!Bon appetit!’
Accompanied by some crisp bon mots and a bottle of vintage ‘plonk’ from my parents one stop shop. Andre was always bemused how the Australian troops couldn’t quite get their tongues around the words ‘vin blanc’.
I would have liked to have opened the bottle with my French Army Knife but Michael Crawford hadn’t yet drawn up the blueprint.
‘ Formidable! C’est si bon!’ Andre said. 'I’ve just spent a month in France and it’s Chardonnay 'as got nothing on this.’
‘Naturellement,’ I said. ‘Over there, their Chardonnay is domestically produced. Ours is imported.’
Alas this deluxe banquet in the backblocks was never to be.The tyranny of distance proved the overriding snag.Andre would have had bigger fish to fry closer to home. The secret of ‘Yabby Salade avec Plonk du Jeur’ would remain so that much longer.
Thriving in this secure burgeoning world, thoughtful in all matters of the mind and plenty serious, I whiled away much of my leisure time engrossed in the radio, the picture theatre and books.Once I got into serious reading that was it. I became fascinated with the writers and actors I encountered, and the literary and theatrical sets in which they consorted. These opened a window on the outside world for me.The wide world of thoughts and dreams, myths, ideas, inspirations, intuitions brought into being by the human imagination since the dawn of consciousness.Not just something decorative, much of the costumery we wear,the songs we sing and so on. More deeply the body of ethical and moral values that we place around each individual to keep at bay the barbaric heart that history teaches us lies beneath the surface of all humans.Our culture that enables us to make sense out of sensation,to find order and meaning in a universe that doesn’t give it freely.The glue that allows civilisation to happen and wards off alienation.
The radio acted to dispel any sense of isolation, being my main source of news, music and entertainment.My first was a crystal set that I was attached to,curled up under the bedcovers at night.My ritual before getting shuteye.The single family wireless receiver was built like a piece of furniture and took up a whole corner of the lounge room.
Radio stretched my imagination letting me create my own mental pictures around what I was listening to. High on my list in this regard were the improvised BBC ‘In All Directions’ and ‘The Goons’ of which I was one of the many listeners throughout the world.
‘In All Directions’ regarded as a forerunner of the Goon Show featured Peter Ustinov and Peter Jones in a Beckettesque road movie, driving round in a perpetual search for Copthorne Avenue. Peter was a real card who exploited his renowned gift for mimicry to the full . The comedy derived from the characters they met along the way, often also played by themselves.I aimed to emulate Ustinov’s fine ear for characters and sounds, his perfect command of accent and intonation. I worked at reproducing musical instruments, bird cries in our garden and car impersonations.By taking off his, mine were so accurate that I could get people to leap on to the pavement to avoid being r.un down by non-existent vehicles.It was my ‘car's’ cold start one morning that led to my father jumping out of bed,expecting to see his car being driven off.
Such skills could come in handy.Once on a visit to Sydney a trio of louts tried to occupy my seat in a train carriage.I flipped out, acting as if I had been bitten by a rabid dog.This sent them packing.
The Goons’ zany miscellany of skits and bits mixed cockamanie plots with surreal humour, catchphrases,quips and cranks, and an array of daffy and bizarre sound effects. Appealing to the latent eccentric in me it sharpened my sense of the absurd.The bubbling humour they created also infected the Monty Python team and the Beatles, all who would give me great delectation.It would be the sound of his troublesome stomach that would announce the arrival of the cloddish Major Dennis Bloodnok, a well known coward who deserted from the British Army. This was one of the many characters of Peter, the impressionists’ impressionist, who could even do a Spike Milligan, his fellow Goon. Peter took on the voice of Hercules Grytpype, a smooth talking con man. Peter was Hercules Grytpype, a smooth talking con man. He was the twittish boy scout Bluebottle whose flummoxed and flummoxing persiflage with Eccles take place in many of the Goons scripts.
At the other end of the age spectrum he was the extraordinarily antediluvian Henry Grun who defies old age and the dreaded lurgy with ‘Get Fat Hormones’. Having lived in India Peter was a master at taking off the broken English Hindi accent through his characters Lalkaka and Banerjee. The Goons’ characters were largely based on dimwits or cads they came across in the forces, or in Peter’s case at a minor public school. With their vocal dexterity their characters took on a life of their own. The Goons was a showcase for Peter’s improvisational talent with he and Milligan,perfect foils, sparking ideas and situations off each other.I aimed to capture such clever casualness and off-handedness in
my own call and response verbal volleys.Trading banter with partners of the right chemistry,playing off each other’s reactions, feeding a continual flow of fuel.
‘Did you know I invented the echo?’I asked my mate Owen.
‘Just listen to yourself---self---self,’he replied, happy to act the foil.
Stripped and cleaned before your eyes
Sweet meat look, fresh and ready to cook
Crawfish
Now take Mr. Crawfish in your hand
He's gonna look good in your frying pan
If you fry him crisp or you boil him right
He'll be sweeter than sugar when you take a bite’
Come dinnertime with a soupcon of colonial etiquette, this cordon bleu was to place my honoured guest next to my Dad,the host.I was to do the honours, proudly unveiling this non-pareil culinary
delight with a sweep of my hand and a gallic flourish . ‘Voila- la piece de resistance!Bon appetit!’
Accompanied by some crisp bon mots and a bottle of vintage ‘plonk’ from my parents one stop shop. Andre was always bemused how the Australian troops couldn’t quite get their tongues around the words ‘vin blanc’.
I would have liked to have opened the bottle with my French Army Knife but Michael Crawford hadn’t yet drawn up the blueprint.
‘ Formidable! C’est si bon!’ Andre said. 'I’ve just spent a month in France and it’s Chardonnay 'as got nothing on this.’
‘Naturellement,’ I said. ‘Over there, their Chardonnay is domestically produced. Ours is imported.’
Culture
Vulture.
Thriving in this secure burgeoning world, thoughtful in all matters of the mind and plenty serious, I whiled away much of my leisure time engrossed in the radio, the picture theatre and books.Once I got into serious reading that was it. I became fascinated with the writers and actors I encountered, and the literary and theatrical sets in which they consorted. These opened a window on the outside world for me.The wide world of thoughts and dreams, myths, ideas, inspirations, intuitions brought into being by the human imagination since the dawn of consciousness.Not just something decorative, much of the costumery we wear,the songs we sing and so on. More deeply the body of ethical and moral values that we place around each individual to keep at bay the barbaric heart that history teaches us lies beneath the surface of all humans.Our culture that enables us to make sense out of sensation,to find order and meaning in a universe that doesn’t give it freely.The glue that allows civilisation to happen and wards off alienation.
The radio acted to dispel any sense of isolation, being my main source of news, music and entertainment.My first was a crystal set that I was attached to,curled up under the bedcovers at night.My ritual before getting shuteye.The single family wireless receiver was built like a piece of furniture and took up a whole corner of the lounge room.
Radio stretched my imagination letting me create my own mental pictures around what I was listening to. High on my list in this regard were the improvised BBC ‘In All Directions’ and ‘The Goons’ of which I was one of the many listeners throughout the world.
‘In All Directions’ regarded as a forerunner of the Goon Show featured Peter Ustinov and Peter Jones in a Beckettesque road movie, driving round in a perpetual search for Copthorne Avenue. Peter was a real card who exploited his renowned gift for mimicry to the full . The comedy derived from the characters they met along the way, often also played by themselves.I aimed to emulate Ustinov’s fine ear for characters and sounds, his perfect command of accent and intonation. I worked at reproducing musical instruments, bird cries in our garden and car impersonations.By taking off his, mine were so accurate that I could get people to leap on to the pavement to avoid being r.un down by non-existent vehicles.It was my ‘car's’ cold start one morning that led to my father jumping out of bed,expecting to see his car being driven off.
Such skills could come in handy.Once on a visit to Sydney a trio of louts tried to occupy my seat in a train carriage.I flipped out, acting as if I had been bitten by a rabid dog.This sent them packing.
The Goons’ zany miscellany of skits and bits mixed cockamanie plots with surreal humour, catchphrases,quips and cranks, and an array of daffy and bizarre sound effects. Appealing to the latent eccentric in me it sharpened my sense of the absurd.The bubbling humour they created also infected the Monty Python team and the Beatles, all who would give me great delectation.It would be the sound of his troublesome stomach that would announce the arrival of the cloddish Major Dennis Bloodnok, a well known coward who deserted from the British Army. This was one of the many characters of Peter, the impressionists’ impressionist, who could even do a Spike Milligan, his fellow Goon. Peter took on the voice of Hercules Grytpype, a smooth talking con man. Peter was Hercules Grytpype, a smooth talking con man. He was the twittish boy scout Bluebottle whose flummoxed and flummoxing persiflage with Eccles take place in many of the Goons scripts.
At the other end of the age spectrum he was the extraordinarily antediluvian Henry Grun who defies old age and the dreaded lurgy with ‘Get Fat Hormones’. Having lived in India Peter was a master at taking off the broken English Hindi accent through his characters Lalkaka and Banerjee. The Goons’ characters were largely based on dimwits or cads they came across in the forces, or in Peter’s case at a minor public school. With their vocal dexterity their characters took on a life of their own. The Goons was a showcase for Peter’s improvisational talent with he and Milligan,perfect foils, sparking ideas and situations off each other.I aimed to capture such clever casualness and off-handedness in
my own call and response verbal volleys.Trading banter with partners of the right chemistry,playing off each other’s reactions, feeding a continual flow of fuel.
‘Did you know I invented the echo?’I asked my mate Owen.
‘Just listen to yourself---self---self,’he replied, happy to act the foil.
Best Sellers.
He was also a very depressed man, often infusing his comic characters with an undercurrent of deep melancholy,reflecting his own mood indigo. Aiming to help him in a small way overcome his personal insecurities and lack of a well adjusted self-image,I would congratulate him for his comedic legacy for which he thanked me very much.
I told this enigmatic figure, who often claimed to have no identity outside the roles that he played, how impressed I was with his astonishing range of characters which had earned him international stardom at a time when rigid typecasting was usual. He had a talent for playing multiple characters, making the individual characters distinct, frequently with contrasting temperaments and styles, for example in “The Mouse that Roared’ as well as ‘Dr Strangelove’, considered to be his best film.In it,he took on three different roles seamlessly integrated into the end-of-the-world storyline.He had a gift for playing different nationalities and ethnicities.He could embody his characters with such wonderful,‘out there’ characteristics.
As the unctuous self-disparaging slave dealing Lentulus Batiatus, purveying shapely females to the Roman upper classes, owner of a gladiatorial school, his instructions were to bully Spartacus mercilessly and break his spirit. Fellow actors still analyse the almost throwaway technique of understatement with which he upstaged Laurence Olivier during that player's prime and held his own with Charles Laughton, a grand master of underplayed idiosyncracy.
Peter sent me his best wishes.
His acting career was characterized by numerous roles in which he displayed those talents for vocal mimicry and age affectation. In 1946 he played the detective, twice his own age, opposite John Gielgud in a legendary stage version of Dostoevsky's Crime And Punishment.
The Soundtrack of my Youth
At the beginning of the 60’s I entered a musical quiz broadcast by the mobile studio of the local radio station 2MO at the local show. As a kid, I was chuffed to win against a local schoolteacher and to receive something that was brand new to the world – a transistor radio. This breaking of the nexus between the radio and the power point was an exciting development.It brought with it a profound increase in the traffic in knowledge, ideas, and information, which in turn influenced my generation to become more of a going concern in politics and other affairs which affected us, than what our preceding generations would have been.Wrapped around my ear, it provided me with a companion to fend off boredom wherever I was and to lay on background music for whatever mood I wanted.With my ear to the ground,twiddling with that dial, I was well and truly switched on.
This revolution in listening consummated the age of fast expanding mass media whose birth coincided with mine. The baby boom and economic growth had fuelled the emergence of the youth culture I grew up in.I wondered what had happened to the big famous big swing bands that had come before. The leader of the local brass band,Iven Laing filled me in on this.
‘ Allan,he said, It costs a bomb running a small town band.Imagine how more so it is for big bands.The big professional ones had to cash in their chips. During and immediately after the war bandleaders became balled up and chained down with big musical units . With shortages of fuel and limitations on audiences and available personnel, they became uneconomical. Many musicians felt it impractical to carry on this tradition. The big bands were replaced by smaller combos, using electric guitars, bass and drums,amplifiers and microphones , producing 45 rpm records . What’s transforming the musical soundscape now is rhythm and blues from the inner-city ghettos exerting itself in various forms.’
Those with an eye for tapping into the huge emerging market that accompanied these changes knew the importance of the means of communication. Of course it was forces stateside who ushered in the birth of the rapidly growing popular music industry to shape my listening.One of those responsible for nurturing it on the British side of the Atlantic was Norrie Paramor, head honcho of recording for the giant EMI Corporation. He had a head both for music and the industry. His background as composer of movie soundtracks, arranger and orchestral conductor, enabled him to become one of the top producers of easy listening and early British rock and roll. He played a large part in determining what I and millions listened to before the Beatles rage. Norrie arranged and produced recordings by such artists as Eddie Calvert,Judy Garland, Helen Shapiro, Britain’s answer to Brenda Lee, and the star turn of his stable, Cliff Richard, a knight to Elvis’ King.
I told Norrie how thrilled I was by the instrumental smash hit ‘Apache’,performed by Cliff and his backing group The Shadows, which Norrie put together. A pioneering example of the surf music genre with its use of twangy guitars, its innovative tribal rhythms and straightforward melody, it evoked that mighty rush I felt, the swells coming fast, hooked onto the forces of nature while surfing. Body surfing that is. Being fair freckled skin and a country mile from the salty tang of seawater, I had as scant a connection with the lifestyle of those archetypal bronzed briny boarders who hung five, hugging the coast, as had those melody making pommy palefaces. Or as had Burt Lancaster’s celluloid redskin in the movie ‘Apache’ whose courage inspired the tune.
Norrie had an ongoing rivalry with George Martin who had under his wing amongst others the comic talent of Peter Sellers. George was trailing Norrie in the number of hits they produced until Helen Shapiro’s supporting act, the four mop topped lads from Liverpool came to his notice. They would sweep the field,but not before parodying the ‘Shadows’ in their instrumental ‘Cry for a Shadow’.
Every dog has his day and as I would remind Norrie, he had had his fair whack. I told him to take the Beatles send up as a back handed tribute. He was delighted to learn of the enjoyment he and his protégés gave me in what would seem, at least to many mums and dads looking back, an oh-so-squeaky-clean age when the sound was toned down and records kept ‘straight’.
Peter Sellers was one of the worlds greatest character actors, especially in comedy.
Peter strove to avoid playing the same character twice. He especially enjoyed disappearing into characters much older than himself. He could slip in and out of characters as easily as one slips in and out of a jacket.
In 'Lolita' as a mentally unbalanced TV writer with multiple personalities he mined emotional depths and reached crazed comic epiphanies unmatched in his later work. His hotel porch confrontation with James Mason's Humbert Humbert is a marvel of nervous energy and quirky timing.
Watching him I became aware of that sense of lunacy lurking.You never knew when his role would be as someone provocative, sensible,totally insane,singing,shaking his booty or exploding.. He was a unique combination of being extremely subtle and over-the-top all at the same time.
A Man Of Capacious Talent.
I congratulated actor, raconteur and humanitarian Peter Ustinov for enriching the gaiety of nations, adding to the public stock of harmless pleasure with some darned good acting thrown in for good measure.
As an actor, he won international stardom as a lurid,gloating Nero in the 1951 epic ''Quo Vadis?,'' gained increasing stature by playing sly rogues and became one of the few character actors to hold star status for decades, adjusting easily to movies, plays, broadcast roles and talk shows, which he enlivened with pungent one-liners and hilarious imitations.I told him he was far from being an epigone.This was no faint praise.
I congratulated him in particular for his portrayal of the slave owner Lentulus Batiatus in another sword-and-sandal epic, Stanley Kubrick's ‘Spartacus’ which brought him the first of two supporting actor Oscars.
In 'Lolita' as a mentally unbalanced TV writer with multiple personalities he mined emotional depths and reached crazed comic epiphanies unmatched in his later work. His hotel porch confrontation with James Mason's Humbert Humbert is a marvel of nervous energy and quirky timing.
Watching him I became aware of that sense of lunacy lurking.You never knew when his role would be as someone provocative, sensible,totally insane,singing,shaking his booty or exploding.. He was a unique combination of being extremely subtle and over-the-top all at the same time.
A Man Of Capacious Talent.
I congratulated actor, raconteur and humanitarian Peter Ustinov for enriching the gaiety of nations, adding to the public stock of harmless pleasure with some darned good acting thrown in for good measure.
As an actor, he won international stardom as a lurid,gloating Nero in the 1951 epic ''Quo Vadis?,'' gained increasing stature by playing sly rogues and became one of the few character actors to hold star status for decades, adjusting easily to movies, plays, broadcast roles and talk shows, which he enlivened with pungent one-liners and hilarious imitations.I told him he was far from being an epigone.This was no faint praise.
I congratulated him in particular for his portrayal of the slave owner Lentulus Batiatus in another sword-and-sandal epic, Stanley Kubrick's ‘Spartacus’ which brought him the first of two supporting actor Oscars.
As the unctuous self-disparaging slave dealing Lentulus Batiatus, purveying shapely females to the Roman upper classes, owner of a gladiatorial school, his instructions were to bully Spartacus mercilessly and break his spirit. Fellow actors still analyse the almost throwaway technique of understatement with which he upstaged Laurence Olivier during that player's prime and held his own with Charles Laughton, a grand master of underplayed idiosyncracy.
Peter sent me his best wishes.
His acting career was characterized by numerous roles in which he displayed those talents for vocal mimicry and age affectation. In 1946 he played the detective, twice his own age, opposite John Gielgud in a legendary stage version of Dostoevsky's Crime And Punishment.
The Big
Smoke.
"He ceased; but left so pleasing on the
ear his voice, that list'ning still they seemed to hear."
Homer,
describing Odysseus' effect on an audience in a faraway land.
As a child I came to Sydney during school holidays and other times to stay with my father’s sisters.I got to range over this big city,especially its centre,on my own hook.Like most people I like to watch the activities on building sites.This particular one I came across in November,1960, just a stone’s throw from Circular Quay,my reference point, was not like any other.This was where the latest wonder of the world was being constructed.The Sydney Opera House.I asked one of the hardhats entering a gate how I could get approval for a look-see.
‘‘How far have you worked up those tricky sails structures?’
‘Listen Sonny Jim,’he said hurriedly, hugging an oxy acetylene cylinder, ‘after a slow start, I can assure you now we’re cooking with gas. Come and see for yourself.The opening act is just about to start.If you want to see and hear a world class act,just tag along with me.You can do the official tour anytime.’Was he fair dinkum or having me on? Curious as to what kind of artistic performance this labouring man could offer,I decided to take him up on it.He led me through a maze of massive concrete slabs, , building machinery and the general clutter of a construction site, onto the performance space- this stupendous expanse of concrete platform,resembling an ancient Mayan temple, decorated with cranes.Workers were standing, sitting on their haunches or perched on the scaffolding eating their lunch,, gathered around a big black man.We were all hushed,spellbound as this extraordinary beautiful, deep,rich, bass-baritone set of pipes ,as calm as the water lapping around the site,began to boom.Bowled over by the sheer magnitude of the notes his lungs and diaphragm expelled,I realized his voice must have carried far beyond. He would have been heard from miles away.His singing without unaccompaniment lent a highly personal atmosphere to this impromptu standout performance.I recognized the voice as soon as it opened up. There was only one in the world like that- Paul Robeson.Except that when he broke into Old Man River , he had changed the lyrics, ‘ No more "tired of livin’, scared of dyin’", to "must keep fightin’ until I’m dyin’.He sang the stirring song of protest ‘Joe Hill’,about the unionist/songwriter,summarily executed for murder, many believe on trumped up charges.So powerful in the directness and simplicity of its melody and lyrics.In Paul’s rendition it became a moving hymn to the never-ending struggle of working people for justice. Goose flesh manifested. We rewarded him with our extraordinary attentiveness and warm-hearted response. At the end of the performance,after Paul met and talked to us well-wishers,my host explained to me the nature of this event while escorting me outside.
‘Our trade union invited Paul to come here today.He can perform anywhere he likes-in palaces,in grand theatres,but he prefers to play directly to the people he believes in-those who earn their bread by honest toil. -the common people.He sees us as truly brothers and sisters in the great family of mankind.Like Joe Hill did,Paul sings at union meetings , on corners and picket lines,to us.Although we are the ones who build this mighty structure,we know we won’t be the ones who’ll be able to afford it.So this is a once in a lifetime occasion for us.For an hour at least we’re the ones who call the tune.’
‘‘How far have you worked up those tricky sails structures?’
‘Listen Sonny Jim,’he said hurriedly, hugging an oxy acetylene cylinder, ‘after a slow start, I can assure you now we’re cooking with gas. Come and see for yourself.The opening act is just about to start.If you want to see and hear a world class act,just tag along with me.You can do the official tour anytime.’Was he fair dinkum or having me on? Curious as to what kind of artistic performance this labouring man could offer,I decided to take him up on it.He led me through a maze of massive concrete slabs, , building machinery and the general clutter of a construction site, onto the performance space- this stupendous expanse of concrete platform,resembling an ancient Mayan temple, decorated with cranes.Workers were standing, sitting on their haunches or perched on the scaffolding eating their lunch,, gathered around a big black man.We were all hushed,spellbound as this extraordinary beautiful, deep,rich, bass-baritone set of pipes ,as calm as the water lapping around the site,began to boom.Bowled over by the sheer magnitude of the notes his lungs and diaphragm expelled,I realized his voice must have carried far beyond. He would have been heard from miles away.His singing without unaccompaniment lent a highly personal atmosphere to this impromptu standout performance.I recognized the voice as soon as it opened up. There was only one in the world like that- Paul Robeson.Except that when he broke into Old Man River , he had changed the lyrics, ‘ No more "tired of livin’, scared of dyin’", to "must keep fightin’ until I’m dyin’.He sang the stirring song of protest ‘Joe Hill’,about the unionist/songwriter,summarily executed for murder, many believe on trumped up charges.So powerful in the directness and simplicity of its melody and lyrics.In Paul’s rendition it became a moving hymn to the never-ending struggle of working people for justice. Goose flesh manifested. We rewarded him with our extraordinary attentiveness and warm-hearted response. At the end of the performance,after Paul met and talked to us well-wishers,my host explained to me the nature of this event while escorting me outside.
‘Our trade union invited Paul to come here today.He can perform anywhere he likes-in palaces,in grand theatres,but he prefers to play directly to the people he believes in-those who earn their bread by honest toil. -the common people.He sees us as truly brothers and sisters in the great family of mankind.Like Joe Hill did,Paul sings at union meetings , on corners and picket lines,to us.Although we are the ones who build this mighty structure,we know we won’t be the ones who’ll be able to afford it.So this is a once in a lifetime occasion for us.For an hour at least we’re the ones who call the tune.’
The Soundtrack of my Youth
At the beginning of the 60’s I entered a musical quiz broadcast by the mobile studio of the local radio station 2MO at the local show. As a kid, I was chuffed to win against a local schoolteacher and to receive something that was brand new to the world – a transistor radio. This breaking of the nexus between the radio and the power point was an exciting development.It brought with it a profound increase in the traffic in knowledge, ideas, and information, which in turn influenced my generation to become more of a going concern in politics and other affairs which affected us, than what our preceding generations would have been.Wrapped around my ear, it provided me with a companion to fend off boredom wherever I was and to lay on background music for whatever mood I wanted.With my ear to the ground,twiddling with that dial, I was well and truly switched on.
This revolution in listening consummated the age of fast expanding mass media whose birth coincided with mine. The baby boom and economic growth had fuelled the emergence of the youth culture I grew up in.I wondered what had happened to the big famous big swing bands that had come before. The leader of the local brass band,Iven Laing filled me in on this.
‘ Allan,he said, It costs a bomb running a small town band.Imagine how more so it is for big bands.The big professional ones had to cash in their chips. During and immediately after the war bandleaders became balled up and chained down with big musical units . With shortages of fuel and limitations on audiences and available personnel, they became uneconomical. Many musicians felt it impractical to carry on this tradition. The big bands were replaced by smaller combos, using electric guitars, bass and drums,amplifiers and microphones , producing 45 rpm records . What’s transforming the musical soundscape now is rhythm and blues from the inner-city ghettos exerting itself in various forms.’
Those with an eye for tapping into the huge emerging market that accompanied these changes knew the importance of the means of communication. Of course it was forces stateside who ushered in the birth of the rapidly growing popular music industry to shape my listening.One of those responsible for nurturing it on the British side of the Atlantic was Norrie Paramor, head honcho of recording for the giant EMI Corporation. He had a head both for music and the industry. His background as composer of movie soundtracks, arranger and orchestral conductor, enabled him to become one of the top producers of easy listening and early British rock and roll. He played a large part in determining what I and millions listened to before the Beatles rage. Norrie arranged and produced recordings by such artists as Eddie Calvert,Judy Garland, Helen Shapiro, Britain’s answer to Brenda Lee, and the star turn of his stable, Cliff Richard, a knight to Elvis’ King.
I told Norrie how thrilled I was by the instrumental smash hit ‘Apache’,performed by Cliff and his backing group The Shadows, which Norrie put together. A pioneering example of the surf music genre with its use of twangy guitars, its innovative tribal rhythms and straightforward melody, it evoked that mighty rush I felt, the swells coming fast, hooked onto the forces of nature while surfing. Body surfing that is. Being fair freckled skin and a country mile from the salty tang of seawater, I had as scant a connection with the lifestyle of those archetypal bronzed briny boarders who hung five, hugging the coast, as had those melody making pommy palefaces. Or as had Burt Lancaster’s celluloid redskin in the movie ‘Apache’ whose courage inspired the tune.
Norrie had an ongoing rivalry with George Martin who had under his wing amongst others the comic talent of Peter Sellers. George was trailing Norrie in the number of hits they produced until Helen Shapiro’s supporting act, the four mop topped lads from Liverpool came to his notice. They would sweep the field,but not before parodying the ‘Shadows’ in their instrumental ‘Cry for a Shadow’.
Every dog has his day and as I would remind Norrie, he had had his fair whack. I told him to take the Beatles send up as a back handed tribute. He was delighted to learn of the enjoyment he and his protégés gave me in what would seem, at least to many mums and dads looking back, an oh-so-squeaky-clean age when the sound was toned down and records kept ‘straight’.
Put a Penny in It!
Going to ‘the flicks’ was undoubtedly the most enjoyable time of the week. This young movie buff got to go twice a week to this darkened sanctuary . During the week I would go with my parents. We would sit on the comfy cushioned chairs upstairs in the dress circle and see two feature films. I would stay behind at the end to collect the lemonade bottles which people left on the floor, along with their sweet papers and tickets. Sitting in the dark with others watching a screen somehow is conducive to that habit which is defiant to the cultural standard of cleaning up after oneself. The deposits on the bottles which patrons paid and which I would claim paid for my night out plus my Saturday afternoon matinee. This was a more rambunctious affair, sitting on the harder stalls down below with orange coated chocolate balls and the groundlings hissing, booing or rolling in the aisles. A chorus of finger whistles and voices would punctuate the silence like a dose of salts when the projector conked out with slow handclapping and catcalls of ‘put a penny in it!”.
Defining our fantasies,fears and pleasures,most of the films were American, followed by British and a dwindling number of locally made films. The American cinema told stories that identify a collective fear of invasion, nuclear destruction, and invasive political ideologies, reflecting this paranoia back to a receptive public.For example after it was announced it was "Them! Them! Them!", the eponymous mutated, giant, radio-active, murderous ants hatched in the New Mexico desert after an A-bomb test were interpreted as Communists on-the-loose.
It was a toss-up whether the police in American noir were corrupt or not, but in British film of the 40s and 50s, corruption was startlingly absent thanks to censorship. Policemen were portrayed both sympathetically and impeccably as hard-working, caring, humane individuals while the crims were unstable delinquents on the make who got their just desserts. Forget tasers, SWAT teams, brutal interrogations, strip searches or indeed any hint that policemen are less than saints in uniform. In the Ealing films, kindly policemen London police rode bicycles, directed traffic, gave directions, found lost dogs, and even sang in the police choir. The grossest sin committed by the police was a tendency to park themselves in the police cafeteria and drink one too many cups of tea.
Sentimental viewers today may fall for the idea that these movies showed a gentler, kinder age. More cynical viewers (including yours truly) understand that they are a reflection of the age and its censorship. Not too surprising as the films did nothing to offend. Generally these movies endorsed the idea that the police and military apparatus made us secure standing between us and the End of Civilization as we know it.
This was a particularly barren point of time for the Australian film industry. The hunger for local people to see their own stories on the screen was voracious. They were nostalgic for a time of hardy pioneers. When the classic ‘On Our Selection’ film featuring the rustic Dad and Dave came to the picture theatre, the queue to buy tickets stretched along Conadilly Street, the main drag. Usually the only Australian content of the program was the newsreels, as often as not giving the latest update on the ongoing ‘war between good and evil’, on the battle against the ‘Reds’ for world mastery. Kicking off the matinee performance was the American serial with its ham acting and crude special effects, laughable today, but gripping stuff for us kids then. A variety of short films of topical interest would provide filler until the main item started rolling.
The feature films of the fifties overwhelmingly reflected conservative values with white-bread social, gender and racial roles being promoted. Men were men and women’s place was in the home. The ‘natives’ in the Tarzan and Jungle Jim films were usually relegated to romantic backdrops to be exploited by civilized white men or eaten by wild animals. Or they formed implacable hordes, red in tooth and claw, who only understood the language of force.
Occasional outbursts of defiance and rebelliousness as portrayed by individuals if not by organized political groups made it through to the Civic Theatre in Gunnedah. Performances by Marlon Brando and James Dean as contemporary anti-heroes added some reel biff to a fairly long period of sanitised run of the mill releases. On the screen I had seen endless legions of American Indians mowed down to expand the frontier of civilization.When the cavalry won it was a great victory, and when the Indians won it was a massacre.
I told Burt Lancaster it was an eye-opener for me to see him interpret their plight as the result of white conquest and displacement rather than the result of their own ignorance and barbarism. While typically still using non-Indian actors for such roles, ‘Apache’ was one of the first films to depict the Indians sympathetically and one of the liveliest. A dazzling frame for non stop action, the film is full of spectacular battles, breathtaking chases and tight suspense.
Going to ‘the flicks’ was undoubtedly the most enjoyable time of the week. This young movie buff got to go twice a week to this darkened sanctuary . During the week I would go with my parents. We would sit on the comfy cushioned chairs upstairs in the dress circle and see two feature films. I would stay behind at the end to collect the lemonade bottles which people left on the floor, along with their sweet papers and tickets. Sitting in the dark with others watching a screen somehow is conducive to that habit which is defiant to the cultural standard of cleaning up after oneself. The deposits on the bottles which patrons paid and which I would claim paid for my night out plus my Saturday afternoon matinee. This was a more rambunctious affair, sitting on the harder stalls down below with orange coated chocolate balls and the groundlings hissing, booing or rolling in the aisles. A chorus of finger whistles and voices would punctuate the silence like a dose of salts when the projector conked out with slow handclapping and catcalls of ‘put a penny in it!”.
Defining our fantasies,fears and pleasures,most of the films were American, followed by British and a dwindling number of locally made films. The American cinema told stories that identify a collective fear of invasion, nuclear destruction, and invasive political ideologies, reflecting this paranoia back to a receptive public.For example after it was announced it was "Them! Them! Them!", the eponymous mutated, giant, radio-active, murderous ants hatched in the New Mexico desert after an A-bomb test were interpreted as Communists on-the-loose.
It was a toss-up whether the police in American noir were corrupt or not, but in British film of the 40s and 50s, corruption was startlingly absent thanks to censorship. Policemen were portrayed both sympathetically and impeccably as hard-working, caring, humane individuals while the crims were unstable delinquents on the make who got their just desserts. Forget tasers, SWAT teams, brutal interrogations, strip searches or indeed any hint that policemen are less than saints in uniform. In the Ealing films, kindly policemen London police rode bicycles, directed traffic, gave directions, found lost dogs, and even sang in the police choir. The grossest sin committed by the police was a tendency to park themselves in the police cafeteria and drink one too many cups of tea.
Sentimental viewers today may fall for the idea that these movies showed a gentler, kinder age. More cynical viewers (including yours truly) understand that they are a reflection of the age and its censorship. Not too surprising as the films did nothing to offend. Generally these movies endorsed the idea that the police and military apparatus made us secure standing between us and the End of Civilization as we know it.
This was a particularly barren point of time for the Australian film industry. The hunger for local people to see their own stories on the screen was voracious. They were nostalgic for a time of hardy pioneers. When the classic ‘On Our Selection’ film featuring the rustic Dad and Dave came to the picture theatre, the queue to buy tickets stretched along Conadilly Street, the main drag. Usually the only Australian content of the program was the newsreels, as often as not giving the latest update on the ongoing ‘war between good and evil’, on the battle against the ‘Reds’ for world mastery. Kicking off the matinee performance was the American serial with its ham acting and crude special effects, laughable today, but gripping stuff for us kids then. A variety of short films of topical interest would provide filler until the main item started rolling.
The feature films of the fifties overwhelmingly reflected conservative values with white-bread social, gender and racial roles being promoted. Men were men and women’s place was in the home. The ‘natives’ in the Tarzan and Jungle Jim films were usually relegated to romantic backdrops to be exploited by civilized white men or eaten by wild animals. Or they formed implacable hordes, red in tooth and claw, who only understood the language of force.
Occasional outbursts of defiance and rebelliousness as portrayed by individuals if not by organized political groups made it through to the Civic Theatre in Gunnedah. Performances by Marlon Brando and James Dean as contemporary anti-heroes added some reel biff to a fairly long period of sanitised run of the mill releases. On the screen I had seen endless legions of American Indians mowed down to expand the frontier of civilization.When the cavalry won it was a great victory, and when the Indians won it was a massacre.
I told Burt Lancaster it was an eye-opener for me to see him interpret their plight as the result of white conquest and displacement rather than the result of their own ignorance and barbarism. While typically still using non-Indian actors for such roles, ‘Apache’ was one of the first films to depict the Indians sympathetically and one of the liveliest. A dazzling frame for non stop action, the film is full of spectacular battles, breathtaking chases and tight suspense.
Burt took on the persona of the renegade Apache, Massai.Fired by his exploits I in turn envisaged myself as this indomitable warrior of sorts. Refusing to accept the humiliating surrender that my chief Geronimo had submitted to after years of bloody fighting with settlers. Going native,I horn in on the surrender ceremony in mid-stream to hurl defiance at the top dogs. Cut to the the prison train I‘m transported in. I I make a break for it to undergo an epic journey back to my home. With unflinching strength and enormous cunning, I wage a one man war against the US cavalry. Scampering over rocks and rolling unscathed between the wheels of racing wagons, I squeak through.I keep one step ahead of the highly trained soldiers,riding the skin off their foaming horses, pounding the prairie, raising a cloud of yellow dust.. They have sworn to track me down. As my resistance escalates into a
final show- down, I know I must persevere, not only for my own life, but for the pride of my people.
This the cinematic warrior does, for the sake of the film studio who wanted a happy ending, against Burt’s wishes. The historical Massai was brought to bay by the cavalry and cut down. It seems we could only have our eyes opened so much at a time.
A Question of Colour.
Another film that impacted on this young cineaste during the period was “Jedda”.
I remember the posters outside the picture theatre announcing it’s coming. Interest in them was off the charts.
The straplines read “The magic of the native mating call was stranger than the habits of civilization” and “The drama of a girl caught between civilization and the call of her native instincts”. Such words acted to stir the blood of the local people. This wasn’t another feel good movie with Doris Day. ‘Jedda’ was daring, long awaited and duly well patronized. It was the first Australian feature film in colour and the first in which the indigenous cast played themselves. Colour was an important element because the film dealt with the question of skin colour, still then an important determinant of one’s status in a racially divided Australian society. At the premiere in Darwin, aborigine people were kept separate from the white folks. Only the two stars could sit upstairs in the comfy seats. At it’s first showing at the Civic Theatre in Gunnedah,I sat downstairs in the stalls with my nanny,Rose who took me as my parents were busy renovating our shop.
Turning on the aboriginal stars, the film was the first to give considerable weight to their emotional lives. Marbuck is the tribal young blood in this outback take on the Romeo and Juliet star crossed lovers scenario.. He is dignified and proud, ignoring the castoff trappings of civilization. He's not
wearing trousers like the other Aboriginal men, and he never puts those trousers on. When he is shooed off, he's being shunned, but his exit is also a marvellous entrance and we see about four
different shots of his handsome body. Jedda, the object of his desire is a young woman who was taken in and adopted as a baby by a white family.
She learns how to read, write and dress like a white girl
and is steered towards white tendencies and away from first nation norms.
Yet she feels an increasing sense of solitude.
She feels more and more fascinated by the tribal life style.
Unlike the case of Rose Watley, this lifestyle draws her to it.It remained intact much longer in the northern territory of Australia. Jedda longs to go on the walkabout every year. She hears tribal chants over her European piano. She is torn between two races and cultures.
It is Marbuck’s mating call that entrances her and stirs her awakening as a woman. He takes delight in tearing down the wall that the mission has erected around her heart and makes off with her. Pursued by the white family and shunned by Marbuck’s tribal council because of her wrong “skin colour”, their attraction proves fatal.
Driven insane, Marbuck takes Jedda with him in leaping to his death. The passion that Marbuck and Jedda aroused in each other had the same effect on the audience ,leaning forward in their seats.
Chauvel, the director knew how to tap into the great fascination white Australians have for the land and its noble savage. Many see black blood as having been flyblown when intermingled with that of
whites, as more important than the corrupting effect of their dispossession. We were spellbound by the physical beauty of the couple. There were few dry eyes in the cinema the evening we saw it. We were awed by the sight of this rugged wilderness, this savage Garden of Eden, alive for the first time in all its glorious colours. Later my father showed me the bluff near the Blue Mountains in NSW where the stirring finale had to be refilmed .
This film had all the right ingredients for a classic. Like ‘Apache’ it delivered it’s message in a popular action packed adventure formula. Marbuck could keep pace with Massai on the land, wrestling crocodiles, using fire to throw off his pursuers, using water to cover his tracks and being expert with both spear and rifle. Like “Apache”, it showed indigenous people in a more humane light
,both providing a strong sounding board for me to discuss racial issues. It was highly critical of the then-prevailing policy of assimilation. It boldly rejects the notion that indigenous Australians should conform to the expectations of European Australians.
At the deeply affecting end of ‘Jedda’ no one in the cinema was moving. No one was talking. For several minutes the whole audience sat in stunned pin-dropping silence save for scattered gasped sobs and blowing noses.Red cast down eyes and clutched hankies betrayed what even the the stoniest of viewers had been reduced to. The story had raised the question of what it is to be australian .
Our Neck of the Woods.
The power of the still image came to me in the illustrations and photos of our library books,but quantitatively in magazines and comic books.The proximity of words and images accelerated my reading ability greatly.That’s why I particularly loved cartoons.
final show- down, I know I must persevere, not only for my own life, but for the pride of my people.
This the cinematic warrior does, for the sake of the film studio who wanted a happy ending, against Burt’s wishes. The historical Massai was brought to bay by the cavalry and cut down. It seems we could only have our eyes opened so much at a time.
A Question of Colour.
Another film that impacted on this young cineaste during the period was “Jedda”.
I remember the posters outside the picture theatre announcing it’s coming. Interest in them was off the charts.
The straplines read “The magic of the native mating call was stranger than the habits of civilization” and “The drama of a girl caught between civilization and the call of her native instincts”. Such words acted to stir the blood of the local people. This wasn’t another feel good movie with Doris Day. ‘Jedda’ was daring, long awaited and duly well patronized. It was the first Australian feature film in colour and the first in which the indigenous cast played themselves. Colour was an important element because the film dealt with the question of skin colour, still then an important determinant of one’s status in a racially divided Australian society. At the premiere in Darwin, aborigine people were kept separate from the white folks. Only the two stars could sit upstairs in the comfy seats. At it’s first showing at the Civic Theatre in Gunnedah,I sat downstairs in the stalls with my nanny,Rose who took me as my parents were busy renovating our shop.
Turning on the aboriginal stars, the film was the first to give considerable weight to their emotional lives. Marbuck is the tribal young blood in this outback take on the Romeo and Juliet star crossed lovers scenario.. He is dignified and proud, ignoring the castoff trappings of civilization. He's not
wearing trousers like the other Aboriginal men, and he never puts those trousers on. When he is shooed off, he's being shunned, but his exit is also a marvellous entrance and we see about four
different shots of his handsome body. Jedda, the object of his desire is a young woman who was taken in and adopted as a baby by a white family.
She learns how to read, write and dress like a white girl
and is steered towards white tendencies and away from first nation norms.
Yet she feels an increasing sense of solitude.
She feels more and more fascinated by the tribal life style.
Unlike the case of Rose Watley, this lifestyle draws her to it.It remained intact much longer in the northern territory of Australia. Jedda longs to go on the walkabout every year. She hears tribal chants over her European piano. She is torn between two races and cultures.
It is Marbuck’s mating call that entrances her and stirs her awakening as a woman. He takes delight in tearing down the wall that the mission has erected around her heart and makes off with her. Pursued by the white family and shunned by Marbuck’s tribal council because of her wrong “skin colour”, their attraction proves fatal.
Driven insane, Marbuck takes Jedda with him in leaping to his death. The passion that Marbuck and Jedda aroused in each other had the same effect on the audience ,leaning forward in their seats.
Chauvel, the director knew how to tap into the great fascination white Australians have for the land and its noble savage. Many see black blood as having been flyblown when intermingled with that of
whites, as more important than the corrupting effect of their dispossession. We were spellbound by the physical beauty of the couple. There were few dry eyes in the cinema the evening we saw it. We were awed by the sight of this rugged wilderness, this savage Garden of Eden, alive for the first time in all its glorious colours. Later my father showed me the bluff near the Blue Mountains in NSW where the stirring finale had to be refilmed .
This film had all the right ingredients for a classic. Like ‘Apache’ it delivered it’s message in a popular action packed adventure formula. Marbuck could keep pace with Massai on the land, wrestling crocodiles, using fire to throw off his pursuers, using water to cover his tracks and being expert with both spear and rifle. Like “Apache”, it showed indigenous people in a more humane light
,both providing a strong sounding board for me to discuss racial issues. It was highly critical of the then-prevailing policy of assimilation. It boldly rejects the notion that indigenous Australians should conform to the expectations of European Australians.
At the deeply affecting end of ‘Jedda’ no one in the cinema was moving. No one was talking. For several minutes the whole audience sat in stunned pin-dropping silence save for scattered gasped sobs and blowing noses.Red cast down eyes and clutched hankies betrayed what even the the stoniest of viewers had been reduced to. The story had raised the question of what it is to be australian .
Our Neck of the Woods.
The power of the still image came to me in the illustrations and photos of our library books,but quantitatively in magazines and comic books.The proximity of words and images accelerated my reading ability greatly.That’s why I particularly loved cartoons.
Whenever I saw the images in books,I longed to have my own copy.Not alone, I had that envy of those who had the luck of the draw.
I accumulated a humongous repository of comics. Starting with a few, I swapped small ones for bigger ones and bigger ones for more smaller ones until shazam!I had a huge stock to marvel at.Popular items included Dick Tracy with his futuristic wrist phone that now seems so commonplace, and the nose thumbing Mad Magazines with its keen joy in exposing the fakery behind the images the ever more powerful mass media were pumping into our lives. It was magical, objective proof to kids that we weren't alone,that there were people who knew that there was something off beam, phony and funny about a world of bomb shelters, brinkmanship and toothpaste smiles. The magazine gradually instilled in me a habit of mind, a way of thinking about a world rife with false fronts, small print, deceptive ads, booby traps, treacherous language, double standards, half truths, subliminal pitches and product placements; it tried to warn me that I could be merely the target of people who claimed to be my friend; it prompted me to be alert to to mistrusting authority, to read between the lines, to take nothing at face value, to see patterns in the often shoddy construction of movies and TV shows,to cut through the schmalz.
Among my favourite reads was the popular comic strip Li’l Abner set in the fictional backwoods community at Dogpatch, U.S.A. This hillbilly world became familiar caricatures of American life. Sunday mornings would see me dashing along Conadilly Street to the newsagent to make sure I didn’t miss out on the newspaper with it’s comic supplement. Cars swerved to miss me as I sprinted across the roads , pedestrians avoided bumping into me as I walked back slowly along the street poring over the latest instalment.
The characters featured in this syndicated strip- Li’l Abner,his gal Daisy Mae, Mammy Yokum and others- satirized famous persons and customs.I took a particular interest in Daisy Mae’s voluptuous charms ,much of it visible thanks to her famous polka-dot peasant blouse and cropped skirt. Hubba hubba.
This strip created by the cartoonist Al Caplin, who abbreviated his name to Al Capp, included Charles Chaplin amongst its admirers.
Appearing intermittently as a strip-within-a-strip was ‘Fearless Fosdick”, a spoof of Dick Tracy, set in an unnamed American metropolis lousy with crime, where you shouldn't make a sudden move. Its urban setting filled with tough guys, burnt-out buildings everywhere, narrow alleys, rubble spilling out over the sidewalks, cheap bars, greasy diners, people living on top of each other, their expressions reflecting the destitution of their
surroundings.. So tough it was said you could walk six blocks without leaving the scene of the crime.So tough it was said even the muggers walked around in pairs .So tough when you go to buy silk stockings,the shop assistant wants to know your head size.So tough anytime you put your hand in some wet cement you felt another hand. So tough every time you shut the window you hurt somebody's fingers. So tough at Easter time the children have little porcupines instead of bunnies.So tough if everyone’s seen to be smiling at once,it must be Halloween.
This all stood in stark contrast to Li'l Abner's rural Dogpatch.In combatting crime Fosdick was himself responsible for astronomical collateral damage,
Making for twice as much reading fun,Li'l Abner bookended the offbeat Fosdick sequences as a narrative framing device. Abner himself serves as a rustic Greek chorus-to introduce, comment upon and sum up the Fosdick stories. Typically, a spun up Abner would race frantically to the mailbox or to the train delivering the morning newspapers, to get a glimpse of the latest cliffhanger episode. Every so often I would walk back from the newsagent reading about Lil Abner walking away with his latest copy,reading about Fearless Fosdick.
Subsequent instalments of L’il Abner would reinforce his obsessive immersion in the unfolding Fosdick continuity while at the same time recapping the story-within-a-story. Oblivious to the surrounding "real" world Abe would walk off a cliff or into the path of an oncoming train, or inadvertently ignore one of Daisy Mae's perilous predicaments. Occasionally the gullible, bumbling and impossibly dense Fosdick's adventures would directly affect what came down the pike to Abner, and the two storylines would artfully converge. The story-within-a-story often ironically paralleled and or parodied the story itself. Also, by having the comically obtuse Abner “explain” the strip to Daisy Mae, Capp would use Fearless Fosdick to self-reflexively comment upon his own strip, his readers, and the nature of comic strips and "fandom" in general, resulting in an absurd but overall structurally complex and layered satire.
I can now,after a fashion,walk along my risky city floor reading about me walking along the risky country streets of Gunnedah reading about L’il Abner walking along the risky country streets of Dogpatch reading about Fearless Fosdick walking along the risky streets of the city.A story-within-a-story-within a story.It remains for some literary critic to write about my writing to extend the layers.
Sparing no-one his merciless needle, Al targeted all kinds of mossbacks, radicals and liberals. Some sharply satirical episodes of Li’l Abner were censored in early strips.
His irreverent art stayed with me as I got older. With adult readers far outnumbering juveniles, Li'l Abner forever cleared away the concept that humour strips were solely the domain of adolescents and children. Li'l Abner provided a whole new template for contemporary satire and personal expression in comics, paving the way for MAD.
I would commend Al for the wealth of characters he created. I pointed out to him that many country cousins of his rustic folk lived in our part of the bush. Al thanked me for having taken the time to write to him so kindly.
Wishing me the best, he threw in a drawing of Li’l Abner and Daisy Mae in full stride on one of their their humorous adventures.
The Busy Bookworm.
“Read well and you will write well” Sir Max Mallowan.
With an eye to learning and edification,I wolfed down books,my mother’s milk, from the local library, starting with the Enid Blyton children’s books when I was little, moving through to the boys stories of wartime heroes and space adventures.. By the time I entered secondary school I was one of the innumerable readers of the second most published author in the English; by the time I left I was tackling the leader of the pack.When reading Shakespeare’s works,a turnoff to many, it broke on me
that along with owning books, reading was one of the greatest gifts we have. It takes us beyond ourselves.
Some of my mates missed out sadly on both counts.They couldn’t read well and never even knew we had a local library. It was kept quiet.
I encouraged one of my mates to find out about this vital resource.He rang up finally and asked Ms.Rixon: 'Is that the local library?'
She said: 'It depends where you're calling from.'
My mother was an avid reader of Agatha Christies mystery novels. I chose her books while I got my
own and would plough through them all,exhausting the supply. I kept the town librarian, Beth Rixon on her toes stamping them with their due date.
‘Outside of a dog,’she liked to say, ‘ a book is man's best friend.’
‘Inside of a dog,’I hastened to point out, ‘it's too dark to read.’
I was a great one for borrowing books in the morning and returning them in the evening which flummoxed Mrs.Rixon.’This is against the rules, Allan,’she pointed out to me,turning a blind eye to this ludicrous restriction. My familiarity with the ideas in these books and the experience of their author made me percipient of the thinking of my mother for whom they were a staple. I told Ms. Christie I appreciated her craftsmanship, spinning delicate webs of deception and mistruths in an effort to dissemble the real deal behind the façade.I told her that my mother and I had fun following the cleverly plotted and ingenious solutions that would never fail to surprise us. ‘Who knows?’I asked myself, ‘maybe one day I too will write such mysteries’.
Indeed I would write a short one and it is part of this saga.Titled ‘A Case of Mistaken Identity’,the main character is my mother herself.The mystery is that surrounding her fate and the behaviour leading up to it. Reading further will supply you with the clues necessary for solving it.
I asked Ms.Christie to give my regards to her husband, the eminent archaeologist Six Max Mallowan whose digs she had accompanied him on.These provided background for some of her novels.Both stimulated my interest in lost civilizations and those who seek to discover them. Ms. Christie expressed her good wishes to me.
Her crime fiction is considered to be a leading example of the cozy or cosy style, a title which says a lot. While the subject is more often than not murder, it invariably takes place in a context that would be considered familiar, non threatening and not likely to bring significant unpleasantness to readers or to the other characters in the story. This usually focused on member of a closed group, often in a country house village or European train who become suspects in a generally bloodless and neat murder cracked wide open by an amateurish but astute detective or shrewd spinsterly sticky beak. The characters often reflect refined personal habit – Oxford dons, threadbare aristocrats supported by down in the mouth butlers and gruff ruddy constables from the village.As with most good detective fiction,the puzzle seems impossible to solve until the last chapter when everything’s made transparently clear. The happy endings are usually preceded by confrontation induced confessions and erudite unravelling with a minimal acknowledgement of the social or factual aspects of the crime. Much of the deduction and logic used is to explain who is behind the corpse rather than the mind bending psychological factors that compelled the killer thus.
I would commend Al for the wealth of characters he created. I pointed out to him that many country cousins of his rustic folk lived in our part of the bush. Al thanked me for having taken the time to write to him so kindly.
Wishing me the best, he threw in a drawing of Li’l Abner and Daisy Mae in full stride on one of their their humorous adventures.
The Busy Bookworm.
“Read well and you will write well” Sir Max Mallowan.
An archaeologist
is the best husband a woman can have; the older she gets, the more interested
he is in her.
Agatha Christie on Sir Max Mallowan.
With an eye to learning and edification,I wolfed down books,my mother’s milk, from the local library, starting with the Enid Blyton children’s books when I was little, moving through to the boys stories of wartime heroes and space adventures.. By the time I entered secondary school I was one of the innumerable readers of the second most published author in the English; by the time I left I was tackling the leader of the pack.When reading Shakespeare’s works,a turnoff to many, it broke on me
that along with owning books, reading was one of the greatest gifts we have. It takes us beyond ourselves.
Some of my mates missed out sadly on both counts.They couldn’t read well and never even knew we had a local library. It was kept quiet.
I encouraged one of my mates to find out about this vital resource.He rang up finally and asked Ms.Rixon: 'Is that the local library?'
She said: 'It depends where you're calling from.'
My mother was an avid reader of Agatha Christies mystery novels. I chose her books while I got my
own and would plough through them all,exhausting the supply. I kept the town librarian, Beth Rixon on her toes stamping them with their due date.
‘Outside of a dog,’she liked to say, ‘ a book is man's best friend.’
‘Inside of a dog,’I hastened to point out, ‘it's too dark to read.’
I was a great one for borrowing books in the morning and returning them in the evening which flummoxed Mrs.Rixon.’This is against the rules, Allan,’she pointed out to me,turning a blind eye to this ludicrous restriction. My familiarity with the ideas in these books and the experience of their author made me percipient of the thinking of my mother for whom they were a staple. I told Ms. Christie I appreciated her craftsmanship, spinning delicate webs of deception and mistruths in an effort to dissemble the real deal behind the façade.I told her that my mother and I had fun following the cleverly plotted and ingenious solutions that would never fail to surprise us. ‘Who knows?’I asked myself, ‘maybe one day I too will write such mysteries’.
Indeed I would write a short one and it is part of this saga.Titled ‘A Case of Mistaken Identity’,the main character is my mother herself.The mystery is that surrounding her fate and the behaviour leading up to it. Reading further will supply you with the clues necessary for solving it.
I asked Ms.Christie to give my regards to her husband, the eminent archaeologist Six Max Mallowan whose digs she had accompanied him on.These provided background for some of her novels.Both stimulated my interest in lost civilizations and those who seek to discover them. Ms. Christie expressed her good wishes to me.
Her crime fiction is considered to be a leading example of the cozy or cosy style, a title which says a lot. While the subject is more often than not murder, it invariably takes place in a context that would be considered familiar, non threatening and not likely to bring significant unpleasantness to readers or to the other characters in the story. This usually focused on member of a closed group, often in a country house village or European train who become suspects in a generally bloodless and neat murder cracked wide open by an amateurish but astute detective or shrewd spinsterly sticky beak. The characters often reflect refined personal habit – Oxford dons, threadbare aristocrats supported by down in the mouth butlers and gruff ruddy constables from the village.As with most good detective fiction,the puzzle seems impossible to solve until the last chapter when everything’s made transparently clear. The happy endings are usually preceded by confrontation induced confessions and erudite unravelling with a minimal acknowledgement of the social or factual aspects of the crime. Much of the deduction and logic used is to explain who is behind the corpse rather than the mind bending psychological factors that compelled the killer thus.
I came up with an alternative to the standard mystery formula: ‘The Butler Didn’t Do It.’ After the lord of the manor is found bludgeoned to death with a silver platter,the one armed chief manservant is quickly ruled out as a suspect.Upon observation of his working motions, Ms.Marple determined this butler could take it, but he couldn’t dish it out.
The Bleeding Heart.
If you want to find an earlier parallel to the modern contemporary murder mystery, the closest similarity is the four Gospels,especially the first three,the synoptic Gospels.People are intrigued about the sudden termination of life because it says something about what life is about.Agatha’s stories are about the death of an innocent person.The Gospels are about the death of an innocent man and what it means.These kinds of narrative speak to us about our mortality.
The mystery that engrossed my mind the most was that surrounding the ritual killing of Jesus as interpreted by the Roman Catholic Church.My meditation on the suffering and insults he endured wasshaped by the powerful visual narrative set out in the stations of the cross.These graphic scenes following his footsteps,stretched around the church,guiding my spiritual pilgrimage of prayer.I resolved to learn to speak in divers tongues.
My parents were both Catholics and the Church played a central role in my formative years.As a tyke,lining up at the rails, I was very moved by the image of the sacred heart of Jesus – a flaming bleeding heart encircled by a crown of thorns. A simple, credulous woman, my mother was ready to lap up any homilies dished out by the prelates. My father’s Catholicism was more secular,rooted in good works rather than dogma or pomp and circumstance. He didn’t flagellate himself or prostrate himself at the altar. Tempering his spiritual belief with a healthy dose of scepticism, he resembled so many Catholic men returned home after World War II. It was the war that sent away a generation of rich men and poor men and sent them back just men. Men that bled, men who shattered into a thousand pieces under fire, men who loved and felt fear and wanted better. While maintaining in varying degrees their ties with this almighty body with its allusion to saints, its penchant for sacrifice and its medieval views of the human condition, these Catholics in name had misgivings about the church’s restrictive social and sexual moves. They were deist in a airy fairy way , faintly Catholic in their outlook and ideas, not too much so.
I wore my ‘heart’ not on my sleeve but under my shirt. Strung around my neck was my scapular, a religious emblem with a cloth badge illustrating the agony of Jesus. This symbolized Christ’s suffering and love for humanity.
If you want to find an earlier parallel to the modern contemporary murder mystery, the closest similarity is the four Gospels,especially the first three,the synoptic Gospels.People are intrigued about the sudden termination of life because it says something about what life is about.Agatha’s stories are about the death of an innocent person.The Gospels are about the death of an innocent man and what it means.These kinds of narrative speak to us about our mortality.
The mystery that engrossed my mind the most was that surrounding the ritual killing of Jesus as interpreted by the Roman Catholic Church.My meditation on the suffering and insults he endured wasshaped by the powerful visual narrative set out in the stations of the cross.These graphic scenes following his footsteps,stretched around the church,guiding my spiritual pilgrimage of prayer.I resolved to learn to speak in divers tongues.
My parents were both Catholics and the Church played a central role in my formative years.As a tyke,lining up at the rails, I was very moved by the image of the sacred heart of Jesus – a flaming bleeding heart encircled by a crown of thorns. A simple, credulous woman, my mother was ready to lap up any homilies dished out by the prelates. My father’s Catholicism was more secular,rooted in good works rather than dogma or pomp and circumstance. He didn’t flagellate himself or prostrate himself at the altar. Tempering his spiritual belief with a healthy dose of scepticism, he resembled so many Catholic men returned home after World War II. It was the war that sent away a generation of rich men and poor men and sent them back just men. Men that bled, men who shattered into a thousand pieces under fire, men who loved and felt fear and wanted better. While maintaining in varying degrees their ties with this almighty body with its allusion to saints, its penchant for sacrifice and its medieval views of the human condition, these Catholics in name had misgivings about the church’s restrictive social and sexual moves. They were deist in a airy fairy way , faintly Catholic in their outlook and ideas, not too much so.
I wore my ‘heart’ not on my sleeve but under my shirt. Strung around my neck was my scapular, a religious emblem with a cloth badge illustrating the agony of Jesus. This symbolized Christ’s suffering and love for humanity.
In the Eyes of the Church.
As an altar boy I was quite zealous in my service. All day long I'd biddy-biddy-bum.Down on my knees,I’d fiddle with my rosaries, bow my head with great respect,and genuflect, reflect, expect. I’d
get in line in the long processional,step into that small confessional,find out if my sin was original.Kyrie eleison,I’d play it safer,bow down more to receive the wafer.Two, four, six, eight,it was time to transubstantiate.
Reading through the New Testament Gospels, I realised how often fish are talked about. Like Leo Cullum I came to see the Jesus fish as a symbol of hope.
In an aura of incense and theatre,a culture of symbolism and imagery, I was right up front in all the action, serving devoutly both in the local church and in the chapel of the Sisters of Mercy. Assisting the men of the cloth discharge their ecclesiastical office with bells and smells gave me first hand knowledge of these celibate shavelings and the almighty institution they served. In the chapel attached to the convent, I assisted a string of priests who must have come out of the ark, too feeble to say the mass impressively in the parish church.Their idea of a good sermon was to have a good beginning and a good ending, then having the two as close together as possible.
As an altar boy I was quite zealous in my service. All day long I'd biddy-biddy-bum.Down on my knees,I’d fiddle with my rosaries, bow my head with great respect,and genuflect, reflect, expect. I’d
get in line in the long processional,step into that small confessional,find out if my sin was original.Kyrie eleison,I’d play it safer,bow down more to receive the wafer.Two, four, six, eight,it was time to transubstantiate.
Reading through the New Testament Gospels, I realised how often fish are talked about. Like Leo Cullum I came to see the Jesus fish as a symbol of hope.
In an aura of incense and theatre,a culture of symbolism and imagery, I was right up front in all the action, serving devoutly both in the local church and in the chapel of the Sisters of Mercy. Assisting the men of the cloth discharge their ecclesiastical office with bells and smells gave me first hand knowledge of these celibate shavelings and the almighty institution they served. In the chapel attached to the convent, I assisted a string of priests who must have come out of the ark, too feeble to say the mass impressively in the parish church.Their idea of a good sermon was to have a good beginning and a good ending, then having the two as close together as possible.
“Weddings”, I replied with hesitation, savouring the thought of wedding cake and scads of other goodies, on top of the festive atmosphere of the occasion.
‘You can say that again,’croaked the ancient cleric. I thought as much. My gut feeling was I’m sure the same as his more than the lofty one he elaborated.
‘There’s more goodies here than at the Last Supper,’ I said at one reception.’
I often wondered why none of the disciples sat on the other side of the table. I reckoned that originally there were people sitting on the other side but those were the people going, “You know,
there’'s a strong draft from Mount Zion hitting me right on the back on the neck.’
I observed the appropriate emotions accompanying each ceremony.
I learned why it is that we rejoice at a wedding and cry at a funeral. It is because we are not the person involved.
Monsignor Leahy radiated joy after each wedding.
I was always relieved when the priest was delivering the eulogy and I realized I was listening to it.
The ancient cleric wasn’t too involved at one burial we officiated at.It was an appropriately funereal day, the wind was blowing hard, rain pelting the black crowd of umbrellas and everyone wanting to get it over with.I swear while watching the coffin being lowered into the ground I could hear the priest saying, ‘In the name of the father and the sun and into the hole he goes.’
At one wedding we officiated at,a bubbly old hen poked a nubile neighbour and said teasingly ‘You’re next.’
She didn’t like it when the young woman returned the comment some time later.They were both attending the same funeral.
At one shotgun wedding ,this priest disapproved of the groom drinking so heartily. ‘My wishes for a healthy family’,he went up and said to him.’I hope there’s nothing in heredity.’
‘Marriage is a most sacred ceremony,’ he declared to me ponderously. Protestants can wriggle out of it without compunction. For them anything goes. Wishy-washy versions of what the Lord expects. Those supermarket Protestants can choose from the shelf what’s convenient and leave the rest. Too many are mispronounced man and wife.The Archbishop of Canterbury adds an escape clause for those wishing to remarry.He says it is their private responsibility, and if they seek marriage, it must be by a civil ceremony without trying to involve the Church in the act.
‘You can say that again,’croaked the ancient cleric. I thought as much. My gut feeling was I’m sure the same as his more than the lofty one he elaborated.
‘There’s more goodies here than at the Last Supper,’ I said at one reception.’
I often wondered why none of the disciples sat on the other side of the table. I reckoned that originally there were people sitting on the other side but those were the people going, “You know,
there’'s a strong draft from Mount Zion hitting me right on the back on the neck.’
I observed the appropriate emotions accompanying each ceremony.
I learned why it is that we rejoice at a wedding and cry at a funeral. It is because we are not the person involved.
Monsignor Leahy radiated joy after each wedding.
The ancient cleric wasn’t too involved at one burial we officiated at.It was an appropriately funereal day, the wind was blowing hard, rain pelting the black crowd of umbrellas and everyone wanting to get it over with.I swear while watching the coffin being lowered into the ground I could hear the priest saying, ‘In the name of the father and the sun and into the hole he goes.’
At one wedding we officiated at,a bubbly old hen poked a nubile neighbour and said teasingly ‘You’re next.’
She didn’t like it when the young woman returned the comment some time later.They were both attending the same funeral.
At one shotgun wedding ,this priest disapproved of the groom drinking so heartily. ‘My wishes for a healthy family’,he went up and said to him.’I hope there’s nothing in heredity.’
‘Marriage is a most sacred ceremony,’ he declared to me ponderously. Protestants can wriggle out of it without compunction. For them anything goes. Wishy-washy versions of what the Lord expects. Those supermarket Protestants can choose from the shelf what’s convenient and leave the rest. Too many are mispronounced man and wife.The Archbishop of Canterbury adds an escape clause for those wishing to remarry.He says it is their private responsibility, and if they seek marriage, it must be by a civil ceremony without trying to involve the Church in the act.
Monsignor Leahy told me you’ve read about Pearl Buck. He didn’t want to tell you but that fallen women spells trouble for Christianity and the family. This whore of Babylon is in cahoots with that cancerous sore,that Communist Robeson. She once told a large gathering of Presbyterians that missionaries do more harm than good. Can you believe her own father was a missionary himself? So much for the idea that priests should be able to marry. What’s the world coming to?’
‘God only knows,Father ‘,I replied,lost for words,thinking of such mindbenders as the Virgin Birth and the Ascension- what some less reverent call ‘ Jesus moving back in with his parents.’
‘As for Mrs Buck or whatever she calls herself nowadays she should know that God created women from the rib of Adam, that her ordained role is as homemaker and mother to her children. I’m told she wrote a book about a female sculptor who chooses a career over her husband.She should hang her
head in shame. She has no respect for the sanctity of marriage herself and has trampled on it, choosing to shamelessly remarry the very day her divorce papers came through.She must think husbands are like Kleenex tissues, soft and disposable.I hear she even bought a drip-dry wedding dress.A woman like that will keep the bouquets and throw away the groom. What does she think monogamy is- a type of wood?
‘Maybe,’I thought to myself, ‘ for many it sounds too much like monotony.And if I 'am' is the shortest sentence in the English language,could it be for that demographic 'I do' is the longest sentence.
'How can she ever live this down? For us in the true church,we cross our hearts and hope to die. Marriage is an iron-clad contract you can’t just break at will. The Church cannot make exceptions in its public solemnization of marriage without compromising its witness. Woe betide those who sin by such erotic vagrancy,yearning only for carnal satisfaction,” he whined on, bending my ear, thus implicating one of my esteemed aunts who he would have considered had transgressed in this way. “Those who knowingly violate this law of the Church are thereby ineligible to receive the sacraments including the Holy Communion we share,” he pontificated.They are committing mortal sin. If they die with this on their soul they will go straight to hell, denied the sight of god for all eternity. Imagine that.Never ever seeing their heavenly father’.
“What can one do to avoid such a penalty, Father?” I asked. “The couple must seek a dispensation through the Sacred Rota, the church’s supreme court. Only it can decide on such matters. Only it can issue an annulment. If they walk away from this ruling they risk being excommunicated”, he
concluded his jeremiad with.
Sweet Jesus,the idea of my aunt being subjected to such mumbo-jumbo led me to hold such an archaic procedure in derision. How in the name of reason can it be sinful for a man or woman to live with the one they love? People should be free to marry whoever they want and call it quits whenever it’s on the rocks .They should be honest and come clean. Instead of standing in front of an altar saying ‘Til death do us part,’ they should just go, ‘I'll give it a shot.’ How on God’s green earth can anyone else – especially someone who’s never been married – demand a relationship driven by messy incompatibility be maintained at all costs.It was one thing for a man or woman to resist an aspiring partner's advances.It was another to block their retreat.
As for the annulments these struck me as stretching the truth somewhat, as akin to the sale of
indulgences, with similar effect. They allowed Catholics who had once gone and got married in good faith to claim that they hadn’t done so, to gainsay these marriages – despite their vows and often the existence of children– rather than admit their error without cutting the hem off truth's garment, and make a clean break.
Curious to know how the Church was going to stop people leaving, ’I asked the priest” ‘How can the Church convince people to follow it’s rulings?’
‘It’s simple.We need a government like that in Spain to set the lead.To enforce our laws’,he declared, full of fire and brimstone. ‘Not Communist manifestos. We need to remove these cancerous sores from God's sight.’
The priests and nuns had a very dim view of the Communists. In primary school The Sisters of Mercy gave us comic books depicting them as sinister figures skulking in the shadows.
‘We have to have a firm hold on what people can read, see and do.Women used to respect themselves.Brazen hussies flaunt their ankles and bosoms shamelessly in the street .They smoke,wear pants and get knocked up.The Church has a duty to protect the vulnerable from this fascination with the materialist.This so called rock and roll that inflames the passions with it’s pelvic thrusts,leg sliding and debased body grappling.So many occasions of sin multiplied beyond our imagination.We need Catholic rules,not Rafferty’s rules, to clean up the cesspit people are exposed to.Like Franco we have banned the outrageous film 'Viridiana'’.The Holy See backs us up .It has denounced it as "blasphemous."It’s got a "Last Supper" scene featuring crude, ruthless bums in place of Jesus and the apostles.What sacrilege!’
This didn’t fit in with a biblical admonition I had read:"But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed." This didn’t fit in with a biblical admonition I had read:"But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed." [Luke 14:13] It didn’t fit in with the view of St.Lawrence that such persons were the treasures of the Church. I wanted to take the priest on over what I felt was a departure from christian values, but being young and inexperienced I bit my tongue. I wanted to take
the priest on over what I felt was a departure from christian values, but being young and inexperienced I bit my tongue.
He spent an increasing amount of time reading the bible.The way I saw it he was cramming for his final exam.
Before he left for good,I said goodbye to him.I’ll be sorry to see you go,Father.I didn’t know what sin was until you came.’ These control freaks were All At See. This wasn’t how the Jesus I had in mind thought of the lowliest-those he called his brothers and sisters.True some frowsy tramps on the turps I had encountered were not fun people to be with the closer you edged up to them. B.O.Plenty,named after the Dick Tracy character, who humped his bluey,sleeping under Cohen’s bridge in Gunnedah came to my nostrils.His breath could kill a fly at fifty feet.The story went he once looked at the sign ‘Cleaning and Dyeing above the dry cleaners and commented ‘I always knew these things went together.’ However I didn’t see those ending up in this condition as simply down to them. The biblical accounts I had read of ‘The Bread of Life’ depicted him repeatedly reaching out with compassion to those at the bottom of the social pyramid—the needy,the helpless, women, Samaritans, lepers, children, prostitutes, tax collectors and all kinds of social outcasts.Had the priest had forgotten what we had been told about Jesus’s sayings.That it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.That the last shall be first and the first shall be last.That we must feed the hungry and clothe the poor.
I knew for a fact even outcasts can place their hope in the Almighty.Feeling the wrath of grapes, B.O. Plenty shuffled into our store one day to buy a small bottle of red wine.While he was fumbling for his coins,I said to him, ‘It’s not my business but you shouldn’t drink so much.Don’t be ashamed to talk about it.What do you have to thank for your drinking habit?’
He replied, ‘A woman drove me to drink and I didn't even have the decency to thank her.’
After rifling through his pockets,he finally came up with the required amount of coins.Jack slid the bottle in his back pocket and started out the door,a little unsteadily I feared. Checking to see he was walking O.K.,I saw him go just a short distance when he slipped and fell heavily astern. Struggling to
I became engrossed in Church history . I even wanted to become a Church historian until I realised there was no future in it.
At one altar boy’s picnic,I was assigned to rotating the various cuts on the gridiron .Monsignor Leahy, one of the parish priests, liked the meat cooked slowly for a long time. As the dripping fat and bloody juices sizzled onto the coals underneath, Colin Sills,my fellow altar boy said to me: ‘Hey,Allan I’ve been thinking .’
‘I thought I smelled something burning.’
‘I’ve been thinking about who my favourite saint is. Who’s your,Al?
‘Nearest and dearest to my heart is St.Lawrence, patron of cooks, chefs and comedians. As deacon in Rome, Lawrence was charged with the responsibility for the material goods of the church and the distribution of alms to the poor. I came across him when I was flipping through the missal to see the different saints' feasts. Now that's a saint if ever there was one.In one of their crackdowns, The Romans demanded he render to Caesar what was his.The lot.But there was nothing to give.Having gotten wind of their demands, Lawrence had sold the sacred vessels,golden candlesticks and other treasures and given the proceeds to the poor and needy.So the Romans put the heat on him. They “roasted” him alive ‘by inches’, little by little on a grill. To the faithful his burning flesh emitted a sweet,pleasant smell.To the unredeemed it was noxious. He kept his good humor to the end.So vehement of possessing Christ, he is said to have made his famous cheerful remark, “Turn me over. I’m done on this side.” Then after being turned,he declared ‘I am well baked. Whether better cooked or raw,make trial by a taste of me.Now if that isn’t chutzpah,I don’t know what is.’
‘Do we know if the prefect took him up on his offer? ’
Imbued with the spirit of St,Lawrence,I added my own postscript to the legend: ‘The prefect did make trial.After rolling a large bite around in his mouth,he said, “Umm, love them crispy Christians.You know,I’m converted. Until we barbecued this deacon, I just couldn’t seem to get a tender Christian. I’ve baked them, I’ve roasted them, I’ve stewed them. I’ve tried every sort of marinade.
The second prefect asked, “What kind of Christian have you used?”
The first said, “You know, the ones with those brown cloaks, a rope around the waist and a tonsured scalp.’
“Ah, well!” the second prefect replied, “no wonder … those are friars!’
‘Now pass me your plate,Colin.Ready for some short ribs? Sausages? Divers tongue.Eye fillet? How would you like them? Rare,medium or well done?’
‘Ah,I think I’ll pass.I’ll settle for a cheese sandwich.I’m feeling rather unredeemed right now.’
I became interested in the different orders. It was my reading The Three Musketeers that sparked my interest in the Jesuits.
‘One of them,Aramis is a Jesuit novice’,I told a trio of my fellow altar boys. ‘He is preparing for his ordination to the priesthood.’
‘We’re just like the Four Musketeers,aren’t we?’said Paul,one of our novice acolytes,
‘Fighting duels with hairy ticks and overcoming confusion.’
‘Shouldn’t it be ‘The Three Musketeers?’
‘Four if you count D'Artagnan.’
‘Well, nobody knows how many there were, really, do they, Paul? After all,history's a sketchbook.You do know that The Three Musketeers is a fiction, right? Written by Alexandre Dumas.’
‘A lot of people are saying that about the Bible these days.’
‘What, that it was written by Alexandre Dumas?
‘Don't be silly, Allan.Everyone knows it was written by Jesus.’
I was interested in how the different orders treated heretics.
"Do the Jesuit and Dominican Orders have similarities? "I asked Monsignor Leahy, renowned for his wit.
He replied, "Well, they were both founded by Spaniards -- St. Dominic for the Dominicans, and St. Ignatius of Loyola for the Jesuits. They were also both founded to combat heresy -- the Dominicans to fight the Albigensians, and the Jesuits to fight the Protestants."
"What is different about the Jesuit and Dominican Orders?"
"Met any Albigensians lately?" I was curious to find out more about this French religious sect exterminated for heresy during the Inquisition and other nonconformist groups. Gnostics,Manaechists,Arianists.all came under my microscope and I discussed them keenly with my fellow altar boys.So much so.it started to get on Tom Leahy’s nerves.
‘Sects!Sects!Sects!Is that all you boys can talk about’he complained.What’s wrong with Rugby League?’’
I was led to the realization how institutions and their representatives can be less likely to be offended by a separate group with a separate name, holding views different from their own, than they are by a group claiming their own name holding different views.Rugby would always mean Union,never League.And League would mean much more than Rugby.
Monsignor Leahy suggested I might follow in the footsteps of Cardinal Spellman. ‘ Like you, this humble,angelic boy with a humble wish to serve God, worked in his father’s grocery store and served at the altar .He shares your interest in archaeology. His Eminence is keenly interested in Church history and preservation of it’s sacred sites’,the Monsignor apprised me. ‘One of his pet projects involved the underground discoveries at the Basilica of Saints John and Paul,this holy of holies.’
During his long tenure in New York, The Cardinal had become known as ‘The American Pope’. He was military vicar general of US forces during World War II and would appreciate my thoughtful consideration in his regard for this service.
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I didn’t know at the time,however,that he didn’t appreciate the gentleness and humility of John, the new Roman pontiff . This benign pope had a different agenda, favouring a spiritual revolution rather than temporal matters of politics.In his encyclical addressed to ‘all men of good will’ he instructed that every human being has the right to worship God in accordance with the right dictates of his own conscience and to profess his religion both in camera and in public.This was a repudiation of the Catholic strain of exceptionalism-the insistent cry by armies,crusaders and inquisitioners throughout history that the Mother Church was the one and only true religion.He taught that age-old animosities with Protestants must end,even when faced with anti-Catholic bigotry.His ‘Mater et Magistra Encyclical’ took Catholic social thought expressed in Pope Leo’s ‘Rerum Novarum’ and brought it up to date by suggesting that government had a moral duty to provide welfare,health and education services, services for the poor and handicapped,and that democracy was the best governmental form to effect such justice.
To mock Pope John’s wish to be seen as ‘pastor and mariner’ it is said Cardinal Spellman filled a boat with sheep and sailed it along The Tiber. Looking down his nose at him, he is said to have scoffed: “He’s no pope – he should be selling bananas”.
Then there were stories told of the Cardinal himself at his expense. One I would hear later from Russel Ward, tells how Archbishop Mannix of Melbourne had been lobbied at a conference in 1939 by the then American ambassador to Australia.Pope Pius 11 had just died and the U.S. State Department was working hard to have the ultra conservative Spellman elevated to the throne of
St.Peter as the first American Vicar of Christ. In pursuit of this end the ambassador,Pete Jarman,spoke long and eloquently to the Archbishop who replied with only the occasional non-commital grunt.Mistaking reticence for assent,the ambassador finally said, ‘Of course,Your Eminence,there may be some difficulty in finding a suitable name for our man.’
‘Oh no,Your Excellency,’ replied the archbishop, ‘we could always call him Bolonius the First.’
I felt myself to be in the same boat as the kindly pope.
Unschooled in the byzantine ways of the Vatican power structure at the time-and even later- and the role in ecclesiastical intrigue played by God’s Field Marshal on Earth, I was just a kid helping my parents sell -amongst other things- lots of bananas.
Growing quickly I knew a few things for sure. Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.And I would learn that officiating in the Church doesn't make you a Christian any more than standing in a garage makes you a car.
Approaching the age of reason, I would become painfully aware of the hardline conservatives in the church when I attended the local parochial schools.
The Holy Family.
As had the Kennedy brothers from Boston. Monsignor Leahy lionized their clan as the Catholic ideal. His admiration was understandable. They were a gift to the media, the raw stuff of legends, perfect grist to the image making mill.In a hormonal manner of speaking, I had my mind to sharing their vocation, joining women, not men in frocks. Like many I read myself into the lives of these handsome ambitious men and their glamorous wives, all in their prime, all polished, buffed and shining. This was an image of splendour and high calling, of succeeding in places once believed out of reach.The social register. This carefully nurtured image became firmly lodged in my mind.
‘Jack Kennedy’, the monsignor said proudly of the eldest son, ‘is tipped to be elected as the first Catholic to the American presidency.We pray a puff of cigar smoke from the White House will confirm this. This could break the stranglehold of power there that is heavily weighted against ‘left footers.’. He’s a good Catholic role model, from a family to which everyone might want to belong.As a layman in the American church their father Joseph is out of the box. His wife Rose is a saintly mother devoted to the care of their intellectually handicapped daughter” he said.
“I’ve read about her,’I replied. She spoke publicly about her profoundly retarded daughter. ‘She was encouraged by the example of Pearl Buck. Mrs Buck wrote about the same cross her own daughter had to bear.Praise be. Her book ‘The Child Who Never Grew’ led me to understand mental illness better.”
“Is that so?” replied the Monsignor, seemingly taken aback, “I didn’t know they had common cause.”
I wasn’t sure what to say so said an emphatic nothing.
“Although Joseph Kennedy has made a pretty penny” he resumed,” he measures his success by the kind of family he has raised. They’re one big happy family – dedicated to each other as well as to the Church.They’ve given their nation and ours a sense of moving forward toward great things.They’ve brought to our life a culture, a refinement, a meaningfulness, that we have not known before. They have received the personal benison of the Pope and have always enjoyed the trust and close friendship of Cardinal Spellman.
‘I trust His Holiness received some holy venison,’I said.
‘You’ll be interested to know that Joseph Kennedy has kept the digging at the basilica moving along. He has chucked in some generous amounts.Relics play a large part in the life of the Church,you know,Allan.’
‘Amen to that Monsignor,amen,’I replied,the homily from the sanctimonious antiquity fresh in my mind.
I counted myself in this broad constituency of the great young white hope, wanting to mingle amongst the ‘in-crowd’-the blacktie artists, writers, scientists, glitterati and cognoscenti at the ritzy inaugural gala. Lightbulbs popping, lots of pizzaz. I too wanted to be elegant and sophisticated, with poetry on my tongue and a radiant woman all in white on my arm. I’d take her hand,kiss it and lead her on the floor.
The Woman in Black.
Nudging me along gently in this direction was the radiant lady sitting at my side after school.Dressed in black with ecclesiastical severity from the top of her head to the tip of her toes save for her white bib. My music teacher,Sister Aloysius. Not a widow but a bride of Christ.
‘The Catechism teaches that we nuns are mystically betrothed to Jesus Christ. In our actual marriage ceremony, we novitiates dress in white and make a public vow to the Church. After this we must consecrate ourselves to God “until death”.’
‘Why are Wedding Dresses white?’,I asked her.
‘Most people associate the color white with innocence and happiness.’
‘Not Maria’,I said,referring to the heroine in ‘West Side Story,which I had mentioned seeing. ‘She wasn’t happy about her white dress-and she worked in a bridal shop.Her communion dress was being altered into a gown for the big dance . When she tried on the plain white dress with a wide red belt,
she complained: "White is for babies."However after trying it on, she became ecstatic: "It is a beautiful dress!" What I neglected to add was that Maria had begged for the neckline to be lowered one more inch as she slightly pulled down on her own bodice: "How much can one little inch do?".
Her name as hard to spell as the life she led, ruled by silences, bells and the metronome, Sister Aloysius combined that essential reserve,delicacy and understatement that is expected of a nun, with a vivaciousness and boundless enthusiasm for all things musical. ‘Music is a language everyone understands’,she told me, ‘Whatever you want to say best, say it with music.’
‘Beautiful music’,I added, as had Irving Berlin.Plink,plank,plunk, Mum played Irving’s songs at home of an evening when we gathered round the piano.
With her rallying benedictions Sister Aloysius worked on me, this so so soprano,to sing in the local eisteddford.She brought to me my first acquaintance with the distinctive, incisive colours of the church organ.She invited me to be her learning companion while she practiced it in the church. ‘It’s time you learned about the king of instruments. It’s ideally suited to accompany human voices..She used it to accompany the choirs, inspire the congregation in their singing, and generally to enhance the liturgy. ‘ It powerfully lifts up man’s mind to God and to higher thing’. First and foremost she taught me piano.One of her favourite solo piano pieces was Prokoviev’s Romeo and Juliet based on his ballet score.She shared my infatuation with Shakespeare's timeless tragedy, the tale of two ill-fated lovers thwarted by circumstances beyond their control. I told her more about my favourite re-telling ,the musical ‘ West Side Story’, presenting her with a vinyl record of the movie soundtrack. It’s iconic red and black cover depicted apartment block fire escapes in New York.
‘One of these takes the place of the famous balcony in Shakespeare’s drama’ , I said.’The outlines you can see are Tony and Maria, the star-crossed lovers, in dancing pose,declaring their love for one another. I hope some day you’ll be able to see this masterpiece. It’s a true marriage of drama, opera and ballet.Saints alive,it’s got everything- sheer visual excitement, a score heavy with jazz and Latin-American rhythms ,music that pulses and soars,superb ballads, restless,dizzying dance steps, bodies high-stepping,leaping,tumbling,rumbling,spinning, flying wildly through space, flickknife fighters chest-puffing, fist-clenching , chin pointing jeering and snorting, crouching slithering and springing. It’s a a feast for the eye, the ear and, ultimately, the heart.’
‘What’s it all about,Allan?’
‘This powerful real life tale uses the street-smart slang of teenagers, skillfuly updating Shakespeare’s plot intricacies. It’s set in the plug ugly tenement slums of today’s ‘Big Apple’ . The ill fated lovers struggle to exist together in a concrete jungle of violence, hate and prejudice.The theme of love defeated is widened to that of society rent asunder.
‘Who are the main characters?’
‘Tony, a Jet. and Maria,a Shark, find themselves caught between not rival families but rival street gangs of different ethnic backgrounds. The native born are the 'Jets' and the Puerto Ricans are the Sharks, the sons of less recent immigrants. In a fight to the death over who will control the neighborhood, the Jets, the "American" hoodlums, want to resist newcomers setting foot in their territory.’
‘Our Sisters in New York write about this savage brawling,’said Sister Aloysius. ‘Some of the bigger
ruffian schoolboys give them the collywobbles.Knife fights are a fact of life in their diosceses.A young punk pulled a knife on one of the Sisters recently.’
‘She must have been terrified.’
‘She stayed calm.She could tell he was new to the game. The knife had butter on it.’’
‘The musical is relevant then,’I said. ‘It makes points in its description of the hell to pay when youth are devastated by poverty. It deals with social problems,particularly those faced by immigrants, grappling with the difficulties of assimilating into a different society. They have mixed feelings about their new country, alternately excited or with their heart in their mouth.In ‘America’,it’s praises are sung. But the streets are not paved with gold. The land of opportunity is also one of racism and discrimination.’ ‘By all that’s holy,it sounds very heart-breaking ’,said the nun,after she had listened to the album, ‘and also very instructive artistically.The tension and suspense is reflected in musical terms.Bernstein displays a motif prominently throughout the entire musical,a common musical device called the tritone -also known as the augmented fourth or diminished fifth. You can hear it in the reiterated word, ‘ Maria’, in the song .Try singing it.’
Breathing in deeply,I sang the three syllables:"Ma-ri-a: I've just seen a girl named...’’
‘It’s hard,isn’t it. It plays on so many rhythms, almost on just that name.Three notes pervade the whole piece and in the overture and all of the fight music -"The Rumble". It comes out in ‘Cool’ and as the gang whistle -in "Prologue”. The same three notes. The interval is dissonant. It sounds jarring,restless, unsettled and creates musical tension.It’s something that yearns to be resolved into the next note. It’s also quite exciting. By embracing the musical disunity created by the tritone, Bernstein provides a musical representation of how Tony,Maria and the opposing gangs feel.
‘It triggers off all kinds of feelings,I said.’
‘As God is my witness,music has a powerful subconscious effect.’she replied, ‘Certain notes can stir certain internal reactions within the listener they may not even be aware of. Today the tritone is used in films and theatre to suggest an "oppressive", "scary", or "evil" sound. It used to be nicknamed ‘The Devil’s Interval’ hundreds of years ago. Some considered it most "dangerous",being associated with sinister things,mainly the devil. In medieval theology you had to have some way of presenting Satan. Or if someone in the Church wanted to portray the crucifixion, it would be sometimes used there . The Church didn’t regard it in accordance with canonical rules.It discouraged use of this particular dissonance.It was seen as wrong when it came up in choruses of monks and nuns. If I had been teaching you then,I would have told you that it simply doesn’t work technically and was to be avoided like the plague. There were stringent musical rules.’
‘More honoured in the breach than in the observance,I daresay..What would have happened if you had broken these rules?’I asked.
‘There were rules for getting around it.Church history is full of compromises.There’s a lot of them happening now. Pope John is bringing us up to date. Some say that singers were cast out,bell,book and candle,or otherwise the Church came down on them for invoking this interval.This notion is likely fanciful.The tritone is just another color in the musical palette.You can’t ban it. It’s a natural and expected component of our music.’
“Let everything that has breath praise the Lord!"- Psalm 150:6.
One day Sister Aloysius led me up the stairs at the rear of St.Joseph’s to the gallery and approached the organ console.
‘As with the tritone the organ has occasioned some misgivings in the eyes of the Church. The sound generated by the hydraulis- the first recognizable ancestor of the organ- was thought to be so terrifying that it was used at the ancient Roman circuses. At that time these were more of a horror show than family entertainment. A strong objection to the organ in worship remained pretty general down to the twelfth century.
‘Why was that?’I asked.
‘It’s partly accounted for by the imperfection of tone in organs of that time. But from the twelfth century on, the organ became the privileged church instrument. The majesty and unimpassioned character of its tone made it a particularly suitable means for adding solemnity to Divine worship. Evolving over time It eventually worked its way into mainstream liturgical use. It hasn’t lost prominence.’
‘Sister,I read in The Catholic Weekly that Cardinal Spellman says the pipe organ is a treasure of inestimable value.He says it adds a wonderful splendour to the Church’s ceremonies.He’s raising funds for a new one.’
‘Whereabouts?’ she asked”.
‘It’s for the the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington.One that will be a resounding memorial to the many deceased chaplains and members of the armed forces.’
‘What a fitting way to show this.Let me show you our’s resounding range of timbre,’she said.
Sitting herself down ,squaring up over the keyboard,she put her feet on the peddles and began coaxing the organ to life. ’ Slowly increasing in volume until a discernible melody breathed through a fluid amalgam of tones and harmonies.
‘Holy smoke’,I thought, She’s having a go at ‘Maria.’
‘ Listen to it piano,’she said, ‘just whispering: ‘Say it soft and it’s almost like praying.’ Pulling out all the stops,she continued to magnify the intensity of sound and, after several minutes, was pumping like crazy.Now listen to it fortissimo:’ ‘Say it loud and there’s music playing.’ Timbre! ‘Maria’ thundered throughout the hallowed space, filling the church with sounds of worship and praise.
I'll never forget the thrill of those tricky tritones.As I recall they gave me goosebumps and set my heart beating . Sister’s playing could only be described as magnificent, the registrations dramatic.I found it devilishly hard resisting my eagerness to sing. Between stanzas of the song, Sister Aloysius played it by ear with the skill and artistry for which she was noted. The sound effect, the very best ‘cos the church was empty, was all that I had imagined and more besides. I was in awe until I noticed that it we had some company.Monsignor Leahy, open mouthed, was gazing up at us from the sacristy.What was going on in his mind?After Sister packed up playing, he started walking along the aisle, to the staircase. O dear, was he unnerved, coming to register his displeasure?
‘What is that you’re playing,Sister?’,he asked,as he climbed up to join us in the loft.I’ve never heard anything quite like this before in our church.’
‘ It’s ‘ Maria’,Father.Do you like it?’
‘ Bless my soul,I don’t like it,Sister.Hallelujah,I love it!’he said,his eyes sparkling.It’s sublime.It transcends the merely human sphere.It evokes the divine. It’s musical testimony to the composer’s obvious devotion to the Blessed Virgin. He depicts this sacred theme in ways not possible with words.’
When he left,I confided my fear to Sister about how this secular piece composed by a worldly New York Jew might have gone down with him. ‘I thought he might have found it unfit , unpleasing,wanting to stick to the traditional hymns.’
‘Allan, you needn’t have worried.This majestic instrument is exactly that- an instrument and its uses are only restricted by the imagination of the organist who plays it. It follows, therefore, that an organ may be used to render traditional or contemporary styles of church music as they may be required.It gives resonance to the fullness of human sentiments, from joy to dejection, from praise to lamentation. It is capable of echoing and expressing all the experiences of human life. According to present canonical legislation organ music is allowed on all joyful occasions .Other than for celebrating our love of the lord,what could be more joyful than celebrating the love of a man for a woman.And might I add your newfound love for this instrument, superior to all others.’ .”What could be more becoming for playing in the Church than ‘Maria’?’
‘Would you go to see West Side Story if asked,Sister?’,I asked her later.
‘I wouldn’t say no’,she said. ‘One day.It’s subject is not for the fainthearted-it is a tragedy after all- but-and I’m not placing them on the same level- like that of the death of Christ,what it draws out of it is beautiful. For all it’s sadness West Side Story ends on a positive note— with the idea that out of the vale of tears a better society can be created in which different groups can live together.’
The Altar Boys Picnic
The annual altar boys outing was the occasion on which the priests thanked us for our services with a splash at the local swimming hole followed by an outdoor spread and barbeque.One in particular presented me with an opportune moment to find out more about the Church’s views on the political hot potato.
‘Monsignor Leahy, I see many articles in the Catholic Weekly that paint a diabolical picture of Communism. Some in the church see it as the devil incarnate.’
‘Of all the animals God created, the serpent was the most tricky and deceitful. Snakes and serpents take many disguises. Lucifer doesn’t necessarily stink of sulphur have horns and a pointed tail. He may wear a fine red shirt and sing about brotherhood. But his horrible goals are still the same.’
‘At school the Sisters have given us comics. They show the Communists as sinister figures skulking in the shadows.They say they worship the anti-Christ and his false idols. What is it between the Church and the Communists?’
‘We are at loggerheads with Communism,Allan.We don’t go along with it for its pagan ideas and we fear what they have done to the Church. Communists don’t believe in the soul, in the afterlife.They don’t believe in the Trinity or the Virgin Birth.They believe that man is a physical being and nothing else. They have put the God-Man in place of the Man-God.’
‘What have they actually done to the Church?I asked.
‘Let’s look at their record.In the 20’s prists disappeared in the gulags to the sorrow of the faithful. In the 30’s mobs looted convents and seminaries in Spain. Religious properties were torched and desecrated while crowds looked on and cheered. Archbishop Duhig feared that the Republican measures were part of a universal pattern.He said: 'Yesterday it was Russia and Mexico; today it is Spain. Tomorrow it may be Britain, and the day after, Australia.’
‘Monsignor’,I said, ‘Don’t you think some of this trembling fear led to unnecessary alarm. To some real howlers.I’ve been reading some old back copies of The Catholic Weekly’ from the presbytery shed. In two September 1942 issues Cardinal Gilroy said that the communists-our allies- were gearing up for "armed insurrection" in Australia. Archbishop Mannix called Mussolini-our enemy- the greatest man living today" in 1943. Cardinal Duhig glowingly described him as 'like Napoleon with few, if any, of his faults'.Mussolini who we know was butchering so many people. How could Catholic spokesmen parrot such alibis. Some might say these statements, sowing doubts and confusion, bordered on apostasy and disloyalty’,I commented.How do we explain this blot on their conduct?’,I asked.
‘Allan,none of them ever seriously went along with fascism.’
‘No,of course not. None of them ever did,’I said, only too aware of Pope Pius’ notorious failure to condemn the Nazi regime and the deals he made with them. ‘I don’t know how those rumours ever got started.’
‘The thing is they were scatty and simply got carried away.To understand the position they got into,you have to understand their background.They inherited a deep mistrust of the British Empire and felt impelled to speak up for the Italian flock in the fight against Communism.’ This fight hasn’t stopped.The Communists haven’t made it easy.To be a priest serving in Eastern Europe today’, he said, reaching to the hamper for a sandwich, “is no picnic.Heavens preserve us, the Communists have commited a multitude of sins in these captive nations.They accuse the Church of offering people pie in the sky. Like the serpent that tempted Eve in paradise,they offer pie on the earth, instead-,’
‘Apple pie,’I said,cutting in on him .
‘-- with the bogus promise of limitless output and leisure time. A fool’s paradise. Like Judas of old they lie and finagle .They’ve disbanded and razed churches.Our priests act in the spirit of Thomas More, resisting Henry VIII's seizure of church power.’
‘ Martyred ,’I said,drawing my hand across my throat.
‘The Communists deny congregations the right to practice their religion. They have silenced the clergy.People have forgotten how to pray’.
‘What about the Pope?,I asked,picking up a pie from the ground. ‘Can’t he do anything about this?’
‘Pope John is taking a very diplomatic approach to this matter.I’m told Pravda, the Soviet newspaper, has cautiously praised him.They see virtue in his upbringing as a peasant, like Khruschev,their leader.’
‘So what are the biggest hurdles along the way?’
‘The immediate stumbling block remains the situation of the Hungarian Cardinal Mindszenty. As you know he has taken refuge at the American Embassy for standing up for his beliefs.When Bobby Kennedy spoke up for him in Budapest they put him under close arrest for being a spy, accusing him of collaboration with Cardinal Spellman. They won’t forgive the Cardinal for standing up for victims of the Communists in Vietnam.
‘What happened there?’ I asked.
‘They beat a priest with a bamboo club.They’ve disembowelled women. They jam chopsticks in the ears of children to keep them from hearing the word of God.’
‘Holy Dooley’,I said. ‘What cruelty.’
‘Holy Dooley’ is right.When they were forcing all the Catholics out of the country, Dr.Dooley, helped them flee their clutches.He was backed up by His Eminence .’
‘The Cardinal’ I thought, tucking into a meat one, ‘seems to have a finger in quite a few pies’.
‘The Communists have no feelings for other people.’ Monsignor Leahy went on, ‘They don’t listen to others.They listen in.They don’t watch over people.They watch their every step.They debase the individual.They don’t allow you to read and see what you fancy.They allow no search for the truth. Children are taken early and moulded to fit the vast machine that powers the state.They have no respect for private property.They take over people’s businesses and homes.They don’t know the meaning of fair play. All these heathens know is how to inflict pain on people’.
Tender Mercies.
‘Stand up straight and hold your hand out!’ Something told me I wasn’t about to be presented with a sweet . I gritted my teeth, waiting for the first sharp blaze of pain across my hand.Each stroke she really laid it on. The whistling sound of the cane cutting downward through the air apprised me that all I could expect was a weal, a ridge the stroke would raise on my flesh.
‘Silence!’ Sister Casimir had howled out to the assembly like a mighty Wurlitzer.She was breathing fire. When she heard what she deemed an infringement of this command, she would point to whoever she thought had breached this commandment.
‘What did you say?’she demanded of of one of my classmates who had whispered to me his discomfort.
‘Oh,I was just thinking out loud’,he came back.
‘Well don’t’, she warned. ‘People get in trouble for that.’
Double, double, toil and trouble. I got the lot at one assembly when she put the finger on me.I was to be the whipping boy.
‘Good grief’,I thought,wincing, as she flexed it. ‘I’m for it.’
‘If I've told you once I've told you a thousand times,you’re not to talk on assembly. You’ll write this out one hundred times.’
What rankled with us was that this martinet could pick you out at the drop of a veil for the most trivial infractions. I can still remember the instructions – ‘hand out level, keep your thumb down and out of the way, and don't pull away.’ Lashing herself into an almost orgiastic fury, flushed more purple than ever, she smote thee thrice on each hand, prescribed I dared to say, by summoning the Holy Trinity in her ghostly ritual. Take that! And that! And that!"
It wasn’t too bad if you copped it against the centre of the palm. Further out on the fingers, it hurt like blazes. It was no use pulling your hand away. If you did you got it even harder. She could raise welts like nobody else.
‘You’ll thank me one day for this’, said this flailing flagellator.Why not? Of course she was only rough on us ‘cos she loved us.
‘Yeah, and pigs might fly” I replied,under my breath.
‘ Say what ?’ she demanded.
‘Yeah and time flies’, I replied without blinking an eye, somehow convincing her that I wasn’t referring to her, thus saving my own back. ‘Watch your tongue, boy’, she snapped. ‘Off you go!’.
Stinging from her scolding, I held my tongue as it occurred to me how I could express my gratitude to her.
‘I will thank you to keep your comments and your hands to yourself, Sister Harridan’, I said to myself. She was, unless I was very much mistaken, descended from the Marquis De Sade. Biting my lip, fighting back any tears welling, I headed for the tap to douse my hands in water to salve the pain.
Later in the secondary school, we were expected to use our "best writing". This was always a trial as you had to dip your pen in the inkwell on the flip top desk, and try to write without producing blots. The nibs would cross or break, or simply pick up too much or too little ink, with an inevitable result of ink on our fingers and clothes.
Sister Kieran, our class teacher would rap the back of our hands with the edge of a ruler and say "start again" if our work was not up to standard. The inkwell and blotting paper naturally had the alternative use in the making of ink pellets.Once she noticed blue pellets on the floor. All hot andbothered she raced around like a bullant when a stick is plunged into it.
After she slowed down,she asked, 'Perhaps one of you would care to explain this to me.
Everone took a bopeep at one another only to give the expectedcomeback of "Nobody Sister, cross my heart and hope to die".
"Own up or you’re all in for it. You’ll all all stay in".
‘‘I’m Spartacus’,called one boy.’No,I’m Spartacus’, called another and so it went on.
When she selected one as the guilty party ,she demanded, You’ve got a real nerve,boy. What have you got to say for yourself?
Upon getting the wrong reply, she ticked him off, raising the cane backwards to whack him: ‘ This is going to hurt you a lot more than it hurts me. Let's get this over with.’
‘Well I never. Swish. She got it over all right. Before she bore down on her intended target, she swiped me a real stinger on the backstroke.Right across the cranium.
She was totally unaware of any collateral damage.
‘I’ll thank you not to dip your nib in the well when there’s no ink, Sister,’ I managed to come out with.
‘You can take it, can’t you, Allan.’
Seeing I was in on the deal,I took this as a backhanded compliment.
You needed gumption just to be in her firing range .
Many years later I would be in stitches watching Jake and Elwood, the Blues Brothers, being woman handled by Sister Mary Stigmata. I would thank her prototype, Sister Casimir for this motherlode that the Church has bequeathed the literary world and for letting me off lightly. Many others who had attended Catholic schools had had the living Christ beaten out of them. And that’s the gospel truth.
The Devil’s Showground.
The ascetic lessons of sacrifice, confession and spiritual reflection would become a strong and lasting counterpoint to any more frivolous side of my sunny personality.Minding my p’s and q’s, I was always a conscientious student and never cheated.Well,just once.During a religious knowledge test,I looked into the soul of the boy next to me.
I didn’t get up to mischief. This was no vouchsafe against getting the ‘cuts’ from some of those big on wielding the cane. On one occasion Sister Stephen, the principal, whacked me for jumping up to look over a fence while marching in line to benediction.
Another occasion to interrupt lessons took place soon after the travelling showground families had rolled into town with their overflowing trucks and caravans for the annual agricultural show, set up their rides and stalls, and spruiked their offerings to the locals.What concerned her was not so much what was going on but what was coming off.
This time her delivery was for me attending a sinful ‘striptease’ sideshow performance. What had been little more than a sideshow became seen as a den of iniquity . Such forms of entertainment were frowned on severely, seen as designed to make people happy without divine assistance.Muggins me was guileless enough to put my hand up when quizzed at assembly. I had actually only gone on sufferance, being a bit of a Holy Joe myself, but some madcap girls insisted I go. . Keeping my eyes closed most of the performance’, I dared not open them.Finally I forced them open at one stage to glimpse the vague outline of a human form behind a thick sheet of glass fairly impenetrable to sight.Neither bump nor grind.Merely hokum.
I was told I had transgressed the Seventh Deadly Sin. ‘ We’re such weak pitiful creatures, prey to the vilest temptations of the flesh.Remember yourself.If you don’t watch out,you’ll form habits that will be hard to break later. If you harbour impure thoughts,indulge in base vices, God will turn away from you.’
The ensuing penance imposed on me,’equal to the gravity of the sin’, led to greater transparency in this matter. To the striking disclosure how religious authority can resort to violence to prevent a child learning about the human body. To realization of the restrictive boundaries of the Church when dealing with sexuality.A topic never mentioned except in vague general admonition about ‘purity’ and ‘clean living.’ This was still a time when sex was something few talked about openly and sexual development was accompanied by ignorance, fear and psychic trauma. The nun’s action, with much left to the imagination, said more about what was in her prurient mind than was in mine. On another occasion this moral watchdog cracked down on students after the school dance.It wasn’t about clinches too close for chastity.Something far more serious.Somehow the Hokey Pokey had made it onto the program .. It was something quite innocent and fun filled as far as I was concerned. Oh me oh my. The idea of body parts other than those in the
lyrics being put in and out of the ring and wiggled and shaken hadn’t occurred to me. Any sexual overtones of this dance were put in my mind by this nun who laid the seeds of my secular awakening.On that account it only made me think more about it. Ironically one plausible explanation for the origins of this dance’s name lies in the corruption of a phrase used in the ritual of the mass.
At one school dance,I said to my partner, ‘Do you have the feeling there’s someone coming between us.’ One of the older nuns went round couples,her arms outstretched to indicate the regulation distance for being close, ‘Don't forget to make room for the Holy Ghost,’she reminded us.
The infliction of pain on me at St Mary’s did not stop with some nuns. I collected a ‘rabbit chop’ to the neck from one boy and a cricket bat hurled at me by another who went on to graduate as a policeman. I’m not so precious to consider that this was big time bullying, but considering that this was a fee paying institution my father concluded you could avoid this arrant tommyrot without the cost.
Catholic boys in the final years of secondary school in a country town like Gunnedah were usually shipped off to a larger centre or the city. At a time when as in many facets of life the separation of Catholics in education was waning, my father ruled this out. “Better to put the money saved towards a university education”, he opined wisely. “Look at John Kennedy”, he said “He only spent one year at a Catholic school but that didn’t stop him being publicly identified as a practising congregate”.
My father’s Catholicism was much more secular than my mother’s. He had tasted the harsh regime of Christian Brothers as a boy: ‘I received more than my share of corporal punishment for relatively harmless offences. Some of the Brothers were real sadists’,he recalled’, raving about the 'filthy beast' called lust while they flailed us with their sticks.We spent so much time escaping their violent attentions’.Wisely he saw fit to send me to the state high school.
Finding it increasingly difficult to reconcile the preaching and practice of Christ with those of most of his professional servants,I would increasingly shed any vestigial belief in the supernatural and messiahs. The whole Judeo-Christian view is that the body belongs to a fallen world and nature belongs to a fallen world, and I don't accept any of that at all. Both a sensualist and an ascetic, I think the sacred is in this world, not in another world, and in the body and in nature.
I continued to love the peaceful precepts and example of Christ. I saw him as no kind of miracle man but a whole and magical human being with no magic advantages over the rest of us. Who could lift people up but not with the aid of mirrors or crippled midgets behind black curtains.I aimed to become as human all over as I could and to bear the responsibility for my own actions.
A Delicate Matter.
But not before my next brush with another major figure from the Establishment which occurred in 1961. It was quite instructive.The year my voice broke Menzies had appointed a new Governor-General who had the impeccable pedigree and accoutrements of the nobility that he himself,a mere bunyip aristocrat,still lacked. Nay the ceremonial head of state also had a distinguished military record. While travelling widely throughout Australia, he stopped off in Gunnedah.. His duty was to cut ribbons, unveil statues,utter generalities,attend garden parties, and open formal events and buildings.It was said that he would be on hand to attend the opening of an envelope.Another duty was to encourage by his presence and interest, individuals and groups considered to be making a substantial contribution to the community and to national life.That’s where I came in.
As a member of the student body, I found myself part of the guard of honour formed to welcome the vice regal visitor. Once settled on the podium, the Governor-General took the floor, launching into an upbeat appraisal of the state of affairs in the British Commonwealth. His address started something like the following: “Ladies and Gentlemen, Sisters of Mercy, Boys and Girls, On behalf of her gracious Majesty the Queen, I must say how proud we are of our Commonwealth of Nations and the family of nations that belong to it.Former members of the greatest empire the world has ever known.Ruled not by superior force or skill, but by sheer presence.It only ever went to war to defend values, never to acquire territory or to subjugate people. It only ever went to war to defend values and principles.We ought to always remember that.”
These ties of loyalty that bind us together bring us all greater prosperity and democracy. It is my great pleasure to tell you that this family will be growing over the coming years. Most of the remaining Crown territories will become independent and will choose to maintain their links with the other countries of the former empire. I call on you, especially you youthful Australians to nurture this family of nations on which the sun as before never sets, and to learn from its peoples.
I call on you to service . It is within the province of all of us to be great or small, according to the degree of service we render, service of one man to another, to a community, to a nation, to all mankind. It is by service we are born, we live, and we are carried to our last resting place. It is therefore not just an obligation, it is the very purpose of life – to serve.’
I was fain to follow out the benign spirit of his exhortation.Happenstance came forthwith. Making his way along the guard of honour at the end of his address he paused his review, according to his wont, to inquire of children after their interests.
“Young man”, he asked me “What subjects do you like to study?”
“ Verily I say unto you, Your Excellency, history and languages,” I replied.’I’m studying French and Latin”.
“Magnifique!” he enthused. “My life is closely bound up with France and its language. My family came over with William The Conqueror. My title originates from French. Viscount comes from two parts ‘Vis’ means ‘in place of’, like ‘vice’ in vice-royal. ‘Conte’ means ‘count’. “And my titular name is ‘de L’Isle”, he said tearing out a page from a pad, writing it down and handing it to me.
‘This means ‘from the island’ in French, or from ‘insula’ in Latin. It originally stood for coming “from Lille’ in France which used to be an island of dry land in a marsh”. “And this officer assisting me, my aide-de camp gets his title from one who aids or helps in the military camp.’ Unlike Menzies who saw himself as British to the bootstraps, it seemed de L’isle was British to the ‘languettes’. It entered my mind that the stronger your connections with the French, or in the case of the royals with the Germans, the more British you were. That is if you’ve blue blood.
I had a question ready for the Governor-General arising out of my reading about his background. In framing it, the advice dispensed by Sybil Thorndikes’s Dowager Princess to Marilyn Monroe’s showgirl about how to address the royals was fresh in my mind. This was not less than to say what is obvious.
‘ Hail, Your Excellence,well met, I believe you were injured during the War. Where were you shot, pray tell me?’ I asked,shucking and jiving, somewhat presumptuously letting slip what I felt was the kind of archaic highfaluting utterances you might hear at court.
“In Italy” he replied. “Italy?” I queried “but where forsooth …” Before I could finish the sentence he was off again, spreading his stately personage hither and thither in the short amount of time he had. But not before I caught the faintest trace of a blush betraying blood the same hue as my own coursing through his veins. Was he being coy about something? It was the aide-de camp shadowing him that my complete question would fall. As he passed, I put it to him. “Sir, I wanted to know what part of His Excellence sustained the injury?’ Smiling at me vacantly he lowered his head and whispered in my ear “Do your homework, Danny Boy!”.
Avast! Was this an officer but not a gentleman taking the micky out of me, this green Catholic bucko? Did he think this was bush week? Did he think I had been out of place the way I had spoken? Chewing over this puzzle during the following days, I couldn’t make head or tail of it.
Gadzooks.It turned out to be a tail. The breakthrough came after I conveyed the aide-de camp’s advice to Sister Aloysius, my dear music teacher.
‘Danny Boy’, she informed me, ‘is the familiar title of the Irish classic ‘Londonderry Air”.’ After much deliberation I rearranged it in franglais as ‘London Derriere’. Further research turned up the fact that the Germans had lodged a bullet in the nobleman’s buttocks.Methinks I had been given a bum steer – albeit one in the right direction.
The Secular Estate.
At first blush I was a bit apprehensive over the new academic direction I was headed At that time there was still some residual degree of division between Protestants and Catholics. My father’s parents had come from both sides of the aisle . My grandfather was Catholic, this side seen as that of the poor Irish without a penny to their name.His own father’s family in famine stricken Ireland had been forced to light out during the great wave of immigrants in mid-nineteenth century.My grandfather told me ‘The English summed up what they thought of them in one sentence: "Those bogtrotters keep pigs in the parlour".
‘ Pigs arse!’,he exclaimed. ‘They were talking through their bowler hats. It was the poor people who mainly kept pigs and in their houses there were no parlours’.
My grandmother’s was on the Anglican side, it seen mainly as the spiritual home of the rich and fashionable. As their brood was larger and closer and more within cooee than my mother’s, it was their union that shaped most the ideological and cultural makeup of my parental family. In this mixed marriage the issues determined to a large extent where your business went, to whom you paid your tithes, and where you fitted in with respect to the establishment. Religionwise my father and his six siblings were a mixed bag, half choosing to stay aligned as their father,half staying on the distaff side.
My father went along with his father, Paddy, and married a Catholic, the sense of the Irish Catholic thread, and of coming from an often oppressed minority – albeit a most significant one – carried through generationally.
Dad took me to see ‘Shake Hands with the Devil’ in which Lady Fitzhugh an Irish noble woman, is arrested and put on trial for assisting the IRA. Sybil Thorndike’s Lady Fitzhugh challenges the legitimacy of the officer trying her: ‘What’s an English judge doing in an Irish court.’Dad supplied his own answer loudly: ‘Up to no good.’
‘As far as I can see,Dad, all the differences between the various religions and their followers can be linked to whom they recognise as legitimate.’
‘Allan,it’s all about recognition. Jews don't recognize Jesus as the Son of God.Protestants don't recognize the Pope as the Vicar of Christ and Baptists don't recognize each other in the pub on Saturday nights.’
It occurred to me it would be probably more sensible if people brought up their children free from all these traditional divisions.
‘God only knows,Father ‘,I replied,lost for words,thinking of such mindbenders as the Virgin Birth and the Ascension- what some less reverent call ‘ Jesus moving back in with his parents.’
‘As for Mrs Buck or whatever she calls herself nowadays she should know that God created women from the rib of Adam, that her ordained role is as homemaker and mother to her children. I’m told she wrote a book about a female sculptor who chooses a career over her husband.She should hang her
head in shame. She has no respect for the sanctity of marriage herself and has trampled on it, choosing to shamelessly remarry the very day her divorce papers came through.She must think husbands are like Kleenex tissues, soft and disposable.I hear she even bought a drip-dry wedding dress.A woman like that will keep the bouquets and throw away the groom. What does she think monogamy is- a type of wood?
‘Maybe,’I thought to myself, ‘ for many it sounds too much like monotony.And if I 'am' is the shortest sentence in the English language,could it be for that demographic 'I do' is the longest sentence.
'How can she ever live this down? For us in the true church,we cross our hearts and hope to die. Marriage is an iron-clad contract you can’t just break at will. The Church cannot make exceptions in its public solemnization of marriage without compromising its witness. Woe betide those who sin by such erotic vagrancy,yearning only for carnal satisfaction,” he whined on, bending my ear, thus implicating one of my esteemed aunts who he would have considered had transgressed in this way. “Those who knowingly violate this law of the Church are thereby ineligible to receive the sacraments including the Holy Communion we share,” he pontificated.They are committing mortal sin. If they die with this on their soul they will go straight to hell, denied the sight of god for all eternity. Imagine that.Never ever seeing their heavenly father’.
“What can one do to avoid such a penalty, Father?” I asked. “The couple must seek a dispensation through the Sacred Rota, the church’s supreme court. Only it can decide on such matters. Only it can issue an annulment. If they walk away from this ruling they risk being excommunicated”, he
concluded his jeremiad with.
Sweet Jesus,the idea of my aunt being subjected to such mumbo-jumbo led me to hold such an archaic procedure in derision. How in the name of reason can it be sinful for a man or woman to live with the one they love? People should be free to marry whoever they want and call it quits whenever it’s on the rocks .They should be honest and come clean. Instead of standing in front of an altar saying ‘Til death do us part,’ they should just go, ‘I'll give it a shot.’ How on God’s green earth can anyone else – especially someone who’s never been married – demand a relationship driven by messy incompatibility be maintained at all costs.It was one thing for a man or woman to resist an aspiring partner's advances.It was another to block their retreat.
As for the annulments these struck me as stretching the truth somewhat, as akin to the sale of
indulgences, with similar effect. They allowed Catholics who had once gone and got married in good faith to claim that they hadn’t done so, to gainsay these marriages – despite their vows and often the existence of children– rather than admit their error without cutting the hem off truth's garment, and make a clean break.
Curious to know how the Church was going to stop people leaving, ’I asked the priest” ‘How can the Church convince people to follow it’s rulings?’
‘It’s simple.We need a government like that in Spain to set the lead.To enforce our laws’,he declared, full of fire and brimstone. ‘Not Communist manifestos. We need to remove these cancerous sores from God's sight.’
The priests and nuns had a very dim view of the Communists. In primary school The Sisters of Mercy gave us comic books depicting them as sinister figures skulking in the shadows.
‘We have to have a firm hold on what people can read, see and do.Women used to respect themselves.Brazen hussies flaunt their ankles and bosoms shamelessly in the street .They smoke,wear pants and get knocked up.The Church has a duty to protect the vulnerable from this fascination with the materialist.This so called rock and roll that inflames the passions with it’s pelvic thrusts,leg sliding and debased body grappling.So many occasions of sin multiplied beyond our imagination.We need Catholic rules,not Rafferty’s rules, to clean up the cesspit people are exposed to.Like Franco we have banned the outrageous film 'Viridiana'’.The Holy See backs us up .It has denounced it as "blasphemous."It’s got a "Last Supper" scene featuring crude, ruthless bums in place of Jesus and the apostles.What sacrilege!’
This didn’t fit in with a biblical admonition I had read:"But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed." This didn’t fit in with a biblical admonition I had read:"But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed." [Luke 14:13] It didn’t fit in with the view of St.Lawrence that such persons were the treasures of the Church. I wanted to take the priest on over what I felt was a departure from christian values, but being young and inexperienced I bit my tongue. I wanted to take
the priest on over what I felt was a departure from christian values, but being young and inexperienced I bit my tongue.
He spent an increasing amount of time reading the bible.The way I saw it he was cramming for his final exam.
Before he left for good,I said goodbye to him.I’ll be sorry to see you go,Father.I didn’t know what sin was until you came.’ These control freaks were All At See. This wasn’t how the Jesus I had in mind thought of the lowliest-those he called his brothers and sisters.True some frowsy tramps on the turps I had encountered were not fun people to be with the closer you edged up to them. B.O.Plenty,named after the Dick Tracy character, who humped his bluey,sleeping under Cohen’s bridge in Gunnedah came to my nostrils.His breath could kill a fly at fifty feet.The story went he once looked at the sign ‘Cleaning and Dyeing above the dry cleaners and commented ‘I always knew these things went together.’ However I didn’t see those ending up in this condition as simply down to them. The biblical accounts I had read of ‘The Bread of Life’ depicted him repeatedly reaching out with compassion to those at the bottom of the social pyramid—the needy,the helpless, women, Samaritans, lepers, children, prostitutes, tax collectors and all kinds of social outcasts.Had the priest had forgotten what we had been told about Jesus’s sayings.That it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.That the last shall be first and the first shall be last.That we must feed the hungry and clothe the poor.
I knew for a fact even outcasts can place their hope in the Almighty.Feeling the wrath of grapes, B.O. Plenty shuffled into our store one day to buy a small bottle of red wine.While he was fumbling for his coins,I said to him, ‘It’s not my business but you shouldn’t drink so much.Don’t be ashamed to talk about it.What do you have to thank for your drinking habit?’
He replied, ‘A woman drove me to drink and I didn't even have the decency to thank her.’
After rifling through his pockets,he finally came up with the required amount of coins.Jack slid the bottle in his back pocket and started out the door,a little unsteadily I feared. Checking to see he was walking O.K.,I saw him go just a short distance when he slipped and fell heavily astern. Struggling to
his feet,he looked at the
wine trickling down his leg,not yet sure
what it was. ‘Please, God,’he implored, ‘let it be blood!’
I inspired
visions in some of the clergy I might be
ordained with a vocation,to give myself to a higher purpose.Monsignor Leahy
told me, ‘For the Israelites, God parted the sea.To Moses,he spoke from the
burning bush.The Lord has spoken to me and he will speak to you.Allan, expect a
sign and God's wisdom will be proven to you too.
I became engrossed in Church history . I even wanted to become a Church historian until I realised there was no future in it.
At one altar boy’s picnic,I was assigned to rotating the various cuts on the gridiron .Monsignor Leahy, one of the parish priests, liked the meat cooked slowly for a long time. As the dripping fat and bloody juices sizzled onto the coals underneath, Colin Sills,my fellow altar boy said to me: ‘Hey,Allan I’ve been thinking .’
‘I thought I smelled something burning.’
‘I’ve been thinking about who my favourite saint is. Who’s your,Al?
‘Nearest and dearest to my heart is St.Lawrence, patron of cooks, chefs and comedians. As deacon in Rome, Lawrence was charged with the responsibility for the material goods of the church and the distribution of alms to the poor. I came across him when I was flipping through the missal to see the different saints' feasts. Now that's a saint if ever there was one.In one of their crackdowns, The Romans demanded he render to Caesar what was his.The lot.But there was nothing to give.Having gotten wind of their demands, Lawrence had sold the sacred vessels,golden candlesticks and other treasures and given the proceeds to the poor and needy.So the Romans put the heat on him. They “roasted” him alive ‘by inches’, little by little on a grill. To the faithful his burning flesh emitted a sweet,pleasant smell.To the unredeemed it was noxious. He kept his good humor to the end.So vehement of possessing Christ, he is said to have made his famous cheerful remark, “Turn me over. I’m done on this side.” Then after being turned,he declared ‘I am well baked. Whether better cooked or raw,make trial by a taste of me.Now if that isn’t chutzpah,I don’t know what is.’
‘Do we know if the prefect took him up on his offer? ’
Imbued with the spirit of St,Lawrence,I added my own postscript to the legend: ‘The prefect did make trial.After rolling a large bite around in his mouth,he said, “Umm, love them crispy Christians.You know,I’m converted. Until we barbecued this deacon, I just couldn’t seem to get a tender Christian. I’ve baked them, I’ve roasted them, I’ve stewed them. I’ve tried every sort of marinade.
The second prefect asked, “What kind of Christian have you used?”
The first said, “You know, the ones with those brown cloaks, a rope around the waist and a tonsured scalp.’
“Ah, well!” the second prefect replied, “no wonder … those are friars!’
‘Now pass me your plate,Colin.Ready for some short ribs? Sausages? Divers tongue.Eye fillet? How would you like them? Rare,medium or well done?’
‘Ah,I think I’ll pass.I’ll settle for a cheese sandwich.I’m feeling rather unredeemed right now.’
I became interested in the different orders. It was my reading The Three Musketeers that sparked my interest in the Jesuits.
‘One of them,Aramis is a Jesuit novice’,I told a trio of my fellow altar boys. ‘He is preparing for his ordination to the priesthood.’
‘We’re just like the Four Musketeers,aren’t we?’said Paul,one of our novice acolytes,
‘Fighting duels with hairy ticks and overcoming confusion.’
‘Shouldn’t it be ‘The Three Musketeers?’
‘Four if you count D'Artagnan.’
‘Well, nobody knows how many there were, really, do they, Paul? After all,history's a sketchbook.You do know that The Three Musketeers is a fiction, right? Written by Alexandre Dumas.’
‘A lot of people are saying that about the Bible these days.’
‘What, that it was written by Alexandre Dumas?
‘Don't be silly, Allan.Everyone knows it was written by Jesus.’
I was interested in how the different orders treated heretics.
"Do the Jesuit and Dominican Orders have similarities? "I asked Monsignor Leahy, renowned for his wit.
He replied, "Well, they were both founded by Spaniards -- St. Dominic for the Dominicans, and St. Ignatius of Loyola for the Jesuits. They were also both founded to combat heresy -- the Dominicans to fight the Albigensians, and the Jesuits to fight the Protestants."
"What is different about the Jesuit and Dominican Orders?"
"Met any Albigensians lately?" I was curious to find out more about this French religious sect exterminated for heresy during the Inquisition and other nonconformist groups. Gnostics,Manaechists,Arianists.all came under my microscope and I discussed them keenly with my fellow altar boys.So much so.it started to get on Tom Leahy’s nerves.
‘Sects!Sects!Sects!Is that all you boys can talk about’he complained.What’s wrong with Rugby League?’’
I was led to the realization how institutions and their representatives can be less likely to be offended by a separate group with a separate name, holding views different from their own, than they are by a group claiming their own name holding different views.Rugby would always mean Union,never League.And League would mean much more than Rugby.
Monsignor Leahy suggested I might follow in the footsteps of Cardinal Spellman. ‘ Like you, this humble,angelic boy with a humble wish to serve God, worked in his father’s grocery store and served at the altar .He shares your interest in archaeology. His Eminence is keenly interested in Church history and preservation of it’s sacred sites’,the Monsignor apprised me. ‘One of his pet projects involved the underground discoveries at the Basilica of Saints John and Paul,this holy of holies.’
During his long tenure in New York, The Cardinal had become known as ‘The American Pope’. He was military vicar general of US forces during World War II and would appreciate my thoughtful consideration in his regard for this service.
To mock Pope John’s wish to be seen as ‘pastor and mariner’ it is said Cardinal Spellman filled a boat with sheep and sailed it along The Tiber. Looking down his nose at him, he is said to have scoffed: “He’s no pope – he should be selling bananas”.
Then there were stories told of the Cardinal himself at his expense. One I would hear later from Russel Ward, tells how Archbishop Mannix of Melbourne had been lobbied at a conference in 1939 by the then American ambassador to Australia.Pope Pius 11 had just died and the U.S. State Department was working hard to have the ultra conservative Spellman elevated to the throne of
St.Peter as the first American Vicar of Christ. In pursuit of this end the ambassador,Pete Jarman,spoke long and eloquently to the Archbishop who replied with only the occasional non-commital grunt.Mistaking reticence for assent,the ambassador finally said, ‘Of course,Your Eminence,there may be some difficulty in finding a suitable name for our man.’
‘Oh no,Your Excellency,’ replied the archbishop, ‘we could always call him Bolonius the First.’
I felt myself to be in the same boat as the kindly pope.
Unschooled in the byzantine ways of the Vatican power structure at the time-and even later- and the role in ecclesiastical intrigue played by God’s Field Marshal on Earth, I was just a kid helping my parents sell -amongst other things- lots of bananas.
Growing quickly I knew a few things for sure. Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.And I would learn that officiating in the Church doesn't make you a Christian any more than standing in a garage makes you a car.
Approaching the age of reason, I would become painfully aware of the hardline conservatives in the church when I attended the local parochial schools.
The Holy Family.
As had the Kennedy brothers from Boston. Monsignor Leahy lionized their clan as the Catholic ideal. His admiration was understandable. They were a gift to the media, the raw stuff of legends, perfect grist to the image making mill.In a hormonal manner of speaking, I had my mind to sharing their vocation, joining women, not men in frocks. Like many I read myself into the lives of these handsome ambitious men and their glamorous wives, all in their prime, all polished, buffed and shining. This was an image of splendour and high calling, of succeeding in places once believed out of reach.The social register. This carefully nurtured image became firmly lodged in my mind.
‘Jack Kennedy’, the monsignor said proudly of the eldest son, ‘is tipped to be elected as the first Catholic to the American presidency.We pray a puff of cigar smoke from the White House will confirm this. This could break the stranglehold of power there that is heavily weighted against ‘left footers.’. He’s a good Catholic role model, from a family to which everyone might want to belong.As a layman in the American church their father Joseph is out of the box. His wife Rose is a saintly mother devoted to the care of their intellectually handicapped daughter” he said.
“I’ve read about her,’I replied. She spoke publicly about her profoundly retarded daughter. ‘She was encouraged by the example of Pearl Buck. Mrs Buck wrote about the same cross her own daughter had to bear.Praise be. Her book ‘The Child Who Never Grew’ led me to understand mental illness better.”
“Is that so?” replied the Monsignor, seemingly taken aback, “I didn’t know they had common cause.”
I wasn’t sure what to say so said an emphatic nothing.
“Although Joseph Kennedy has made a pretty penny” he resumed,” he measures his success by the kind of family he has raised. They’re one big happy family – dedicated to each other as well as to the Church.They’ve given their nation and ours a sense of moving forward toward great things.They’ve brought to our life a culture, a refinement, a meaningfulness, that we have not known before. They have received the personal benison of the Pope and have always enjoyed the trust and close friendship of Cardinal Spellman.
‘I trust His Holiness received some holy venison,’I said.
‘You’ll be interested to know that Joseph Kennedy has kept the digging at the basilica moving along. He has chucked in some generous amounts.Relics play a large part in the life of the Church,you know,Allan.’
‘Amen to that Monsignor,amen,’I replied,the homily from the sanctimonious antiquity fresh in my mind.
I counted myself in this broad constituency of the great young white hope, wanting to mingle amongst the ‘in-crowd’-the blacktie artists, writers, scientists, glitterati and cognoscenti at the ritzy inaugural gala. Lightbulbs popping, lots of pizzaz. I too wanted to be elegant and sophisticated, with poetry on my tongue and a radiant woman all in white on my arm. I’d take her hand,kiss it and lead her on the floor.
The Woman in Black.
Nudging me along gently in this direction was the radiant lady sitting at my side after school.Dressed in black with ecclesiastical severity from the top of her head to the tip of her toes save for her white bib. My music teacher,Sister Aloysius. Not a widow but a bride of Christ.
She imagined herself flying up in the sky,next to Jesus, as Waldemar von Kozak would imagine.
‘The Catechism teaches that we nuns are mystically betrothed to Jesus Christ. In our actual marriage ceremony, we novitiates dress in white and make a public vow to the Church. After this we must consecrate ourselves to God “until death”.’
‘Why are Wedding Dresses white?’,I asked her.
‘Most people associate the color white with innocence and happiness.’
‘Not Maria’,I said,referring to the heroine in ‘West Side Story,which I had mentioned seeing. ‘She wasn’t happy about her white dress-and she worked in a bridal shop.Her communion dress was being altered into a gown for the big dance . When she tried on the plain white dress with a wide red belt,
she complained: "White is for babies."However after trying it on, she became ecstatic: "It is a beautiful dress!" What I neglected to add was that Maria had begged for the neckline to be lowered one more inch as she slightly pulled down on her own bodice: "How much can one little inch do?".
Her name as hard to spell as the life she led, ruled by silences, bells and the metronome, Sister Aloysius combined that essential reserve,delicacy and understatement that is expected of a nun, with a vivaciousness and boundless enthusiasm for all things musical. ‘Music is a language everyone understands’,she told me, ‘Whatever you want to say best, say it with music.’
‘Beautiful music’,I added, as had Irving Berlin.Plink,plank,plunk, Mum played Irving’s songs at home of an evening when we gathered round the piano.
With her rallying benedictions Sister Aloysius worked on me, this so so soprano,to sing in the local eisteddford.She brought to me my first acquaintance with the distinctive, incisive colours of the church organ.She invited me to be her learning companion while she practiced it in the church. ‘It’s time you learned about the king of instruments. It’s ideally suited to accompany human voices..She used it to accompany the choirs, inspire the congregation in their singing, and generally to enhance the liturgy. ‘ It powerfully lifts up man’s mind to God and to higher thing’. First and foremost she taught me piano.One of her favourite solo piano pieces was Prokoviev’s Romeo and Juliet based on his ballet score.She shared my infatuation with Shakespeare's timeless tragedy, the tale of two ill-fated lovers thwarted by circumstances beyond their control. I told her more about my favourite re-telling ,the musical ‘ West Side Story’, presenting her with a vinyl record of the movie soundtrack. It’s iconic red and black cover depicted apartment block fire escapes in New York.
‘One of these takes the place of the famous balcony in Shakespeare’s drama’ , I said.’The outlines you can see are Tony and Maria, the star-crossed lovers, in dancing pose,declaring their love for one another. I hope some day you’ll be able to see this masterpiece. It’s a true marriage of drama, opera and ballet.Saints alive,it’s got everything- sheer visual excitement, a score heavy with jazz and Latin-American rhythms ,music that pulses and soars,superb ballads, restless,dizzying dance steps, bodies high-stepping,leaping,tumbling,rumbling,spinning, flying wildly through space, flickknife fighters chest-puffing, fist-clenching , chin pointing jeering and snorting, crouching slithering and springing. It’s a a feast for the eye, the ear and, ultimately, the heart.’
‘What’s it all about,Allan?’
‘This powerful real life tale uses the street-smart slang of teenagers, skillfuly updating Shakespeare’s plot intricacies. It’s set in the plug ugly tenement slums of today’s ‘Big Apple’ . The ill fated lovers struggle to exist together in a concrete jungle of violence, hate and prejudice.The theme of love defeated is widened to that of society rent asunder.
‘Who are the main characters?’
‘Tony, a Jet. and Maria,a Shark, find themselves caught between not rival families but rival street gangs of different ethnic backgrounds. The native born are the 'Jets' and the Puerto Ricans are the Sharks, the sons of less recent immigrants. In a fight to the death over who will control the neighborhood, the Jets, the "American" hoodlums, want to resist newcomers setting foot in their territory.’
‘Our Sisters in New York write about this savage brawling,’said Sister Aloysius. ‘Some of the bigger
ruffian schoolboys give them the collywobbles.Knife fights are a fact of life in their diosceses.A young punk pulled a knife on one of the Sisters recently.’
‘She must have been terrified.’
‘She stayed calm.She could tell he was new to the game. The knife had butter on it.’’
‘The musical is relevant then,’I said. ‘It makes points in its description of the hell to pay when youth are devastated by poverty. It deals with social problems,particularly those faced by immigrants, grappling with the difficulties of assimilating into a different society. They have mixed feelings about their new country, alternately excited or with their heart in their mouth.In ‘America’,it’s praises are sung. But the streets are not paved with gold. The land of opportunity is also one of racism and discrimination.’ ‘By all that’s holy,it sounds very heart-breaking ’,said the nun,after she had listened to the album, ‘and also very instructive artistically.The tension and suspense is reflected in musical terms.Bernstein displays a motif prominently throughout the entire musical,a common musical device called the tritone -also known as the augmented fourth or diminished fifth. You can hear it in the reiterated word, ‘ Maria’, in the song .Try singing it.’
Breathing in deeply,I sang the three syllables:"Ma-ri-a: I've just seen a girl named...’’
‘It’s hard,isn’t it. It plays on so many rhythms, almost on just that name.Three notes pervade the whole piece and in the overture and all of the fight music -"The Rumble". It comes out in ‘Cool’ and as the gang whistle -in "Prologue”. The same three notes. The interval is dissonant. It sounds jarring,restless, unsettled and creates musical tension.It’s something that yearns to be resolved into the next note. It’s also quite exciting. By embracing the musical disunity created by the tritone, Bernstein provides a musical representation of how Tony,Maria and the opposing gangs feel.
‘It triggers off all kinds of feelings,I said.’
‘As God is my witness,music has a powerful subconscious effect.’she replied, ‘Certain notes can stir certain internal reactions within the listener they may not even be aware of. Today the tritone is used in films and theatre to suggest an "oppressive", "scary", or "evil" sound. It used to be nicknamed ‘The Devil’s Interval’ hundreds of years ago. Some considered it most "dangerous",being associated with sinister things,mainly the devil. In medieval theology you had to have some way of presenting Satan. Or if someone in the Church wanted to portray the crucifixion, it would be sometimes used there . The Church didn’t regard it in accordance with canonical rules.It discouraged use of this particular dissonance.It was seen as wrong when it came up in choruses of monks and nuns. If I had been teaching you then,I would have told you that it simply doesn’t work technically and was to be avoided like the plague. There were stringent musical rules.’
‘More honoured in the breach than in the observance,I daresay..What would have happened if you had broken these rules?’I asked.
‘There were rules for getting around it.Church history is full of compromises.There’s a lot of them happening now. Pope John is bringing us up to date. Some say that singers were cast out,bell,book and candle,or otherwise the Church came down on them for invoking this interval.This notion is likely fanciful.The tritone is just another color in the musical palette.You can’t ban it. It’s a natural and expected component of our music.’
“Let everything that has breath praise the Lord!"- Psalm 150:6.
One day Sister Aloysius led me up the stairs at the rear of St.Joseph’s to the gallery and approached the organ console.
‘As with the tritone the organ has occasioned some misgivings in the eyes of the Church. The sound generated by the hydraulis- the first recognizable ancestor of the organ- was thought to be so terrifying that it was used at the ancient Roman circuses. At that time these were more of a horror show than family entertainment. A strong objection to the organ in worship remained pretty general down to the twelfth century.
‘Why was that?’I asked.
‘It’s partly accounted for by the imperfection of tone in organs of that time. But from the twelfth century on, the organ became the privileged church instrument. The majesty and unimpassioned character of its tone made it a particularly suitable means for adding solemnity to Divine worship. Evolving over time It eventually worked its way into mainstream liturgical use. It hasn’t lost prominence.’
‘Sister,I read in The Catholic Weekly that Cardinal Spellman says the pipe organ is a treasure of inestimable value.He says it adds a wonderful splendour to the Church’s ceremonies.He’s raising funds for a new one.’
‘Whereabouts?’ she asked”.
‘It’s for the the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington.One that will be a resounding memorial to the many deceased chaplains and members of the armed forces.’
‘What a fitting way to show this.Let me show you our’s resounding range of timbre,’she said.
Sitting herself down ,squaring up over the keyboard,she put her feet on the peddles and began coaxing the organ to life. ’ Slowly increasing in volume until a discernible melody breathed through a fluid amalgam of tones and harmonies.
‘Holy smoke’,I thought, She’s having a go at ‘Maria.’
‘ Listen to it piano,’she said, ‘just whispering: ‘Say it soft and it’s almost like praying.’ Pulling out all the stops,she continued to magnify the intensity of sound and, after several minutes, was pumping like crazy.Now listen to it fortissimo:’ ‘Say it loud and there’s music playing.’ Timbre! ‘Maria’ thundered throughout the hallowed space, filling the church with sounds of worship and praise.
I'll never forget the thrill of those tricky tritones.As I recall they gave me goosebumps and set my heart beating . Sister’s playing could only be described as magnificent, the registrations dramatic.I found it devilishly hard resisting my eagerness to sing. Between stanzas of the song, Sister Aloysius played it by ear with the skill and artistry for which she was noted. The sound effect, the very best ‘cos the church was empty, was all that I had imagined and more besides. I was in awe until I noticed that it we had some company.Monsignor Leahy, open mouthed, was gazing up at us from the sacristy.What was going on in his mind?After Sister packed up playing, he started walking along the aisle, to the staircase. O dear, was he unnerved, coming to register his displeasure?
‘What is that you’re playing,Sister?’,he asked,as he climbed up to join us in the loft.I’ve never heard anything quite like this before in our church.’
‘ It’s ‘ Maria’,Father.Do you like it?’
‘ Bless my soul,I don’t like it,Sister.Hallelujah,I love it!’he said,his eyes sparkling.It’s sublime.It transcends the merely human sphere.It evokes the divine. It’s musical testimony to the composer’s obvious devotion to the Blessed Virgin. He depicts this sacred theme in ways not possible with words.’
When he left,I confided my fear to Sister about how this secular piece composed by a worldly New York Jew might have gone down with him. ‘I thought he might have found it unfit , unpleasing,wanting to stick to the traditional hymns.’
‘Allan, you needn’t have worried.This majestic instrument is exactly that- an instrument and its uses are only restricted by the imagination of the organist who plays it. It follows, therefore, that an organ may be used to render traditional or contemporary styles of church music as they may be required.It gives resonance to the fullness of human sentiments, from joy to dejection, from praise to lamentation. It is capable of echoing and expressing all the experiences of human life. According to present canonical legislation organ music is allowed on all joyful occasions .Other than for celebrating our love of the lord,what could be more joyful than celebrating the love of a man for a woman.And might I add your newfound love for this instrument, superior to all others.’ .”What could be more becoming for playing in the Church than ‘Maria’?’
‘Would you go to see West Side Story if asked,Sister?’,I asked her later.
‘I wouldn’t say no’,she said. ‘One day.It’s subject is not for the fainthearted-it is a tragedy after all- but-and I’m not placing them on the same level- like that of the death of Christ,what it draws out of it is beautiful. For all it’s sadness West Side Story ends on a positive note— with the idea that out of the vale of tears a better society can be created in which different groups can live together.’
The Altar Boys Picnic
The annual altar boys outing was the occasion on which the priests thanked us for our services with a splash at the local swimming hole followed by an outdoor spread and barbeque.One in particular presented me with an opportune moment to find out more about the Church’s views on the political hot potato.
‘Monsignor Leahy, I see many articles in the Catholic Weekly that paint a diabolical picture of Communism. Some in the church see it as the devil incarnate.’
‘Of all the animals God created, the serpent was the most tricky and deceitful. Snakes and serpents take many disguises. Lucifer doesn’t necessarily stink of sulphur have horns and a pointed tail. He may wear a fine red shirt and sing about brotherhood. But his horrible goals are still the same.’
‘At school the Sisters have given us comics. They show the Communists as sinister figures skulking in the shadows.They say they worship the anti-Christ and his false idols. What is it between the Church and the Communists?’
‘We are at loggerheads with Communism,Allan.We don’t go along with it for its pagan ideas and we fear what they have done to the Church. Communists don’t believe in the soul, in the afterlife.They don’t believe in the Trinity or the Virgin Birth.They believe that man is a physical being and nothing else. They have put the God-Man in place of the Man-God.’
‘What have they actually done to the Church?I asked.
‘Let’s look at their record.In the 20’s prists disappeared in the gulags to the sorrow of the faithful. In the 30’s mobs looted convents and seminaries in Spain. Religious properties were torched and desecrated while crowds looked on and cheered. Archbishop Duhig feared that the Republican measures were part of a universal pattern.He said: 'Yesterday it was Russia and Mexico; today it is Spain. Tomorrow it may be Britain, and the day after, Australia.’
‘Monsignor’,I said, ‘Don’t you think some of this trembling fear led to unnecessary alarm. To some real howlers.I’ve been reading some old back copies of The Catholic Weekly’ from the presbytery shed. In two September 1942 issues Cardinal Gilroy said that the communists-our allies- were gearing up for "armed insurrection" in Australia. Archbishop Mannix called Mussolini-our enemy- the greatest man living today" in 1943. Cardinal Duhig glowingly described him as 'like Napoleon with few, if any, of his faults'.Mussolini who we know was butchering so many people. How could Catholic spokesmen parrot such alibis. Some might say these statements, sowing doubts and confusion, bordered on apostasy and disloyalty’,I commented.How do we explain this blot on their conduct?’,I asked.
‘Allan,none of them ever seriously went along with fascism.’
‘No,of course not. None of them ever did,’I said, only too aware of Pope Pius’ notorious failure to condemn the Nazi regime and the deals he made with them. ‘I don’t know how those rumours ever got started.’
‘The thing is they were scatty and simply got carried away.To understand the position they got into,you have to understand their background.They inherited a deep mistrust of the British Empire and felt impelled to speak up for the Italian flock in the fight against Communism.’ This fight hasn’t stopped.The Communists haven’t made it easy.To be a priest serving in Eastern Europe today’, he said, reaching to the hamper for a sandwich, “is no picnic.Heavens preserve us, the Communists have commited a multitude of sins in these captive nations.They accuse the Church of offering people pie in the sky. Like the serpent that tempted Eve in paradise,they offer pie on the earth, instead-,’
‘Apple pie,’I said,cutting in on him .
‘-- with the bogus promise of limitless output and leisure time. A fool’s paradise. Like Judas of old they lie and finagle .They’ve disbanded and razed churches.Our priests act in the spirit of Thomas More, resisting Henry VIII's seizure of church power.’
‘ Martyred ,’I said,drawing my hand across my throat.
‘The Communists deny congregations the right to practice their religion. They have silenced the clergy.People have forgotten how to pray’.
‘What about the Pope?,I asked,picking up a pie from the ground. ‘Can’t he do anything about this?’
‘Pope John is taking a very diplomatic approach to this matter.I’m told Pravda, the Soviet newspaper, has cautiously praised him.They see virtue in his upbringing as a peasant, like Khruschev,their leader.’
‘So what are the biggest hurdles along the way?’
‘The immediate stumbling block remains the situation of the Hungarian Cardinal Mindszenty. As you know he has taken refuge at the American Embassy for standing up for his beliefs.When Bobby Kennedy spoke up for him in Budapest they put him under close arrest for being a spy, accusing him of collaboration with Cardinal Spellman. They won’t forgive the Cardinal for standing up for victims of the Communists in Vietnam.
‘What happened there?’ I asked.
‘They beat a priest with a bamboo club.They’ve disembowelled women. They jam chopsticks in the ears of children to keep them from hearing the word of God.’
‘Holy Dooley’,I said. ‘What cruelty.’
‘Holy Dooley’ is right.When they were forcing all the Catholics out of the country, Dr.Dooley, helped them flee their clutches.He was backed up by His Eminence .’
‘The Cardinal’ I thought, tucking into a meat one, ‘seems to have a finger in quite a few pies’.
‘The Communists have no feelings for other people.’ Monsignor Leahy went on, ‘They don’t listen to others.They listen in.They don’t watch over people.They watch their every step.They debase the individual.They don’t allow you to read and see what you fancy.They allow no search for the truth. Children are taken early and moulded to fit the vast machine that powers the state.They have no respect for private property.They take over people’s businesses and homes.They don’t know the meaning of fair play. All these heathens know is how to inflict pain on people’.
Tender Mercies.
‘Stand up straight and hold your hand out!’ Something told me I wasn’t about to be presented with a sweet . I gritted my teeth, waiting for the first sharp blaze of pain across my hand.Each stroke she really laid it on. The whistling sound of the cane cutting downward through the air apprised me that all I could expect was a weal, a ridge the stroke would raise on my flesh.
‘Silence!’ Sister Casimir had howled out to the assembly like a mighty Wurlitzer.She was breathing fire. When she heard what she deemed an infringement of this command, she would point to whoever she thought had breached this commandment.
‘What did you say?’she demanded of of one of my classmates who had whispered to me his discomfort.
‘Oh,I was just thinking out loud’,he came back.
‘Well don’t’, she warned. ‘People get in trouble for that.’
Double, double, toil and trouble. I got the lot at one assembly when she put the finger on me.I was to be the whipping boy.
‘Good grief’,I thought,wincing, as she flexed it. ‘I’m for it.’
‘If I've told you once I've told you a thousand times,you’re not to talk on assembly. You’ll write this out one hundred times.’
What rankled with us was that this martinet could pick you out at the drop of a veil for the most trivial infractions. I can still remember the instructions – ‘hand out level, keep your thumb down and out of the way, and don't pull away.’ Lashing herself into an almost orgiastic fury, flushed more purple than ever, she smote thee thrice on each hand, prescribed I dared to say, by summoning the Holy Trinity in her ghostly ritual. Take that! And that! And that!"
It wasn’t too bad if you copped it against the centre of the palm. Further out on the fingers, it hurt like blazes. It was no use pulling your hand away. If you did you got it even harder. She could raise welts like nobody else.
‘You’ll thank me one day for this’, said this flailing flagellator.Why not? Of course she was only rough on us ‘cos she loved us.
‘Yeah, and pigs might fly” I replied,under my breath.
‘ Say what ?’ she demanded.
‘Yeah and time flies’, I replied without blinking an eye, somehow convincing her that I wasn’t referring to her, thus saving my own back. ‘Watch your tongue, boy’, she snapped. ‘Off you go!’.
Stinging from her scolding, I held my tongue as it occurred to me how I could express my gratitude to her.
‘I will thank you to keep your comments and your hands to yourself, Sister Harridan’, I said to myself. She was, unless I was very much mistaken, descended from the Marquis De Sade. Biting my lip, fighting back any tears welling, I headed for the tap to douse my hands in water to salve the pain.
Later in the secondary school, we were expected to use our "best writing". This was always a trial as you had to dip your pen in the inkwell on the flip top desk, and try to write without producing blots. The nibs would cross or break, or simply pick up too much or too little ink, with an inevitable result of ink on our fingers and clothes.
Sister Kieran, our class teacher would rap the back of our hands with the edge of a ruler and say "start again" if our work was not up to standard. The inkwell and blotting paper naturally had the alternative use in the making of ink pellets.Once she noticed blue pellets on the floor. All hot andbothered she raced around like a bullant when a stick is plunged into it.
After she slowed down,she asked, 'Perhaps one of you would care to explain this to me.
Everone took a bopeep at one another only to give the expectedcomeback of "Nobody Sister, cross my heart and hope to die".
"Own up or you’re all in for it. You’ll all all stay in".
‘‘I’m Spartacus’,called one boy.’No,I’m Spartacus’, called another and so it went on.
When she selected one as the guilty party ,she demanded, You’ve got a real nerve,boy. What have you got to say for yourself?
Upon getting the wrong reply, she ticked him off, raising the cane backwards to whack him: ‘ This is going to hurt you a lot more than it hurts me. Let's get this over with.’
‘Well I never. Swish. She got it over all right. Before she bore down on her intended target, she swiped me a real stinger on the backstroke.Right across the cranium.
She was totally unaware of any collateral damage.
‘I’ll thank you not to dip your nib in the well when there’s no ink, Sister,’ I managed to come out with.
‘You can take it, can’t you, Allan.’
Seeing I was in on the deal,I took this as a backhanded compliment.
You needed gumption just to be in her firing range .
Many years later I would be in stitches watching Jake and Elwood, the Blues Brothers, being woman handled by Sister Mary Stigmata. I would thank her prototype, Sister Casimir for this motherlode that the Church has bequeathed the literary world and for letting me off lightly. Many others who had attended Catholic schools had had the living Christ beaten out of them. And that’s the gospel truth.
The Devil’s Showground.
The ascetic lessons of sacrifice, confession and spiritual reflection would become a strong and lasting counterpoint to any more frivolous side of my sunny personality.Minding my p’s and q’s, I was always a conscientious student and never cheated.Well,just once.During a religious knowledge test,I looked into the soul of the boy next to me.
I didn’t get up to mischief. This was no vouchsafe against getting the ‘cuts’ from some of those big on wielding the cane. On one occasion Sister Stephen, the principal, whacked me for jumping up to look over a fence while marching in line to benediction.
Another occasion to interrupt lessons took place soon after the travelling showground families had rolled into town with their overflowing trucks and caravans for the annual agricultural show, set up their rides and stalls, and spruiked their offerings to the locals.What concerned her was not so much what was going on but what was coming off.
This time her delivery was for me attending a sinful ‘striptease’ sideshow performance. What had been little more than a sideshow became seen as a den of iniquity . Such forms of entertainment were frowned on severely, seen as designed to make people happy without divine assistance.Muggins me was guileless enough to put my hand up when quizzed at assembly. I had actually only gone on sufferance, being a bit of a Holy Joe myself, but some madcap girls insisted I go. . Keeping my eyes closed most of the performance’, I dared not open them.Finally I forced them open at one stage to glimpse the vague outline of a human form behind a thick sheet of glass fairly impenetrable to sight.Neither bump nor grind.Merely hokum.
I was told I had transgressed the Seventh Deadly Sin. ‘ We’re such weak pitiful creatures, prey to the vilest temptations of the flesh.Remember yourself.If you don’t watch out,you’ll form habits that will be hard to break later. If you harbour impure thoughts,indulge in base vices, God will turn away from you.’
The ensuing penance imposed on me,’equal to the gravity of the sin’, led to greater transparency in this matter. To the striking disclosure how religious authority can resort to violence to prevent a child learning about the human body. To realization of the restrictive boundaries of the Church when dealing with sexuality.A topic never mentioned except in vague general admonition about ‘purity’ and ‘clean living.’ This was still a time when sex was something few talked about openly and sexual development was accompanied by ignorance, fear and psychic trauma. The nun’s action, with much left to the imagination, said more about what was in her prurient mind than was in mine. On another occasion this moral watchdog cracked down on students after the school dance.It wasn’t about clinches too close for chastity.Something far more serious.Somehow the Hokey Pokey had made it onto the program .. It was something quite innocent and fun filled as far as I was concerned. Oh me oh my. The idea of body parts other than those in the
lyrics being put in and out of the ring and wiggled and shaken hadn’t occurred to me. Any sexual overtones of this dance were put in my mind by this nun who laid the seeds of my secular awakening.On that account it only made me think more about it. Ironically one plausible explanation for the origins of this dance’s name lies in the corruption of a phrase used in the ritual of the mass.
At one school dance,I said to my partner, ‘Do you have the feeling there’s someone coming between us.’ One of the older nuns went round couples,her arms outstretched to indicate the regulation distance for being close, ‘Don't forget to make room for the Holy Ghost,’she reminded us.
The infliction of pain on me at St Mary’s did not stop with some nuns. I collected a ‘rabbit chop’ to the neck from one boy and a cricket bat hurled at me by another who went on to graduate as a policeman. I’m not so precious to consider that this was big time bullying, but considering that this was a fee paying institution my father concluded you could avoid this arrant tommyrot without the cost.
Catholic boys in the final years of secondary school in a country town like Gunnedah were usually shipped off to a larger centre or the city. At a time when as in many facets of life the separation of Catholics in education was waning, my father ruled this out. “Better to put the money saved towards a university education”, he opined wisely. “Look at John Kennedy”, he said “He only spent one year at a Catholic school but that didn’t stop him being publicly identified as a practising congregate”.
My father’s Catholicism was much more secular than my mother’s. He had tasted the harsh regime of Christian Brothers as a boy: ‘I received more than my share of corporal punishment for relatively harmless offences. Some of the Brothers were real sadists’,he recalled’, raving about the 'filthy beast' called lust while they flailed us with their sticks.We spent so much time escaping their violent attentions’.Wisely he saw fit to send me to the state high school.
Finding it increasingly difficult to reconcile the preaching and practice of Christ with those of most of his professional servants,I would increasingly shed any vestigial belief in the supernatural and messiahs. The whole Judeo-Christian view is that the body belongs to a fallen world and nature belongs to a fallen world, and I don't accept any of that at all. Both a sensualist and an ascetic, I think the sacred is in this world, not in another world, and in the body and in nature.
I continued to love the peaceful precepts and example of Christ. I saw him as no kind of miracle man but a whole and magical human being with no magic advantages over the rest of us. Who could lift people up but not with the aid of mirrors or crippled midgets behind black curtains.I aimed to become as human all over as I could and to bear the responsibility for my own actions.
A Delicate Matter.
But not before my next brush with another major figure from the Establishment which occurred in 1961. It was quite instructive.The year my voice broke Menzies had appointed a new Governor-General who had the impeccable pedigree and accoutrements of the nobility that he himself,a mere bunyip aristocrat,still lacked. Nay the ceremonial head of state also had a distinguished military record. While travelling widely throughout Australia, he stopped off in Gunnedah.. His duty was to cut ribbons, unveil statues,utter generalities,attend garden parties, and open formal events and buildings.It was said that he would be on hand to attend the opening of an envelope.Another duty was to encourage by his presence and interest, individuals and groups considered to be making a substantial contribution to the community and to national life.That’s where I came in.
As a member of the student body, I found myself part of the guard of honour formed to welcome the vice regal visitor. Once settled on the podium, the Governor-General took the floor, launching into an upbeat appraisal of the state of affairs in the British Commonwealth. His address started something like the following: “Ladies and Gentlemen, Sisters of Mercy, Boys and Girls, On behalf of her gracious Majesty the Queen, I must say how proud we are of our Commonwealth of Nations and the family of nations that belong to it.Former members of the greatest empire the world has ever known.Ruled not by superior force or skill, but by sheer presence.It only ever went to war to defend values, never to acquire territory or to subjugate people. It only ever went to war to defend values and principles.We ought to always remember that.”
These ties of loyalty that bind us together bring us all greater prosperity and democracy. It is my great pleasure to tell you that this family will be growing over the coming years. Most of the remaining Crown territories will become independent and will choose to maintain their links with the other countries of the former empire. I call on you, especially you youthful Australians to nurture this family of nations on which the sun as before never sets, and to learn from its peoples.
I call on you to service . It is within the province of all of us to be great or small, according to the degree of service we render, service of one man to another, to a community, to a nation, to all mankind. It is by service we are born, we live, and we are carried to our last resting place. It is therefore not just an obligation, it is the very purpose of life – to serve.’
I was fain to follow out the benign spirit of his exhortation.Happenstance came forthwith. Making his way along the guard of honour at the end of his address he paused his review, according to his wont, to inquire of children after their interests.
“Young man”, he asked me “What subjects do you like to study?”
“ Verily I say unto you, Your Excellency, history and languages,” I replied.’I’m studying French and Latin”.
“Magnifique!” he enthused. “My life is closely bound up with France and its language. My family came over with William The Conqueror. My title originates from French. Viscount comes from two parts ‘Vis’ means ‘in place of’, like ‘vice’ in vice-royal. ‘Conte’ means ‘count’. “And my titular name is ‘de L’Isle”, he said tearing out a page from a pad, writing it down and handing it to me.
‘This means ‘from the island’ in French, or from ‘insula’ in Latin. It originally stood for coming “from Lille’ in France which used to be an island of dry land in a marsh”. “And this officer assisting me, my aide-de camp gets his title from one who aids or helps in the military camp.’ Unlike Menzies who saw himself as British to the bootstraps, it seemed de L’isle was British to the ‘languettes’. It entered my mind that the stronger your connections with the French, or in the case of the royals with the Germans, the more British you were. That is if you’ve blue blood.
I had a question ready for the Governor-General arising out of my reading about his background. In framing it, the advice dispensed by Sybil Thorndikes’s Dowager Princess to Marilyn Monroe’s showgirl about how to address the royals was fresh in my mind. This was not less than to say what is obvious.
‘ Hail, Your Excellence,well met, I believe you were injured during the War. Where were you shot, pray tell me?’ I asked,shucking and jiving, somewhat presumptuously letting slip what I felt was the kind of archaic highfaluting utterances you might hear at court.
“In Italy” he replied. “Italy?” I queried “but where forsooth …” Before I could finish the sentence he was off again, spreading his stately personage hither and thither in the short amount of time he had. But not before I caught the faintest trace of a blush betraying blood the same hue as my own coursing through his veins. Was he being coy about something? It was the aide-de camp shadowing him that my complete question would fall. As he passed, I put it to him. “Sir, I wanted to know what part of His Excellence sustained the injury?’ Smiling at me vacantly he lowered his head and whispered in my ear “Do your homework, Danny Boy!”.
Avast! Was this an officer but not a gentleman taking the micky out of me, this green Catholic bucko? Did he think this was bush week? Did he think I had been out of place the way I had spoken? Chewing over this puzzle during the following days, I couldn’t make head or tail of it.
Gadzooks.It turned out to be a tail. The breakthrough came after I conveyed the aide-de camp’s advice to Sister Aloysius, my dear music teacher.
‘Danny Boy’, she informed me, ‘is the familiar title of the Irish classic ‘Londonderry Air”.’ After much deliberation I rearranged it in franglais as ‘London Derriere’. Further research turned up the fact that the Germans had lodged a bullet in the nobleman’s buttocks.Methinks I had been given a bum steer – albeit one in the right direction.
The Secular Estate.
At first blush I was a bit apprehensive over the new academic direction I was headed At that time there was still some residual degree of division between Protestants and Catholics. My father’s parents had come from both sides of the aisle . My grandfather was Catholic, this side seen as that of the poor Irish without a penny to their name.His own father’s family in famine stricken Ireland had been forced to light out during the great wave of immigrants in mid-nineteenth century.My grandfather told me ‘The English summed up what they thought of them in one sentence: "Those bogtrotters keep pigs in the parlour".
‘ Pigs arse!’,he exclaimed. ‘They were talking through their bowler hats. It was the poor people who mainly kept pigs and in their houses there were no parlours’.
My grandmother’s was on the Anglican side, it seen mainly as the spiritual home of the rich and fashionable. As their brood was larger and closer and more within cooee than my mother’s, it was their union that shaped most the ideological and cultural makeup of my parental family. In this mixed marriage the issues determined to a large extent where your business went, to whom you paid your tithes, and where you fitted in with respect to the establishment. Religionwise my father and his six siblings were a mixed bag, half choosing to stay aligned as their father,half staying on the distaff side.
My father went along with his father, Paddy, and married a Catholic, the sense of the Irish Catholic thread, and of coming from an often oppressed minority – albeit a most significant one – carried through generationally.
Dad took me to see ‘Shake Hands with the Devil’ in which Lady Fitzhugh an Irish noble woman, is arrested and put on trial for assisting the IRA. Sybil Thorndike’s Lady Fitzhugh challenges the legitimacy of the officer trying her: ‘What’s an English judge doing in an Irish court.’Dad supplied his own answer loudly: ‘Up to no good.’
‘As far as I can see,Dad, all the differences between the various religions and their followers can be linked to whom they recognise as legitimate.’
‘Allan,it’s all about recognition. Jews don't recognize Jesus as the Son of God.Protestants don't recognize the Pope as the Vicar of Christ and Baptists don't recognize each other in the pub on Saturday nights.’
It occurred to me it would be probably more sensible if people brought up their children free from all these traditional divisions.
In any case the times were a changing.My aunt Colleen pointed out to me in 1960 the ecumenical milestone reached by Geoffrey Fisher, Cantuar of the Church of England : ‘The courtesy call by Pope John XXIII on Pope John XXIII by the Archbishop of Canterbury, is the first meeting between a
Pope and an incumbent of this office since the English Reformation.This paves the way for greater tolerance.I agree with what he says about the words Catholic and Protestant. As ordinarily used they are completely out of date. They are almost always used now purely for mischievous purposes.To make waves.’
‘So what are the real differences?’I asked.‘As Anglicans we have no faith of our own.’replied my aunt. We sit in the "middle way" between Catholicism and outright Protestantism. Our statements of doctrine and liturgies contain, and have always deliberately contained, elements of both. Anglicanism has no Scriptures of its own, no sacraments of its own, no holy orders of its own – just those of the one Holy, Catholic, Apostolic Church that we have received.’
‘The same rituals, half the guilt,’I said.
‘These creeds we hold without addition or diminution. Geoffrey Fisher says we stand firm on that rock.”
‘What about all the issues that led to the great schism? What about the 39 Articles adopted by the English Church after its break from Rome in the 16th century?’
‘These must be put to the side. Our high priests don’t have much choice than for our churches to come closer together.We can’t go back but we must move forward together. They’re looking for a common front in the face of what they see as increasing materialism. The Archbishop thinks that of the Soviets cruder than the more refined Western variety. And more likely to triumph.’
Both the head of state of Vatican City and the primate and metropolitan of all England were presiding over their respective communions during a momentous transition in modern culture and society: from deference, dependence, and duty to indifference, insecurity, and mass individualism. As the Empire was ending, the masses at home enjoyed the welfare state. Revolutions in higher education, health, and consumer spending gradually gathered pace. The end of conscription, emerging feminism, and comparative affluence further eroded the old order. The Anglican Church and all Western Christian churches faced a new intractable problem- wealthier leisured classes rather than poverty.
This was a shock for many but it softened any discomfort for me settling into my new high school.The first day,I felt like a pig in Tehran. However while most students were nominally Protestants, the secular nature of the system soon proved congenial and,having a natural affinity for hitting the books, I settled down to two years of preparation for the university entrance examination. I absorbed the required knowledge like a blotter.
A tisket a tasket,something was missing from my matriculation basket.Physics and chemistry,the scientific end, which hadn’t been available at the parochial school when I was there- another factor influencing my father’s decision.It was too late to pick them up when I got to the local high school although I did study biology which I lapped up .My remaining subjects were deemed to have sufficient cognitive demand to provide what I needed. A suitable preparation for future university studies in economics and the humanities, ones which could normally be studied further once I got there.All going well I would be the first member of my father’s clan to make it there, Having invested so much vicariously in my career path,I would be embodying his own cherished aspiration.
‘I never got the chance to go to university,Al. But if I had, I would have wanted to take all my tests at a grocery store.’
‘Why’s that Dad?’’
‘ Because the customer is always right.’
Stage-struck.
“If all
the world is a stage, where is the audience sitting?”
George Carlin
It was during this time that I would be introduced to the works of the Bard of Stratford on Avon,the high priest of literature with his fabulous felicity of language. Plenty of it went right over my head, wouldn’t you know it, but that's part of what made it attractive and valuable. Things that go over your head can make you raise your head a touch higher.
The most important thing he taught me is that we're not alone. There are some experiences that are so subjective that you might believe you are the only mad person in the world that has actually felt that way or thought that way. Shakespeare's ability to articulate those ideas into something an entire audience can feel, too, is what theatre is all about.
Mining through his works,indulging my emotions,flexing my vocal muscles, delivering my lines, I developed a strong lifelong taste for theatre.Being shy,introspective, guarded in nature, without too much to say for myself,public speaking had left me a quaking jelly of self consciousness,my tongue sticking to the dry roof of my mouth, afraid of fluffing my lines.Dressed up in tights and garters,greasepaint and masks while moving around, acting enabled me to break the ice, open up and express myself more freely. I didn’t know I had it in me.While we parsed ‘As You Like It” and ‘The Tempest’, better still we mounted performances of them as Shakespeare intended. I followed Laurence Olivier's approach. I aimed to find the external look, walk, speech of the character and then come on to his inner thoughts and feelings. In ‘The Tempest’ I lent my lungs to the role of Gonzalo, the ‘honest old counsellor of Naples."Knowing he was good hearted,and wearing a grey streaked beard,I began my character development from there. From that everything flowed. The moment I was dressed, the costume and the make-up made me feel the person he was. Walking slowly,calmly, stroking my beard,I thought of myself as none other than the wise and generous counsellor with an optimistic outlook on life. Staying positive, breaking up arguments,I was the only character able to see the deformed Caliban as more than a demonic beast. The one who reminds my fellow shipwreck survivors else that they should be celebrating because they're alive: "Beseech you, sir, be merry. You have cause, So have we all, of joy; for our escape is much beyond our loss" (2.1.1).
If our audience didn’t get some of the words, the puns or even some of the characters, if our lines were well delivered, using spontaneous, comprehensible, natural speech patterns, they got enough of them to enjoy the play. We avoided laying on Ye Olde Englande over-coloured, overt musical, poeticised stuff .
After so many exits and entrances, I would put such board treading behind me, never to come to a theatre near you.I would further my understanding of Shakespeare through my reading and writing.I would keep not my costume, but my pencil sharp, to see the point. The main question that would remain for me: ‘What kind shall I use? 2B, or not 2B?"
However this drama tragic, away from the footlights' glare, remained eager to witness the commanding presence that others could impose on such works,others who could convey the sheer poetry of his language, it’s sheer descriptive quality,those who had a sui generis perspective on the man known as the greatest writer and dramatist in the English language.
On a Good Wicket
Another facet of my schooldays was an activity somewhat akin to drama. Based on conflict, guile and deception it involved lengthy periods of inactivity while us players choreographed into position and posture, circled each other, watching and waiting. We made our entrances, we made our exits as honorable opponents; we were bound by a code of fair play. Seated waiting for my entrance I kept the benchmark in mind. The player who had held the stage unchallenged.
It’s Not Golf
The water tank at the back of our house sat on a wooden platform and was close to a shed. It needed to have a round brick base and be less confined for my purposes. I needed to be able to hit a golf ball against the base with a cricket bat and hit it back when it rebounded at any angles. This is how Don Bradman, the greatest cricketer and batsman of the 20th Century honed his remarkable powers of co-ordination, concentration, unnerving judgment, fast footwork and decisive powerful bat motion. Hitting the golf ball in the garage where I threw bolt bombs would suffice. There,game faced I replicated the Dons technique for sharpening his reflexes and developing his strokes. The bombs had already taught me to be nimble. Unlike the Don who had to practice in the absence of friends, I had ample opportunity to train with my school mates. There was nothing like the smack of leather on a willowy blond to let us know that summer was coming. Not that I had an overriding sporting career ambition in mind. I simply went in for the fun and action of this gentlemanly game. Nevertheless I aimed to focus as did its near flawless exponent as I stepped up to the wicket – keeping calm and still while awaiting the bowler’s delivery, sizing up the ball in a flash and exploding into action, dispatching their fieldsmen to all parts of the park.Touching base with the Don, a humble man,I said to him ‘Good on you,Sir Don, you’re a real beauty.’.I told him that his admirable personal qualities were ones I wanted to emulate. Being part of a team yet standing out, knowing just what was needed to be done to achieve a roaring success. The Australian people, hit for six during the Great Depression, kept in fine feather when excitement over his tally of runs reached fever pitch.Hats went in the air as he hit balls round the boundary.
I told this national treasure his contribution transcended sport for which he thanked me.
This Sporting Life.
Over these years, taking part in organized sport was naturally de rigueur. For a couple of hours a week,our little town,one community,lived and breathed as a single being.This was during the weekly game of rugby league ,the town’s overriding religion. In a country where men were men and if boys knew what was good for them,they were men too. Weathering nicks, abrasion, bruises, collisions and concussion, with crowds roaring on the touchline, I engaged in this gladiatorial game at school. On
the wing,I would wait cautiously, feet astride, crouching, my arms pushed out protectively, while some bruiser ran at me and shoved out his fist. Grievous bodily harm was an ongoing curse.Like death, tax evasion,and of course shipping and handling too, it was inevitable.
Each week I would brace myself for another clash in which my gangly frame would get roughed up and flattened again and,black and blue,dinged and dented, I would ache like the devil. After which it was time to bounce back to the end of the line – on the wing.We usually got thrashed by the bigger boys from Tamworth,some of whom repeated their final year to stay on top. Going down to them yet again,we once did a lap of disgrace.
All and all It was goodly for my sense of esteem, but a relief when the time came to hang up my boots.I had shifted my gaze, becoming a keen observer of another far more chilling blood sport.
Clear and Present Danger.
In 1962 I braced myself for a clash of the most unimaginable sort, one which overshadowed my
simple world
and threatened to open the gates of hell.
Like most people around the world, I held my breath, the clock ticking, all
set to duck and cover as we visualized
the dark mushroom cloud of atomic devastation.Red Alert.
Monsignor
Leahy had told me to expect a sign but nothing like this.
The Cuban leader Fidel Castro had availed
himself of a Soviet offer to place nuclear missiles on his tropical island. When these were discovered by American spy
planes in October, the Cuban crisis escalated into an unprecedented face-off,
threatening all out nuclear war. Even an accidental first
strike would have likely resulted in retaliation leading to full escalation.
Full on blowback.
‘An eye for an eye,a tooth for a tooth’,said Dad. ‘Everybody will be blind and gummy as well as microwaved.’
‘ I don’t know what the world’s coming to’ , said Mum. ‘ Scientists say we’ll be blown to bits this time.God made the world in one week but we can unmake it in one minute.It seems like it’s human nature to want to kill.’
‘Mum if that’s human nature,we’d better change it or there won’t be anything human left to change.We’d better get ready with our thinking,not just our bombs.’
Dad said ‘When everyone around the world talks war,what we’ll get is war.’
‘War will come, want it or not’,said Mum.We have to make provision for it.’
‘ My word,you’d think this was the Last Supper.’she said soon after that, noting my gargantuan appetite at the time. ‘Where do you put it all? You’re a bottomless pit,Greedy Guts.Eating us out of house and home.And store.’
‘Armageddon ready to meet the storm,’ I replied, ‘building up my reserves in case we have to go without.’
We were better placed than most. We didn’t have to stock up. We already had a decent doomsday supply of canned foods, biscuits, dried hams and potatoes stowed to tide us over while we sheltered. After the electric supply went down, I would console myself over a world pulverised by polishing off our tubes of ice cream as if there were no tomorrow. Bags of grain and coal would do the job of sandbags around our perimeter.As if these would have done much good.
As it turned out matters were within the grasp of the respective leaders. The U.S.Secretary of State Rusk said: "We're standing eyeball to eyeball, and the other fellow just blinked." The Kennedys were able to resist the calls by some generals and White House top advisers for an immediate all – out unprovoked invasion of Cuba, a move virtually certain to precipitate a war with the Soviets. A ring of US Navy destroyers was sent to blockade the island until the Soviets agreed to return their missiles. Rather than a full scale war, this more limited and measured response afforded the Soviets enough time of their own to reconsider and give ground, saving face by declaring they had saved Cuba from invasion. As well they may have done. Castro had good reason to fear an invasion by the US.
This was no straightforward victory. Missiles were used as a bargaining chip in negotiations for withdrawal. The US would back off their plan to bolster their offensive nuclear installations in Turkey. At the time the sainted Kennedy was riding high in my estimate and looking back on this man I give him credit for arriving at good judgment and opening up lines of communication with the Soviet leadership. In light of Nixon’s comments that he would have dropped the Big One,that he didn’t give a damn about the civilians he bombed, the better man by far won in their neck and neck contest.
Eventually,a lifetime away, the US would even strike up a quiet conversation with the Cubans, irrespective of their leadership.
The Band Begins to Play.
Finding my musical feet, I stepped up to the bandstand – in Wolseley Park, and other venues – as a fully kitted member of the Gunnedah Municipal Band, a bastion of the town’s civic pride. Like Eddie Calvert, I saw the brass band as the logical place to pick up musical skills without fees,my father’s business going through a rough patch.
‘The music world would be a lot poorer if there were no such subsidized tuition’,our highly regarded
devoted bandmaster Iven Laing pointed out to me . ‘We may never have known the brilliance of Benny Goodman. The King of Swing’ owed his training to his father sending him to music classes at
the local synagogue. Buckshee.His father could not have done otherwise shovelling animal parts in the stockyards on sweatshop wages.’
Being unnoteworthy, with more enthusiasm than finesse, , my humble part was to chime in with the ‘
oompah’,tooting my melodious cornet. I played all the right notes, but not necessarily in the right order.My ability on the cornet was legendary;everybody knew I had little. During one of my early bandstand performances,we were playing a very sad hymn. I noticed a man in the front row of the audience near me with tears running down his face. When we were finished, I approached him and asked, ‘Are you a devout Christian?’
He replied ‘No I’m a devout musician.’
‘So what sin have I committed?’
‘You're supposed to follow the music, not chase it all over the place.’
It didn’t take long for me however to stand out as someone to take note of.There was one especially memorable moment after the wrong music sheet was handed to me at practice. When I began a very difficult passage from ‘Colonel Bogey’, everyone in the band turned and looked at me in wonder and amazement.They were playing ‘Eine kleine Nachtmusik at the time.’
The bandhall adjoins sporting facilities.It’s next to the town’s basketball court.
When I played Mozart. Mozart lost.
To teach me embouchure and the mechanics of this brass instrument properly was the lot of our principal solo cornettist,John Hinton. ‘There’s nothing to it,buggerlugs’, he advised. ‘Just watch me and it’ll all become clear.Just do it the Wright way’ ,he smiled,referring to Tommy Dorsey’s female vocal:
‘ I blow thru here
The music goes 'round and around
Whoa-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho
And it comes out here
I push the first valve down
The music goes down and around
Whoa-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho
And it comes out here
I push the middle valve down
The music goes down around below
Below, below, deedle-dee-ho-ho-ho
Listen to the jazz come out
I push the other valve down
The music goes 'round and around
Whoa-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho
And it comes out here’
The main source of music in the town, the traditional British brass band was at the service of the community. In our “lion tamer’ uniforms with peaked caps and gold braid,we led the solemn Anzac Day march . Ahead of the army reserve we moved in step as a unit and in formation, coordinating the movements of close order drill with precision, with the correct beat or cadence, sounding off between full-band pieces.
l
The heads are up
The chests are out
The arms are swinging
And cadence count
Sound off ,sound off,
Sound off ,sound off,
Cadence count
1-2-3-4 (1-2, 3-4)
Enie, Meanie, Minie, Moe
Let's go back and count some more
Sound off,sound off,Sound off,sound off,
Cadence count
1-2-3-4 (1-2, 3-4)
I had a good home, but I left (you're right)
I had a good home, but I left (you're right)
Jody was there, when I left (you're right)
Jody was there, when I left (you're right)
Sound off (1-2)
Sound off (3-4)
Cadence count
1-2-3-4 (1-2, 3-4)
We entertained local people through concerts, parades, park performances, opening events, ceremonial occasion, church fetes and a wide variety of public engagements. Eat your heart out, Mick Jagger! I have read that Sir Mick has ruled out the idea of writing his memoirs as he considered his life too ho hum. It must have been, increasingly restricted to huge overcrowded gigs with an avalanche of anonymous faces straining to see the stage. Boring! When I consider the extremely diverse repertoire of the Gunnedah Municipal Band performing classical, contemporary, sacred and military music, I feel frightfully sorry for this frustrated Rolling Stone reeling out his rock and roll standards over and over again. Boring! And can you possibly blow and toot and pound drums up and down the streets to the strain of ‘Jumping Jack Flash’. Then there’s the matter of the audiences – did Sir Mick ever experience the intimacy of gigs where the bandsmen outnumbered the audience.Did he ever see grateful pensioned off geezers and blue rinsed matrons charmed, get their ya-ya’s out, a twinkle in the eyes as their toes got tapping,tearing into favourite melodies.
‘That’s him’,they nodded, ‘The one in the way.’
Joining the group,I demonstrated a basic musicological fundamentals from the word go.As I made my first grand entrance into the bandhall, Iven was just quizzing the guys as to which scale they were playing in.Tripping over a tangle of electric cord,landing on my back, I gave cornet player Bill Syphers the very prompt he needed: ‘A flat minor.’
I felt rather diminished.After a brief interval Iven augmented the situation advising me, ‘You’ll have to be more sharp in future.’
Under Iven’s baton our ensemble rehearsed long ahead for the competition circuit sweating it out, keeping in time with him. While the townsfolk were splashing around cooling off in the adjoining swimming pool, Iven never faltered, working himself up into a solid lather putting us through our paces.
‘All right,’he’d say, ‘now once again from the beginning and remember guys, only the once.Time is tight,time is very tight.’
Orchestrating the talents of seasoned players of a high standard playing alongside the like of kids like me demanded the patience of Job. As it was Iven was just the job. His expert ear would detect when anyone was playing louder or softer than they should: ‘Gentlemen let’s not strike any false notes here.We want a melody,not a malady.Remember, it’s all about the team, not the individual’, he drummed into us unremittingly, pushing our musicianship and personal level of performance higher ‘I’m not going over all this again.Your parts seem to be all rests. You’re better than this,’he would habitually interrupt,tapping his stand, just as we had struck up,‘now straight ahead, and strive for tone’.
One wintry evening he interrupted play when my music stand went flying. ‘What’s up now?’,he demanded. ‘I taut I taw a puddy tat a creepin' up on me,’I tweeted,
‘I did! I taw a puddy tat as plain as he could be!’
Then we all spotted the culprit,a pussycat that had strayed in from the street. Shooing away this varmint briskly, Iven was being a bit too finicky I taut. ‘Take it easy,Iven,’I said. ‘There’s no ladder in here. This cool cat just wants to hear some hot sounds close up’.
‘It’s not that I’m superstitious,Allan’,he explained.This is no place for our feline fans.Sylvester has to vamoose.I don’t care to fetch up with Bernstein’s Allergy.’
‘What in dickens is that,?’ I asked.
‘As a young man Leonard Bernstein once had difficulty seeing the music while being tested in his conducting class.Of all things he was coming down with an allergic reaction to a tabby tom..I can’t afford the remotest chance of furball fever.What with the contest coming up.’
It was the cut and thrust of band contesting that took us to regional centres and cities. Our aim was to fly to faraway places. It led me to value the camaraderie of amateur musicians from all walks of life. Passionately committed to his musical ensemble, Iven encouraged me to widen my musical education. ‘Whatever you’ve learned here won’t be lost on you.You might branch out into some other kind of music. Look at Paul McCartney.His dad took him to brass band concerts when he was a tot.Look where young Macca is today.He filtered these influences of the people’s music through his own experiences. You yourself might just want to appreciate music more deeply.It doesn’t matter if you don’t go on beyond that.Build on your experience with us.Music is the international language.Wherever you go,whatever you want to say,say it with music.’
Iven swelled with pride over our new band hall, it’s walls lined with cups and trophies,mementos from past accomplishments. Looking up at these awards after I practised with them several years later, I told Iven “You must be proud of having built up this flourishing band. Was this what you always wanted to do?”
Iven replied “Band music is in my blood,laddie. This outdoor kind of music has been beating inside me since I was knee high to a grasshopper. One of my first memories was when our family joined the throngs waving streamers, lining the ticker taped streets to welcome home the troops from the Great War. Togged up in our Sunday best to attend band concerts in the park – weather permitting. It was on these occasions I realized the power of music to stir men. To march into battle. To supply entertainment where there was a dearth. To allow us to enter an inner world.To reach emotions that go beyond words.So I wanted to form the best band in the bush.”
The cat’s whiskers you might say.’I replied with a mischievous wink. ‘Did you consider going beyond leading a small town amateur band?”
“I long nursed an ambition to do something on a grander stage, something more elaborate, more orchestral – produce glorious symphonic sounds – with clarinets, saxophones, French horns, soaring violins, crashing cymbals and thundering tubas – the whole kit and caboodle.”
“Something like Sergeant Peppers’,I suggested,referring to the fictional psychedelic marching band, highly popular at the time.’
‘We’d really turn on the locals in our garish satin bib and tucker, dyed in funky day-glo colours,’chortled Iven.
‘Growing moustaches beards and long hair’,I added, ‘spelling out our name with flowers. What about you, John?,I asked of John Hinton.
‘ Some like it hot’ he replied. ‘The jim-jam-jump with the solid jive,
Makes you nine foot tall when you're four foot five’.
‘ Well, twirl my turban, man alive!Here comes Mister Nine to Five.’
‘I‘ve long hankered to be more adventurous, bopping and jazzing it up with loose bluesy,ricky ticky numbers, rocking dance pieces-- and sounds to soothe the soul. ‘Four beats to the bar-and no cheating’to quote Count Basie. Catering to the widest and deepest range of emotions and impulses. If our bands are going to keep being a draw, we have to widen our appeal and keep up with the times.Our music just doesn’t do it for younger people.We can’t afford to be seen as stick-in-the mud.
We have to break away from our traditional stylings, add other elements to our repertoire. It don't mean a thing, if it ain't got that swing.’
‘We should try some. Show it off when we go by plane.Can we do Glenn Miller?’I asked him. ’
‘What,fly off in the fog. Perish the thought.Seriously though,the best music in creation does come from fusion.We can learn a lot from the New Orleans brass bands.That’s where Satchmo’s pubescent cheeks first swelled out- blowing his cornet.These hepcats improvise, blending our heavy metal martial music with the African folk music brought to the Americas by slaves. Of course, you need a special personnel for such magic and they are far and few between. With what we’ve got, we’ve got to make do. Salagagoola mechicka boola bibbidi-bobbidi-boo.’
I pictured these two guys swinging together a generation back, balancing this partiality for free,joyful improvisation while maintaining recognizable melodies.Swinging high ,swinging low.It was not surprising that we concurred on who we rated our favourite big band player. Benny Goodman- that most technically proficient jazz clarinetist, the first jazz musician to gain a reputation as a soloist with symphony orchestras.
Halcyon Days.
Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth; and let thy heart cheer thee in the days of thy
youth, and walk in the ways of thine heart, and in the sight of thine eyes.
It was in the idyllic bush setting of the University Of New England where, with a straight bat, I would embark uninterrupted on my maiden voyage of self discovery. I had never seen so much corduroy in the one place.Putting away my childish things, this was where my world view would seriously take shape. Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, I grazed contentedly on my chosen fields of knowledge,betaking myself ahead to where I wanted to go in leaps and bounds, like the kangaroos I passed on the way to classes.In this natural progression, I completed studies in Economics, English, History and in
Education where I would begin to bring all my catholic ideas together.For me it was just as important to to understand the world around me and why it wagged as it did, as it was to understand myself and my place in it.
In history my interest lay in understanding the origins of man and ancient society particularly in South and South East Asia, in understanding the global forces at play in shaping international relations, and in following the progress of the space race.History in the making.
The first rural university in Australia, UNE, an offshoot of the University of Sydney, has gained its own share of prestige, particularly in the agricultural sciences. My professional grooming there would afford me qualifications recognized at home and abroad. At the heart of its success is the traditional collegiate system which is an integral part of its character. It introduced freshfaced callow me to a body of bright and brainy young sparks drawn from a broad spectrum of schools and countries – eligible by dint of our common capacity to swot. This was a community in which scholarship flourished as best could be expected,where we could put our heads together to sift through ideas and opinions and hammer out our convictions in an atmosphere of tolerance and friendship. To say nothing of some getting off on having their heads hammered together in a scrum.
Because of its small size and emphasis I was afforded supportive personal attention in my initiation and progress in the academic environment. Moreover consideration was paid to my personal welfare. Such encouragement helped me find my feet. Enabling my smooth transition from the high school regimen of compulsion to one where I was left to my own devices,it was the cornerstone of my fair to middling undergraduate attainments.I appreciated this tremendously and was determined to make the most of it. Strongly motivated,proficient, but no whiz kid, I had no time to fritter away with fiddle faddle. I came to study and study I did. I couldn’t afford to flop or flounder in this demanding new world.For every student with a spark of brilliance,there are several others with ignition trouble. After proving I was sound in wind and limb as well as sound in mind and character,I hoped to be accepted as a trainee teacher by the Department of Education.
The first student residence to be built on the campus, Wright College, named after the university’s founder, was to be my home for the next four years.The colleges function as the primary housing, dining, and social organization for undergraduate students. Wright’s five white double storey wooden blocks, named after the first five Greek letters, were only intended as makeshift accommodation but their use by date kept being stretched forward in time. Their windows opened but onto what had to one of the most impressive backyards in Australia – green, spacious attractively landscaped grounds blending into playing fields and seventy four hectares of heritage parklands , effectively running less than one student to the acre, with the beautiful Booloominbah at the centre and heart of it all.
All conducive to tackling both intellectual problems and sporting opponents. This bucolic setting belied the fact that the main university facilities lay within a hop,step and a jump. Classes were small. This was no degree factory.Scholars have rarely had it so good.
A cross-section of the parent university – with the lamentable exception of the fairer sex – Wright College prided itself on its esprit de corps. It built this up through a wide range of activities – sporting matches, balls, dinners and debates.
The standard of debating was very high.Too high for me,an absolute beginner.I considered joining the College team, but somebody talked me out of it.
These activities and everyday matters of concern to the student were coordinated through councils The College fostered a lively fraternal atmosphere, anodyne but never staid – ensuring that all students were known, one by one, that no one was anonymous.
These activities and everyday matters of concern to the student were coordinated through councils The College fostered a lively fraternal atmosphere, anodyne but never staid – ensuring that all students were known, one by one, that no one was anonymous.
I made many friends and acquaintances in short order with no shortage of others whose interests matched my own. Living with like-minded students allowed me to easily share knowledge about assignments and essays and ask advice when confronted with academic or course related problems. Senior students often gave personal advice about the subjects they found interesting, the lecturers they found engaging and tips about past exams – information that couldn’t be found inside a handbook. Around exam period my peers and I could often be found in the library or in tutorial rooms studying together or finishing group assignments.
It also meant that there were people to go to lectures with and share late night discussions. Perhaps more importantly, however, it made it easy to rub elbows with people across a range of disciplines, with different and experiences, talents, and goals. – diversifying friendship groups and allowing a more rounded approach to university life.
Finding my feet, I got into the academic rhythm in earnest, passing my days bustling round lecture
theatres and tutorial rooms, retreating to my quarters for frenzied bouts of study and writing left,right and centre. Interspersed with lobbing in on friends or vice versa – entering into discourse of all kinds,running ideas by them,toing and froing into the wee hours of the morning, playing games, listening to music, sharing tucker and playing games.
I loved all the tricks of playing snooker and billiards. I really miss these though I’m not sure if I miss them on purpose.
Floreat Wright.
Coming the Raw Prawn.
When I met Rick Lay at the beginning of term his legs were buckling under the weight of his bulging suitcase which he was lugging up the stairs. Lending him a hand, I couldn’t believe how heavy it was.
“What have you got in here – bars of gold? I asked.
“Better” he replied, “Sugar and spice and everything nice”.
Upon depositing the suitcase in the room, it popped open with a slight touch of the catch. Bursting at the seam with all kinds of packets, jars and cans, a strange sharp aroma emanated from within making my nostrils twitch.
“What I have down here is the essential part of my identity.’he said, reaching into the case. Rummaging around for what I expected to be his passport, he fished out a package that smelled like the source of that powerful odour. Un-wrapping several layers of plastic revealed the shape of a bar covered in paper. Peeling back the corner, Rick handed it over for my perusal. What then ensured I can only describe as a full frontal assault on my senses. “Holy mackerel”, I thought to myself, “‘What have we here? This dark sticky substance looks like the hash hish I saw pictured in a copy of the National Geographic. Was this one of those ‘dope freaks’ I had read about. My suspicions seemed borne out by the stuff’s olfactory effect. Stinking to high heaven, it nearly bowled me over. Was this the so called ‘high’ that I had heard about? What kind of fishy business was this? Was he coming the raw prawn, Aussie slang for having someone on? Noting my concern, Rick put my mind to rest, explaining the matter at hand. “This is fermented shrimp paste. It blends wonderfully with the robust flavours of chillies, garlic, fragrant spices and aromatic herbs. A little goes a long way”.
“I’m not surprised”, I said to myself, “so should I”.
Rick said “We Asians appreciate the prodigal amount and quality of food here in Australia but feel you lack a lot with regard to flavour. Being poorer than Australians we have to be more resourceful and inventive in our cooking. We get homesick for our customary dishes and make sure we bring a supply of our seasoning agents and condiments when we come here to study. I’m sure you’ll join us and enjoy a break from the college kitchen”.
It also meant that there were people to go to lectures with and share late night discussions. Perhaps more importantly, however, it made it easy to rub elbows with people across a range of disciplines, with different and experiences, talents, and goals. – diversifying friendship groups and allowing a more rounded approach to university life.
Finding my feet, I got into the academic rhythm in earnest, passing my days bustling round lecture
theatres and tutorial rooms, retreating to my quarters for frenzied bouts of study and writing left,right and centre. Interspersed with lobbing in on friends or vice versa – entering into discourse of all kinds,running ideas by them,toing and froing into the wee hours of the morning, playing games, listening to music, sharing tucker and playing games.
I loved all the tricks of playing snooker and billiards. I really miss these though I’m not sure if I miss them on purpose.
Floreat Wright.
Coming the Raw Prawn.
When I met Rick Lay at the beginning of term his legs were buckling under the weight of his bulging suitcase which he was lugging up the stairs. Lending him a hand, I couldn’t believe how heavy it was.
“What have you got in here – bars of gold? I asked.
“Better” he replied, “Sugar and spice and everything nice”.
Upon depositing the suitcase in the room, it popped open with a slight touch of the catch. Bursting at the seam with all kinds of packets, jars and cans, a strange sharp aroma emanated from within making my nostrils twitch.
“What I have down here is the essential part of my identity.’he said, reaching into the case. Rummaging around for what I expected to be his passport, he fished out a package that smelled like the source of that powerful odour. Un-wrapping several layers of plastic revealed the shape of a bar covered in paper. Peeling back the corner, Rick handed it over for my perusal. What then ensured I can only describe as a full frontal assault on my senses. “Holy mackerel”, I thought to myself, “‘What have we here? This dark sticky substance looks like the hash hish I saw pictured in a copy of the National Geographic. Was this one of those ‘dope freaks’ I had read about. My suspicions seemed borne out by the stuff’s olfactory effect. Stinking to high heaven, it nearly bowled me over. Was this the so called ‘high’ that I had heard about? What kind of fishy business was this? Was he coming the raw prawn, Aussie slang for having someone on? Noting my concern, Rick put my mind to rest, explaining the matter at hand. “This is fermented shrimp paste. It blends wonderfully with the robust flavours of chillies, garlic, fragrant spices and aromatic herbs. A little goes a long way”.
“I’m not surprised”, I said to myself, “so should I”.
Rick said “We Asians appreciate the prodigal amount and quality of food here in Australia but feel you lack a lot with regard to flavour. Being poorer than Australians we have to be more resourceful and inventive in our cooking. We get homesick for our customary dishes and make sure we bring a supply of our seasoning agents and condiments when we come here to study. I’m sure you’ll join us and enjoy a break from the college kitchen”.
Hot Stuff.
It was the sizzling sounds that first put me onto the whereabouts of Epsilon’s kitchenette. Then, the air heavy with it, titillating my jaded nostrils, the scent of piquant flavours wafting through the corridors, leading me to sniff out their sauce. Pungent curry bubbling away in a melting pot of race’s and culinary influences. Steaming away was the blander stuff – the vegetables and rice so reliant on this rich concoction. ‘ Double, double toil and trouble,Fire burn, and cauldron bubble’,incanted a figure stirring a large pot. Through this mist I made out the shape of David Evans, a highly visible agent of supportiveness amongst collegians from overseas, who had been pointed out to me in this respect. Surrounded by a group of such students he greeted me “Welcome to Australasia!” emphasizing the latter part of this archaic geographic entity, stretching its ambit somewhat.
He introduced me in turn to this black and brindle band from various corners of the region. They were expressing their sense of difference from each other through comments about such dining niceties as whether to use spoons or just fingers to scrape up their portions. “Feel free to sample some honest-to-goodness Indonesian nosh” he invited laksadaisically. ‘Tuck in.You’re in for a real treat,fit fot a Javanese sultan. Wrap your chops around this. It’ll put hairs on your chest”.I started to probe this offering gingerly,just a smidgen. ‘Well I’ll be blowed. It was nothing if not hair-raising. It was several orders of magnitude more fiery than anything that had ever passed my lips. Where was the fire extinguisher? Was it possible to burn out taste buds? Pressing on,gulping down water, I sweated it out, my palate burning from the unmistakable sting of chillies and god knows what other seasonings. One of these turned out to be nothing other than shrimp paste. “And how do you find your first taste of Indonesia?” queried David, paraphrasing the question put to the infamous heroine Becky Sharp on being introduced to Indian curry.I couldn’t in all honesty manage ‘Delicious’ as had Thackeray’s neophyte from ‘Vanity Fair.’ trying to ingratiate herself. “I’ll stick to my hair shirt, thank you” I grimaced, choking back my tears,declining the chili offered to ‘ chill’ my interior. .
David’s response owed more to Russian literature than the ‘Vanity Fair’ he taught. “A budding Solzhenitchen eh!” quipped David, playing on the name of the ascetic Russian writer and his mortifying habit. “Give it a little time” he urged. “Let your enzymes do their work. Once you get past the initial kick, you’ll never again consider denying your taste buds such an earthly pleasure”. Slowly but surely as the heat subsided and a mellow tingling glow settled over me I sensed what he was on about. Real curry was like so many tastes – an acquired one which you had to be exposed to in stages. I was amazed that anything containing shrimp paste could taste so good. “So how do you feel now?” he asked, nothing the change in my face. “Itchen, David, itchen to come back to your kitchen”.
Lingua Franca.
The college dining room was the ideal arena for my scintillating intellectual conversation with all comers.In this meeting place of minds,students and members of faculties mixed freely.Although there was a designated ‘ high table’,most Fellows chose where to sit on non-formal occasions,partaking of the same hearty conversational fare as we undergrads. To supplement my modest stipend,I waited on the elevated table on formal occasions,enabling me to size up these men of learning and to observe how they interacted with others from different disciplines, and with simpler minds such as myself.Amid this fellowship,one stood out as embodying the collegiate spirit of promoting both the personal and academic welfare of students. David Evans, a non residential member from the English faculty, straddling the social and cultural gulf of town and gown, went the extra mile. A former high school teacher, David eschewed the notion of the university as an ivory tower, rather building on its communal character in practical terms to promote better understanding between the people of Australia and those of our neighbours.
David had taken upon himself on the role as mentor and friend of Indonesian and other overseas students. Starting from a desire to alleviate the difficulties of these young people living in an unfamiliar culture. He told me he wanted to go beyond the occasional easy lofty gestures and cheap grace, actually spending some time trying to some social good. Being in a position to liaise with the university as to what reading was required of his fold, he assisted them with their scriptural work. Our paths crossed frequently around the lecture halls and on the evenings at college when he helped students refine their English. Running across David one Friday evening, I expressed an interest in his activities along with my desire to deepen my understanding of literature. “Why don’t you join me for a meal at the local Chinese and we’ll put our heads together? While you fill up, I‘ll fill you in on what I do. Do you like Chinese food?”
‘Is there any other kind?’ I was more than happy to take him up on this, fain to gain the company of a seasoned litterateur, receive his wise counsel and bounce ideas I was working out off him.
He introduced me in turn to this black and brindle band from various corners of the region. They were expressing their sense of difference from each other through comments about such dining niceties as whether to use spoons or just fingers to scrape up their portions. “Feel free to sample some honest-to-goodness Indonesian nosh” he invited laksadaisically. ‘Tuck in.You’re in for a real treat,fit fot a Javanese sultan. Wrap your chops around this. It’ll put hairs on your chest”.I started to probe this offering gingerly,just a smidgen. ‘Well I’ll be blowed. It was nothing if not hair-raising. It was several orders of magnitude more fiery than anything that had ever passed my lips. Where was the fire extinguisher? Was it possible to burn out taste buds? Pressing on,gulping down water, I sweated it out, my palate burning from the unmistakable sting of chillies and god knows what other seasonings. One of these turned out to be nothing other than shrimp paste. “And how do you find your first taste of Indonesia?” queried David, paraphrasing the question put to the infamous heroine Becky Sharp on being introduced to Indian curry.I couldn’t in all honesty manage ‘Delicious’ as had Thackeray’s neophyte from ‘Vanity Fair.’ trying to ingratiate herself. “I’ll stick to my hair shirt, thank you” I grimaced, choking back my tears,declining the chili offered to ‘ chill’ my interior. .
David’s response owed more to Russian literature than the ‘Vanity Fair’ he taught. “A budding Solzhenitchen eh!” quipped David, playing on the name of the ascetic Russian writer and his mortifying habit. “Give it a little time” he urged. “Let your enzymes do their work. Once you get past the initial kick, you’ll never again consider denying your taste buds such an earthly pleasure”. Slowly but surely as the heat subsided and a mellow tingling glow settled over me I sensed what he was on about. Real curry was like so many tastes – an acquired one which you had to be exposed to in stages. I was amazed that anything containing shrimp paste could taste so good. “So how do you feel now?” he asked, nothing the change in my face. “Itchen, David, itchen to come back to your kitchen”.
Lingua Franca.
The college dining room was the ideal arena for my scintillating intellectual conversation with all comers.In this meeting place of minds,students and members of faculties mixed freely.Although there was a designated ‘ high table’,most Fellows chose where to sit on non-formal occasions,partaking of the same hearty conversational fare as we undergrads. To supplement my modest stipend,I waited on the elevated table on formal occasions,enabling me to size up these men of learning and to observe how they interacted with others from different disciplines, and with simpler minds such as myself.Amid this fellowship,one stood out as embodying the collegiate spirit of promoting both the personal and academic welfare of students. David Evans, a non residential member from the English faculty, straddling the social and cultural gulf of town and gown, went the extra mile. A former high school teacher, David eschewed the notion of the university as an ivory tower, rather building on its communal character in practical terms to promote better understanding between the people of Australia and those of our neighbours.
David had taken upon himself on the role as mentor and friend of Indonesian and other overseas students. Starting from a desire to alleviate the difficulties of these young people living in an unfamiliar culture. He told me he wanted to go beyond the occasional easy lofty gestures and cheap grace, actually spending some time trying to some social good. Being in a position to liaise with the university as to what reading was required of his fold, he assisted them with their scriptural work. Our paths crossed frequently around the lecture halls and on the evenings at college when he helped students refine their English. Running across David one Friday evening, I expressed an interest in his activities along with my desire to deepen my understanding of literature. “Why don’t you join me for a meal at the local Chinese and we’ll put our heads together? While you fill up, I‘ll fill you in on what I do. Do you like Chinese food?”
‘Is there any other kind?’ I was more than happy to take him up on this, fain to gain the company of a seasoned litterateur, receive his wise counsel and bounce ideas I was working out off him.
Well worn, chintzy and unassuming, the restaurant still made an effort to conjure up an oriental ambience what with its traditional lanterns, chipped willow pattern dinner service’ and red, gold and green décor.
‘If we were now in Peking,said David, ‘You wouldn’t notice the golds and greens .Traditionally red symbolizes joy and prosperity for the Chinese,but now the the revolution’s palette seems to follow this trope religiously. it’s the dominant color , infusing practically everything.’
‘If we were now in Peking,said David, ‘You wouldn’t notice the golds and greens .Traditionally red symbolizes joy and prosperity for the Chinese,but now the the revolution’s palette seems to follow this trope religiously. it’s the dominant color , infusing practically everything.’
Pride of place on the restaurant wall was taken by a large handing scroll painting, the subject of which would set the prevailing note of David’s explanation.
While waiting to order, David introduced the group depicted in the painting. “Sitting on the throne,holding court, is Wen Chung, arbiter of the fate of scholars” he said. “Because of their long emphasis on scholasticism and the high status placed on the literati, it is only natural that the Chinese have a god of literature and scholars. Deified from the soul of a student, failed by the Emperor on account of his disfigured face, the Chinese make much of his influence. Seated facing Wen Chung to one side is Kuei Hsing Minister of Literary Affairs on the World, conferrer of degrees and diplomas to whom students prayed for success in exams. My students from the Chinese diaspora have bestowed this honorific title upon me, of which I am touchingly proud”.
“Facing Wen Chang on the other wide is Chu-I, Minister Who Looks After the Welfare of Students. Chu-I regarded as protector of those close to the borderline, he is also know as Mr. Red Coat. This is a mantle you might wish to assume. Unless I’m very much mistaken,you would fill the bill. But first let me explain what deeds it entails”. David proceeded to outline to me the operations of his informal personal peer and staff support network and some of the difficulties faced by his charges. “Allan,”he said,”If native speakers such as yourself have stresses enough keeping up with work and coping with life at uni. ,think of the lot of the students from abroad.They have extra drawbacks through deficits in their language and cultural skills. “They usually know quite a bit about English grammar before they come – maybe more than native speakers – but when the time comes for them to talk in class, they’re not too sure of themselves. They need to be able to speak comfortably in public.
“Ongoing language support is the alpha and omega for these students’ progress, over saddled as they are with the quantity of required reading, full of anxiety about competing with native speakers, facing the risk of flunking, plain loneliness and a yen for home. Australian informality contrasts sharply with their stricter codes based on respect and harmony. Asians generally frown on the swilling, overt lustfulness and rollicking bacchanalia that our boys get up to, whereas they in turn are seen as blue nose spoilsports.
‘They’re not wowsers are they.’
‘ Nothing of the kind.They don’t attempt to force their own morality on everyone. They are just more reserved. They are too often backward in coming forward to seek advice from peers and tutors.Their concern is to maintain face. This is where you could come in Allan, if you don’t have too much on your plate.’
‘I don’t,but I think he or she has-wherever they are’I said quietly nodding to the bowls of of soup and rice and mountain of roasted suckling pig sitting untouched on the adjoining table, in front of an empty chair, long after the large family of Chinese diners had started hoeing into their dishes.A couple of other diners had noticed it too and couldn’t contain their bemusement.
‘In discouraging waste,my father always spoke of the undernourished poor in China. He reminded me with his own Confucian saying: ‘Man with one chopstick go hungry’.
This time is an exception for the Chinese.Now is the Festival of the Ghosts ’,said David. ‘During this time, the gates of hell are opened up and ghosts are free to roam the earth where they seek food and entertainment. People put out plates of food to please the spirits of the deceased, to celebrate their return to earth, and ward off bad luck.This symbolises the continuity of the living and the dead.’
‘Some people laugh at this,I notice.’
‘They think that Chinese lives are controlled by childish fear.They’re dismissive of what they see as medieval superstition persisting in the culture of such a long-lasting civilisation.They see it as wasteful contrasting it by association with their own pragmatism and level-headedness.’
‘It doesn’t seem so different to the myths and superstitions I was brought up with.Not so many years ago,I wouldn’t have dared eating meat on this day of the week .And I believed when swallowing the communion,I was eating the body of an invisible dead man doubling as a holy ghost.A dead man living in the sky who watches everything we do every minute of every day with a list of ten specific things he doesn’t want us to do. I worried about the souls of the faithful parked in purgatory. At death I was led to believe they had not been cleansed from temporal punishment due to venial sins and from attachment to mortal sins. Through the sacrifice of the mass on All Souls Day and strenuous candle burning, lauds and vespers, I believed I could help push them over the finish line to attain the beatific vision in heaven.’
"Beliefs like this go back through early Christianity and other creeds to pagan times.It was traditionally believed that the souls of the departed wandered the earth until All Souls Day. All Hallows' Eve,which became Halloween, provided one last chance for the dead to gain vengeance on their enemies before moving to the next world. In order to avoid being recognised by any soul that might be seeking such vengeance, people would don masks or costumes to disguise their identities. It’s customary still in parts of Europe to lay out offerings of food then for the dead."
‘I’m sure even those who see laying out food for the ghosts as wasteful splash out on buying bouquets and wreaths for their own dead.’
David and I exchanged smiles as the family were leaving.At the door the restaurateur was handing them their doggy bags.
‘Seeing as you have common interests and share activities with many under my tutelage,’David picked up, ‘why don’t you accompany me on my circuit.’
I placed my soup spoon down carefully, for as you may imagine, he had secured my full attention at that particular moment. ‘ By going over the same ground as me with your wide lexicon, clear precise diction and art of conversation, my efforts will be consolidated. While they won’t be composing sonnets in a week,this could help me raise their communication skills to another level. This would be a very loose arrangement where you can come and go to fit in with your own regime. You can cut your red coat according to your cloth. You’ll feel a great deal of satisfaction as you help boost their fluency. You”ll forge enduring friendships which will hold you in good stead when you travel the new neighbourhood. You can build your linguistic repertoire into the bargain. Even a smattering of other languages will take you far. I’m studying Bahasa Indonesian myself with the aim of mastery, but even when I can only greet people in their language they are so impressed.’
‘It’s really speaking in divers tongues’.
‘ It is,Allan. Kismet lies with our northern neighbours, Allan. Let’s shape it together”.
‘That suits me down to the ground.’I replied. I didn’t need to be asked twice. ‘ I want to contribute to strengthening English as the ‘lingua franca’ in the region. So people will learn it because they love it,not because they are pressured to do so.I hope to travel there soon.’
‘Spoken like a real Mr.Red Coat’,said David. ‘Together we’ll help shape the way in which our neighbours view Australia’s accomplishments and our way of life. Now have you had enough to eat?’
‘You might say I’ve had eloquent sufficiency.’
Shadowing David, I helped his charges expand their vocabulary, improve their pronunciation and speak with a more natural rhythm and pausing. In the process I was gratified to observe first hand the quiet achievement of David, this bounteous unsung educator, to see the gains accruing to those he instructed come before they knew it .
Milk, Honey and More.
“Variety is the spice of life”, said David, recalling the famous proverb penned by William Cowper, the English poet. David’s dialogue was peppered with literary quotes as liberally as the gastronomic concoctions that came his way.“Life is so much more exciting when we try different experiences. It can make for a magical quality when you make a special blend of components that by themselves are no great shakes. Take these ingredients”, he said, pointing to some of the commonplace items on the dining table in front of us. “Potatoes, tomatoes, peanuts” he said, “all introduced to the West from the New World and now things we take for granted. Chips for our fish, tomatoes for our salad, peanut butter for our bread.’
‘Matches grown on earth but made in heaven.’
‘ Likewise they were brought to Asia who adapted their dishes to whatever was going. You’ve tasted how scrumptious these humble tomatoes and potatoes become,garnished in their hands, and how peanut butter can be transformed” he said. Upon my word I had, having tasted how it can be enlivened with shrimp paste in gado gado.
While waiting to order, David introduced the group depicted in the painting. “Sitting on the throne,holding court, is Wen Chung, arbiter of the fate of scholars” he said. “Because of their long emphasis on scholasticism and the high status placed on the literati, it is only natural that the Chinese have a god of literature and scholars. Deified from the soul of a student, failed by the Emperor on account of his disfigured face, the Chinese make much of his influence. Seated facing Wen Chung to one side is Kuei Hsing Minister of Literary Affairs on the World, conferrer of degrees and diplomas to whom students prayed for success in exams. My students from the Chinese diaspora have bestowed this honorific title upon me, of which I am touchingly proud”.
“Facing Wen Chang on the other wide is Chu-I, Minister Who Looks After the Welfare of Students. Chu-I regarded as protector of those close to the borderline, he is also know as Mr. Red Coat. This is a mantle you might wish to assume. Unless I’m very much mistaken,you would fill the bill. But first let me explain what deeds it entails”. David proceeded to outline to me the operations of his informal personal peer and staff support network and some of the difficulties faced by his charges. “Allan,”he said,”If native speakers such as yourself have stresses enough keeping up with work and coping with life at uni. ,think of the lot of the students from abroad.They have extra drawbacks through deficits in their language and cultural skills. “They usually know quite a bit about English grammar before they come – maybe more than native speakers – but when the time comes for them to talk in class, they’re not too sure of themselves. They need to be able to speak comfortably in public.
“Ongoing language support is the alpha and omega for these students’ progress, over saddled as they are with the quantity of required reading, full of anxiety about competing with native speakers, facing the risk of flunking, plain loneliness and a yen for home. Australian informality contrasts sharply with their stricter codes based on respect and harmony. Asians generally frown on the swilling, overt lustfulness and rollicking bacchanalia that our boys get up to, whereas they in turn are seen as blue nose spoilsports.
‘They’re not wowsers are they.’
‘ Nothing of the kind.They don’t attempt to force their own morality on everyone. They are just more reserved. They are too often backward in coming forward to seek advice from peers and tutors.Their concern is to maintain face. This is where you could come in Allan, if you don’t have too much on your plate.’
‘I don’t,but I think he or she has-wherever they are’I said quietly nodding to the bowls of of soup and rice and mountain of roasted suckling pig sitting untouched on the adjoining table, in front of an empty chair, long after the large family of Chinese diners had started hoeing into their dishes.A couple of other diners had noticed it too and couldn’t contain their bemusement.
‘In discouraging waste,my father always spoke of the undernourished poor in China. He reminded me with his own Confucian saying: ‘Man with one chopstick go hungry’.
This time is an exception for the Chinese.Now is the Festival of the Ghosts ’,said David. ‘During this time, the gates of hell are opened up and ghosts are free to roam the earth where they seek food and entertainment. People put out plates of food to please the spirits of the deceased, to celebrate their return to earth, and ward off bad luck.This symbolises the continuity of the living and the dead.’
‘Some people laugh at this,I notice.’
‘They think that Chinese lives are controlled by childish fear.They’re dismissive of what they see as medieval superstition persisting in the culture of such a long-lasting civilisation.They see it as wasteful contrasting it by association with their own pragmatism and level-headedness.’
‘It doesn’t seem so different to the myths and superstitions I was brought up with.Not so many years ago,I wouldn’t have dared eating meat on this day of the week .And I believed when swallowing the communion,I was eating the body of an invisible dead man doubling as a holy ghost.A dead man living in the sky who watches everything we do every minute of every day with a list of ten specific things he doesn’t want us to do. I worried about the souls of the faithful parked in purgatory. At death I was led to believe they had not been cleansed from temporal punishment due to venial sins and from attachment to mortal sins. Through the sacrifice of the mass on All Souls Day and strenuous candle burning, lauds and vespers, I believed I could help push them over the finish line to attain the beatific vision in heaven.’
"Beliefs like this go back through early Christianity and other creeds to pagan times.It was traditionally believed that the souls of the departed wandered the earth until All Souls Day. All Hallows' Eve,which became Halloween, provided one last chance for the dead to gain vengeance on their enemies before moving to the next world. In order to avoid being recognised by any soul that might be seeking such vengeance, people would don masks or costumes to disguise their identities. It’s customary still in parts of Europe to lay out offerings of food then for the dead."
‘I’m sure even those who see laying out food for the ghosts as wasteful splash out on buying bouquets and wreaths for their own dead.’
David and I exchanged smiles as the family were leaving.At the door the restaurateur was handing them their doggy bags.
‘Seeing as you have common interests and share activities with many under my tutelage,’David picked up, ‘why don’t you accompany me on my circuit.’
I placed my soup spoon down carefully, for as you may imagine, he had secured my full attention at that particular moment. ‘ By going over the same ground as me with your wide lexicon, clear precise diction and art of conversation, my efforts will be consolidated. While they won’t be composing sonnets in a week,this could help me raise their communication skills to another level. This would be a very loose arrangement where you can come and go to fit in with your own regime. You can cut your red coat according to your cloth. You’ll feel a great deal of satisfaction as you help boost their fluency. You”ll forge enduring friendships which will hold you in good stead when you travel the new neighbourhood. You can build your linguistic repertoire into the bargain. Even a smattering of other languages will take you far. I’m studying Bahasa Indonesian myself with the aim of mastery, but even when I can only greet people in their language they are so impressed.’
‘It’s really speaking in divers tongues’.
‘ It is,Allan. Kismet lies with our northern neighbours, Allan. Let’s shape it together”.
‘That suits me down to the ground.’I replied. I didn’t need to be asked twice. ‘ I want to contribute to strengthening English as the ‘lingua franca’ in the region. So people will learn it because they love it,not because they are pressured to do so.I hope to travel there soon.’
‘Spoken like a real Mr.Red Coat’,said David. ‘Together we’ll help shape the way in which our neighbours view Australia’s accomplishments and our way of life. Now have you had enough to eat?’
‘You might say I’ve had eloquent sufficiency.’
Shadowing David, I helped his charges expand their vocabulary, improve their pronunciation and speak with a more natural rhythm and pausing. In the process I was gratified to observe first hand the quiet achievement of David, this bounteous unsung educator, to see the gains accruing to those he instructed come before they knew it .
Milk, Honey and More.
“Variety is the spice of life”, said David, recalling the famous proverb penned by William Cowper, the English poet. David’s dialogue was peppered with literary quotes as liberally as the gastronomic concoctions that came his way.“Life is so much more exciting when we try different experiences. It can make for a magical quality when you make a special blend of components that by themselves are no great shakes. Take these ingredients”, he said, pointing to some of the commonplace items on the dining table in front of us. “Potatoes, tomatoes, peanuts” he said, “all introduced to the West from the New World and now things we take for granted. Chips for our fish, tomatoes for our salad, peanut butter for our bread.’
‘Matches grown on earth but made in heaven.’
‘ Likewise they were brought to Asia who adapted their dishes to whatever was going. You’ve tasted how scrumptious these humble tomatoes and potatoes become,garnished in their hands, and how peanut butter can be transformed” he said. Upon my word I had, having tasted how it can be enlivened with shrimp paste in gado gado.
“You can work out your own formula for combining foods,” he said. I gave it a whirl, going for a soft approach, aiming at the sweet tooth. David had told me to take those ingredients and I took him at his word. Helping myself from time to time to some of the copious amounts of peanut butter, honey and fresh creamy milk provided in the dining hall, I conveyed these discreetly and in a trice to Epsilon, a whisker away. Churning out the frothiest, crunchiest, thickest milkshakes to all and sundry. With an old industrial strength machine from our store, in a time before domestic blenders were widespread. Whether in soothing the palate of curry munchers, or the battered bones of rugby crunchers, these cool refreshing thirst quenchers hit the spot, going down a real treat. I made a stir as a blend of resourcefulness, smoothness and conviviality.
The Milky Way.
Taking a leaf from David’s book, I developed a discerning ear, picking up the idiosyncratic features of the various accents and ironing these out. A la Peter Sellers, I became particularly fascinated with Indian English, an exponent of which lived right next door to me in the residential tutors flat. Ashok Rathore was a perfectly fluent speaker of this juicy branch of our language, cut off from its trunk with a life of its own, important in its own right. I worked on him not to ‘correct’ his speech patterns but to help him adjust them. For them to become more consonant with those of Standard English. For him to be aware of Indian grammatical peculiarities and what we consider archaisms. It being the practice of Indian speakers to substitute the ‘w’ sound for the ‘v’ sound, I primed this animal physiologist to pronounce ‘heart valves’ rather than what sound to us like ‘heart wows’. Thus obviating any bewilderment in his audience he could wow them with his linguistic clarity.
Our paths met one afternoon while walking down the eucalyptic hill to College. Our conversation touched upon a subject close to Ashok”s heart – the welfare of animals. Sighting a pair of kangaroos grazing contentedly close to the path, unruffled by our presence, he remarked. “It is pleasing me so much to see our fellow creatures roaming free as nature demands”.
“It pleases me too”, I replied, supplying him with the present simple tense in place of the present continuous that Indians are wont to use. Fine tuning his solecistic speech without labouring the point, without disturbing the flow of this thought.
“It pleased the aborigines too, Ashok. They didn’t hunt them indiscriminately. They wanted to avoid an inordinate extent of hunting in certain areas. They understood that their existence was ultimately linked with the survival of their homelands plants, fauna and ecosystems.
“We have to pay closer attention on this balance ourselves now. We have to share the land with all things bright and beautiful, isn’t it?” he reasoned.
“We do, don’t we, Ashok” I replied, noting his curious Indian way with a prepositions and interrogatives. “When I was a kid I was knocked for a loop to come upon the rotting carcasses of these iconic marsupials, considered a pest, littering the ground after a spotlight shoot. I had gone on one such foray.Undone by their own curiosity,the great reds sat upright,silent,staring at the shooter’s trucks,as though waiting the their pleasure. We have to pay closer attention to conserving them. The aboriginals were instructed not to hurt or take certain species until they had regenerated. They never wasted them but revered them as sacred”.
“As we are doing – whoops, I’m talking like this always – as we do with our cows” he pointed out.
“Indians have always exalted the status of cows” I chimed in, taking the opportunity to link his adverb with its verb. Having arrived at Epsilon, I invited Ashok to continue our talk. “You look as though you could do with a drink?We can discuss about this further over a cool milkshake” I suggested, planting this deliberate boo boo to gauge his response.
“I won’t beat about the bush, Allan. That’s for kangaroos. We don’t need it here, so let’s just plain chew the cud,” he replied without hesitation, impressing me with his repartee.
“Hindu scriptures identify the cow as the mother of all civilization. It tills the fields, and its dung is essential as a source of fuel and fertilizer”, a point not lost on me having boosted the growth of my radishes and strawberries with its equine equivalent. “However, of paramount importance”, he stressed “is its role as a service of dairy products”.
“It’s one jump ahead of the kangaroo here, Ashok. Just how do you milk a boomer?”
“With extreme caution” he admonished, “their long claws are super sharp. Actually the kangaroo pouch is a mobile milk bar” . The milk, of varying fat and protein content, supplies joeys of different ages according to their individual specifications”.
“Milkshakes on tap, made to order”, I suggested. “What’s yours by the way” I asked him. “Chocolate with malt. Twist my arms. Pile it in, if you get my weaning”, this fully grown hominid joshed.
“Both aborigines and Hindus view their sacred animal as sharing a common ancestor possessing profound wisdom’, I said. “Did you know that they share the same name for this omniscient being?” I asked, “How’s that?” he enquired.
“Gu-roo”, I replied, keeping a straight face. “You’re pulling my legs”, he exclaimed.
“Just one”, I replied. “This is a standing joke. I don’t want it to fall flat”. “Jokes apart”, Ashok ruminated, “Milk holds a central place in our rituals.”
“I think a toast is in order,” I proposed. “Raise your glass to our animal kith and kin. We sacrifice their lives to nourish and clothe us. We take their precious gifts to nature us. Let’s husband them wisely. Lest we kill the goose who laid the golden eggs,” I said, chinking the canister with my egg nog against Ashok’s.
All That You Desire.
Over coffee one evening in the Junior Common Room I gave David Evans my ear after asking him his recipe for attaining sophisticated taste. “Just as it is with different spices so too it is with our aesthetic appreciation”, David declared. “Learn to distinguish between the various products each bearing the special flavour of their agricultural belt, of a particular crop of writers and artists. Get to know their contents and their special ingredients.As for literature,read widely and as much as you can.Don’t worry about the categories,the constructs, whether you would agree with the writer or if you like the politics.Decide for yourself. Appreciate the subtle variations. Reach out to find the ones that suit you. Keep in mind what I underlined before”, he mused , “Whether it be food we are talking about or fashion or books-the finer things- our tastes are often an acquired one. You’ll be amazed the kinds of things that grow on you once you get past their strange unfamiliar appearance and try them several times. Once you get past a certain threshold, trenchant insights and surpassing delights will flow in abundance. Thenceforth too much of a good thing will be barely enough.’
‘Good things come to he who waits.’
‘Yes,everything in good time. When it comes to taste, don’t act in haste. Work against the grain or you’ll never know what you missed. You may not end up taking to some, but at least you’ll have given them a go. Don’t give up on things easily. Remember ‘ the proof of a pudding is in the eating’
At the same time be honest in your criticism. If something’s not to your taste don’t pretend otherwise. Whether it is or not, aim to justify your opinion, bringing to bear all your knowledge and discernment. You’ll become ever so cultivated in your tastes, widening your horizons, replete with your heart’s desire . Why then the worlds thine oyster, which thou with sword will open,” said David paraphrasing Pistol’s metaphor from ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor’, ‘and suck out as much as you can’,he added,winking.
Chaucer.
It wasn’t long before I was sinking my teeth into some rich literary pudding. My plum assignment, analyzing the work of the ‘father’ of modern English literature, the first author to use many common English words in his writings, was served up by none other than David himself “My task is to accompany you” he told our class “into medieval England and introduce you to a cross-section of its society – the world of the Canterbury Tales. More than five centuries and a huge landmass may separate you from this motley group of pilgrims swapping rattling yarns on their pilgrimage to Thomas Becket. But with Chaucer’s keen eye for how humans behave, these wayfarers’ tales are far from remote. Entry won’t be automatic mind you. For the journey you’ll be required to sharpen your language skills as were these pilgrims. Hard work will be the sole passport for admission. You’ll have to read Chaucer’s lapidary verse in the language of his day to uncover his gems– the hidden messages about the characters, the double-entendres, the bawdy jokes, the hilarious regional accents and the levity with which he undercut respected figures. The further you put your best foot forward,
the more you learn this language, the more you will be rewarded. It will add an extra dimension to your experience. You’ll broaden your horizons of fourteenth century England and Early English literature – a seminal influence on our cultural development.
Henceforth our English class engaged Chaucer directly. We read aloud his masterpiece as he wrote it, pronouncing the words in the round rolling cadences of medieval English, discussing them keenly and writing about them.
David proved to be the perfect lodestar for this journey of discovery. Totally devoted to his subject matter, he knew it from top to toe. He had a contagious enthusiasm and the skill to make such difficult work fresh and exciting With his clear silver tongue, he brought Chaucer’s characters to life. He obviously cared about his students and that they share his knowledge. Judging every individual with a single eye,he refused to move on in lectures until every student had a firm grasp of the content. He got such pleasure out of his work. The delight on his face with discussion briskly firing, even among students who were normally quiet, was plain to see. He illuminated everything we read with the same sharp eye as Chaucer himself. I could see more in the tales that I didn’t tumble to at first, especially with the context and background that he provided.
Each of us students chose one of the pilgrims to follow and study in depth. This meant giving some historical background that would elucidate the character’s tale for the rest of the class. In becoming invested in the Miller, I taught the class about The Peasant Revolt and the finer points of cuckoldry,bared buttocks, flatulence and a sadistic rear end attack.
Illuminated Texts.
Chaucer’s early texts and others of the same ilk fanned another flame of David’s – his love of art. These handwritten books attracted my eyes in the first instance with their lavish illustrations – their addition of decorated initials, borders and miniature pictures, sometimes illuminated with gold, silver and brilliant colours. “In the middle-ages these illustrated books were very popular, particularly those on the lives of saints such as Thomas Becket. These pictures were important as many of the people who looked at them could not read or write” He explained.
“From what I gather reading in the papers and from my observations, many people still don’t read or write very well” I commented. “Why don’t we have beautifully illustrated books like these for all to learn from?”
“That’s a good question, Allan. The school authorities would argue that they don’t have the resources and that if they did they would most likely get vandalized. The way things are going with the spread of television, they’d probably say kids have got enough to look at. Its up to teachers to push for top drawer reading material in the schools. As for me I love drawing and painting in a variety of styles with the widest range of subject matter. That love is what I aimed to impart by example when I taught in high schools.”
“What are you working on at the moment, David?” I asked.
“I am working on illuminating manuscripts inspired by medieval art. My goal is to recreate the Old English epic Beowulf.”
‘The first draft is the hardest,I believe.’
He wanted to feel sure the art of illustrating manuscripts was safe.
It was and despite the uncertainty that Robert Leighton would illustrate would just get easier.
The Milky Way.
Taking a leaf from David’s book, I developed a discerning ear, picking up the idiosyncratic features of the various accents and ironing these out. A la Peter Sellers, I became particularly fascinated with Indian English, an exponent of which lived right next door to me in the residential tutors flat. Ashok Rathore was a perfectly fluent speaker of this juicy branch of our language, cut off from its trunk with a life of its own, important in its own right. I worked on him not to ‘correct’ his speech patterns but to help him adjust them. For them to become more consonant with those of Standard English. For him to be aware of Indian grammatical peculiarities and what we consider archaisms. It being the practice of Indian speakers to substitute the ‘w’ sound for the ‘v’ sound, I primed this animal physiologist to pronounce ‘heart valves’ rather than what sound to us like ‘heart wows’. Thus obviating any bewilderment in his audience he could wow them with his linguistic clarity.
Our paths met one afternoon while walking down the eucalyptic hill to College. Our conversation touched upon a subject close to Ashok”s heart – the welfare of animals. Sighting a pair of kangaroos grazing contentedly close to the path, unruffled by our presence, he remarked. “It is pleasing me so much to see our fellow creatures roaming free as nature demands”.
“It pleases me too”, I replied, supplying him with the present simple tense in place of the present continuous that Indians are wont to use. Fine tuning his solecistic speech without labouring the point, without disturbing the flow of this thought.
“It pleased the aborigines too, Ashok. They didn’t hunt them indiscriminately. They wanted to avoid an inordinate extent of hunting in certain areas. They understood that their existence was ultimately linked with the survival of their homelands plants, fauna and ecosystems.
“We have to pay closer attention on this balance ourselves now. We have to share the land with all things bright and beautiful, isn’t it?” he reasoned.
“We do, don’t we, Ashok” I replied, noting his curious Indian way with a prepositions and interrogatives. “When I was a kid I was knocked for a loop to come upon the rotting carcasses of these iconic marsupials, considered a pest, littering the ground after a spotlight shoot. I had gone on one such foray.Undone by their own curiosity,the great reds sat upright,silent,staring at the shooter’s trucks,as though waiting the their pleasure. We have to pay closer attention to conserving them. The aboriginals were instructed not to hurt or take certain species until they had regenerated. They never wasted them but revered them as sacred”.
“As we are doing – whoops, I’m talking like this always – as we do with our cows” he pointed out.
“Indians have always exalted the status of cows” I chimed in, taking the opportunity to link his adverb with its verb. Having arrived at Epsilon, I invited Ashok to continue our talk. “You look as though you could do with a drink?We can discuss about this further over a cool milkshake” I suggested, planting this deliberate boo boo to gauge his response.
“I won’t beat about the bush, Allan. That’s for kangaroos. We don’t need it here, so let’s just plain chew the cud,” he replied without hesitation, impressing me with his repartee.
“Hindu scriptures identify the cow as the mother of all civilization. It tills the fields, and its dung is essential as a source of fuel and fertilizer”, a point not lost on me having boosted the growth of my radishes and strawberries with its equine equivalent. “However, of paramount importance”, he stressed “is its role as a service of dairy products”.
“It’s one jump ahead of the kangaroo here, Ashok. Just how do you milk a boomer?”
“With extreme caution” he admonished, “their long claws are super sharp. Actually the kangaroo pouch is a mobile milk bar” . The milk, of varying fat and protein content, supplies joeys of different ages according to their individual specifications”.
“Milkshakes on tap, made to order”, I suggested. “What’s yours by the way” I asked him. “Chocolate with malt. Twist my arms. Pile it in, if you get my weaning”, this fully grown hominid joshed.
“Both aborigines and Hindus view their sacred animal as sharing a common ancestor possessing profound wisdom’, I said. “Did you know that they share the same name for this omniscient being?” I asked, “How’s that?” he enquired.
“Gu-roo”, I replied, keeping a straight face. “You’re pulling my legs”, he exclaimed.
“Just one”, I replied. “This is a standing joke. I don’t want it to fall flat”. “Jokes apart”, Ashok ruminated, “Milk holds a central place in our rituals.”
“I think a toast is in order,” I proposed. “Raise your glass to our animal kith and kin. We sacrifice their lives to nourish and clothe us. We take their precious gifts to nature us. Let’s husband them wisely. Lest we kill the goose who laid the golden eggs,” I said, chinking the canister with my egg nog against Ashok’s.
All That You Desire.
Over coffee one evening in the Junior Common Room I gave David Evans my ear after asking him his recipe for attaining sophisticated taste. “Just as it is with different spices so too it is with our aesthetic appreciation”, David declared. “Learn to distinguish between the various products each bearing the special flavour of their agricultural belt, of a particular crop of writers and artists. Get to know their contents and their special ingredients.As for literature,read widely and as much as you can.Don’t worry about the categories,the constructs, whether you would agree with the writer or if you like the politics.Decide for yourself. Appreciate the subtle variations. Reach out to find the ones that suit you. Keep in mind what I underlined before”, he mused , “Whether it be food we are talking about or fashion or books-the finer things- our tastes are often an acquired one. You’ll be amazed the kinds of things that grow on you once you get past their strange unfamiliar appearance and try them several times. Once you get past a certain threshold, trenchant insights and surpassing delights will flow in abundance. Thenceforth too much of a good thing will be barely enough.’
‘Good things come to he who waits.’
‘Yes,everything in good time. When it comes to taste, don’t act in haste. Work against the grain or you’ll never know what you missed. You may not end up taking to some, but at least you’ll have given them a go. Don’t give up on things easily. Remember ‘ the proof of a pudding is in the eating’
At the same time be honest in your criticism. If something’s not to your taste don’t pretend otherwise. Whether it is or not, aim to justify your opinion, bringing to bear all your knowledge and discernment. You’ll become ever so cultivated in your tastes, widening your horizons, replete with your heart’s desire . Why then the worlds thine oyster, which thou with sword will open,” said David paraphrasing Pistol’s metaphor from ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor’, ‘and suck out as much as you can’,he added,winking.
Chaucer.
It wasn’t long before I was sinking my teeth into some rich literary pudding. My plum assignment, analyzing the work of the ‘father’ of modern English literature, the first author to use many common English words in his writings, was served up by none other than David himself “My task is to accompany you” he told our class “into medieval England and introduce you to a cross-section of its society – the world of the Canterbury Tales. More than five centuries and a huge landmass may separate you from this motley group of pilgrims swapping rattling yarns on their pilgrimage to Thomas Becket. But with Chaucer’s keen eye for how humans behave, these wayfarers’ tales are far from remote. Entry won’t be automatic mind you. For the journey you’ll be required to sharpen your language skills as were these pilgrims. Hard work will be the sole passport for admission. You’ll have to read Chaucer’s lapidary verse in the language of his day to uncover his gems– the hidden messages about the characters, the double-entendres, the bawdy jokes, the hilarious regional accents and the levity with which he undercut respected figures. The further you put your best foot forward,
the more you learn this language, the more you will be rewarded. It will add an extra dimension to your experience. You’ll broaden your horizons of fourteenth century England and Early English literature – a seminal influence on our cultural development.
Henceforth our English class engaged Chaucer directly. We read aloud his masterpiece as he wrote it, pronouncing the words in the round rolling cadences of medieval English, discussing them keenly and writing about them.
David proved to be the perfect lodestar for this journey of discovery. Totally devoted to his subject matter, he knew it from top to toe. He had a contagious enthusiasm and the skill to make such difficult work fresh and exciting With his clear silver tongue, he brought Chaucer’s characters to life. He obviously cared about his students and that they share his knowledge. Judging every individual with a single eye,he refused to move on in lectures until every student had a firm grasp of the content. He got such pleasure out of his work. The delight on his face with discussion briskly firing, even among students who were normally quiet, was plain to see. He illuminated everything we read with the same sharp eye as Chaucer himself. I could see more in the tales that I didn’t tumble to at first, especially with the context and background that he provided.
Each of us students chose one of the pilgrims to follow and study in depth. This meant giving some historical background that would elucidate the character’s tale for the rest of the class. In becoming invested in the Miller, I taught the class about The Peasant Revolt and the finer points of cuckoldry,bared buttocks, flatulence and a sadistic rear end attack.
Illuminated Texts.
Chaucer’s early texts and others of the same ilk fanned another flame of David’s – his love of art. These handwritten books attracted my eyes in the first instance with their lavish illustrations – their addition of decorated initials, borders and miniature pictures, sometimes illuminated with gold, silver and brilliant colours. “In the middle-ages these illustrated books were very popular, particularly those on the lives of saints such as Thomas Becket. These pictures were important as many of the people who looked at them could not read or write” He explained.
“From what I gather reading in the papers and from my observations, many people still don’t read or write very well” I commented. “Why don’t we have beautifully illustrated books like these for all to learn from?”
“That’s a good question, Allan. The school authorities would argue that they don’t have the resources and that if they did they would most likely get vandalized. The way things are going with the spread of television, they’d probably say kids have got enough to look at. Its up to teachers to push for top drawer reading material in the schools. As for me I love drawing and painting in a variety of styles with the widest range of subject matter. That love is what I aimed to impart by example when I taught in high schools.”
“What are you working on at the moment, David?” I asked.
“I am working on illuminating manuscripts inspired by medieval art. My goal is to recreate the Old English epic Beowulf.”
‘The first draft is the hardest,I believe.’
He wanted to feel sure the art of illustrating manuscripts was safe.
It was and despite the uncertainty that Robert Leighton would illustrate would just get easier.
Men of Letters.
More and more the aspiring intellectual, I plied David Evans with myriad questions about literature. I was set on my mind being as well stocked by reading as our shop had been with merchandise. “I want to be well read - not just well fed , David. How do I know which books stand the test?”
‘Try this for size: Read widely, read wisely,” David adjured me earnestly picking up the theme we had touched on earlier “Tous les genres. Writers of substance. Take up their invites. Enter the settings they bring so vividly to mind. Meet the vast array of characters they give birth to and share their lives. Explore the ideas running through them. Look for connections. Follow the tales they spin moving us through delight and fascination. Let them know what you think of their books. They welcome feedback - indeed rely on it to gauge their skill and shape whatever they’ve got in the pipeline. They ignore their readers’ thoughts at their peril. The same goes for the actors who bring the dramatist’s characters to life. They need to know how well they convey the spirit of the playwright. All in all the sky is the limit - so open your eyes, spread your wings and cover as much ground as you can”
“What do you see as great literature, David?” I enquired
“The gist of great literature in all its diversity, when it all boils down to it, once we look past the
particularities of place and time, is how it enriches our understanding of the human condition, what it tells us about ourselves,” he declared.
“Of course greatness is in the eye of the beholder” added David, “what a reader takes away from a particular work is a very individual thing depending on where he or she is coming from. We all relate differently in some way to the people, place and events we read about. As boys from the bush you and I probably relate more viscerally to accounts of the harsh realities of life on the land than some young city slickers.They in turn will be more familiar with the nitty gritty faster paced anonymity of city life. The crux of literary criticism and discussion is to seek out the very qualities that make for great literature and arrive at some common agreement about these.”
Alarums and excursions
What did you learn in school today,
Dear little boy of mine?
What did you learn in school today,
Dear little boy of mine?
I learned that war is not so bad;
I learned about the great ones we have had;
We fought in Germany and in France
And someday I might get my chance.
Pete Seeger.
In my first few years when I was a student at Armidale, I enlisted in the New England Company of Sydney University Regiment. This was part of the army reserve.
I had been encouraged to join by Alan Treloar who was in command of the Company. The Colonel was also a distinguished soldier and had published military papers. Soldiery ran in the family. He got it from his father John,who had been at Gallipoli. This facet of his life instilled in him a deep interest in the arts of soldiery, and he developed a blow by blow knowledge of it’s history, as well as a wealth of stories of his own military experiences.
On introducing me to the college in his office,he stood up,put his hand out and welcomed me,‘Take a seat,Allan.take the weight off your feet.’
‘ It's a real honour to meet you,Mr.Treloar.’I said.
After he had explained the workings of the College,he declared ‘Nunc est bibendum, Now we must drink,’ offering me some tea and biscuits.
‘Anzacs’I said,My favourites’,I said,Crispy and crunchy’.
‘As my father said, there’s nothing worse than a limp biscuit. Army provisions were a very important topic in the diary he kept. The Anzacs he chipped away at were hard tack.’
‘My grandfather said that ‘In the army, the biscuits are mighty fine , one rolled off the table, and killed a friend of mine.’
‘Like other wives, mothers and girlfriends of the Australian soldiers my mother was concerned for the nutritional value of the victuals being supplied to her man,’ he said, resting his arms at the back of his head. ‘Here was a problem. Any food they sent to the fighting men had to be carried in the ships of the Merchant Navy. Most of these were lucky to maintain a speed of ten knots. Most had no refrigerated facilities, so any food sent had to be able to remain edible after periods in excess of two months. It was the women who came up with the order of the day - a biscuit with all the nutritional value possible using rolled oats.’
‘What happened to him?’I asked.He must have been a huge influence on you.’
‘He went on to become the first director of the Australian War Memorial . It was only natural I would want to to follow in his tracks. I was capped as an army barmy student, joining Melbourne University Regiment. It’s motto is a phrase from Horace: 'Postera crescam laude' -I grow in the esteem of future generations.And so my father did for me.After serving in the war,I’ve always maintained my activity in university regiments while teaching.’
‘Whereabouts?’I asked.
‘In Nottingham and Glasgow.’
‘Hunting down Arthur Seaton?’I joked, alluding to the squaddies who set on the fictional Arthur in Nottingham for cuckolding.
‘He was making a total pig's ear of somethings,wasn’t he? He seriously needed to be straightened out, grow up and have all that fight in him properly channeled.Throwing grenades at targets,not stones at buildings. Shooting bullets in army ranges,not air pellets at old nosyparking crones. What do you know about our regiment here in New England?’
‘Not a lot’,I answered.What is it’s role?’
It’s purpose is to train officers for the Army Reserve in order to develop military capability.It provides military training for undergraduates.It’s basic aim is to develop leadership.What is that quality you might ask? Using Field Marshal Montgomery’s great definition,it’s the capacity and the will to rally men to a common purpose and the character that will inspire confidence.That leadership must be based on a moral authority and it must be based on the truth.’
‘What’s involved?’I asked,warming to the idea.
‘First you do a recruit training course.Training weekends are conducted once a month to improve the basic soldier and command skills.Ergo those who qualify may be selected to be officers.You could be in their ranks,but you’ll be expected to learn twice as much.. Do you have it in you?’
‘Why not.’I replied, pressing the tips of my fingers together to form a steeple. ‘I applied to get into Duntroon but missed out.’
‘That doesn’t rule you out in the scheme of things.It’s what you demonstrate rather than where. What do you see as the qualities of a leader?’
‘I would have to say,and it’s easier said than done, that a leader is brave and always the first one into the fray.He who dares wins. To follow his instincts and to inspire his men by his example, he has to be with them in the thick of things.’
‘An excellent summing up.Might I add, a leader must always be cool and calm.And oblivious to the horrors of the battle field.He has to have a strong stomach to ignore explosions, heat,sweat and dust and sadly the screams of the wounded.’
‘How is the regiment run,if I might ask?’
‘It is organised as an infantry battalion with the addition of a training Company where members undergo instructional courses aimed at promotion. Of course we expect in return nothing less than the very best. Our standard sets the standard. A commission with us sells itself.Are you built from the right material?’ Are you in fighting trim and ready for action? Do you have what it takes?’
‘ Why not,’ I replied,looking him straight in the eye, ‘I can hold my own as good as the next man.’
‘We’re not interested in the next man.We’re looking for standouts from the herd- fuglemen who’ll push themselves to their limits.Officers and gentlemen. Centurions for the modern age.There’s no telling where this could take you.A long way most likely. Let’s say for the sake of argument, you’re interested in becoming a future leader or shaping the future leaders of New South Wales and Australia, then our regiment is the place for you. A ladder of opportunity.’
‘Do you think that’s possible’,I replied, keen to win my spurs and epaulets,yet thinking this sounded a bit too good to be true.
‘To every man there comes in his lifetime that special moment when he is tapped on the shoulder and offered a chance to be someone special. A look at our history will show you that for our members this is no idle boast. From the Antarctic explorer Mawson, High Court Judge Sir Victor Windeyer, as well as Sir Rodan Cutler awarded the Victoria Cross during the Second World War, to name but a very few, former members of the Regiment have acted and continue to wield power and influence. After you’ve earned your stripes you may prove worthy of their example.
‘I hope I could but I hope I won’t have to.’
‘I hope so too.Today, soldiering is a choice, a profession - albeit one in which dying or losing a piece of yourself is a ‘What did you think was going to happen?’ part of the contract.
Carpe diem,’he said in conclusion, "Seize the day.Enjoy it while you may.Put as little trust as possible in the future. We must be forearmed, never let our guard down.When none dares draw the bow,soon the bowspring is weak.Weakness will rust a people. We never know when the next war will happen’.
It would not be long before the ‘imaginary’ enemy we were readying to combat was materializing. In August 1964 The Colonel told me ‘Things will start happening now. The North Vietnamese have attacked the USS Turner Joy and Maddox on the high seas.They’ve done their dash.The Americans have publicly ordered retaliatory measures .They’ll ratchet up the ground war and we’ll be with them .Watch this space.’
At the time of this incident in the Gulf of Tonkin, Secretary of State Rusk was questioned on NBC television.This was relayed to A.B.C. television :
REPORTER:What explanation, then, can you come up with for this unprovoked attack?
RUSK: Well, I haven't been able, quite frankly, to come to a fully satisfactory explanation. There is a great gulf of understanding, between that world and our world, ideological in character. They see what we think of as the real world in wholly different terms. Their very processes of logic are different. So that it's very difficult to enter into each other's minds across that great ideological gulf.’
Soon after I gave the Colonel my decision tersely: ‘I’m in.’
‘Spoken like a true patriot,’he replied. ‘You won’t regret it.’
Thereupon I signed up with the Company on the spot and started intensive training on fieldcraft, drill and army procedure .
By jingo I was young, full of patriotic fervour, spit and polish. On the double to fend off trouble.It’s a safe bet we Company boys decked out in our slouch hat with it’s upswept brim, with our SLRs and greens ,uniformly starched,creased sharply , would catch the ladies.Run for your lives,girls,the regiment’s around! The drums beat and the trumpets sounded left, right, left, right,in the government boots, on the feet of raw figure happy recruits.Tromping up and down the streets swinging my rifle fro and to,humming do wah diddy,diddy dum diddy do. Good training for me in terms of discipline.
‘Colonel Treloar asked of my progress ‘How did you rate basic training?Is it working?’
I told this lover of verse,‘It's effects are well rooted now that it’s done.Since starting our training ,I’ve gone and saluted a policeman, the milkman, a nun.’
‘Are you ready to proceed to the next stage?’
‘As ready as I’ll ever be.’
During my vacation time and weekends I passed muster,licked into good nick crawling and sneaking through thick bush fighting the imaginary enemy: ‘Easy,boys,easy.You’ve got to glide through the jungle,not clomp’. Such manoeuvres were aimed at confronting guerilla forces hidden in an unfamiliar jungle terrain.
I studied the ideas of General Abdul Haris Nasution who wrote a definitive work on this subject.
Nasution developed the theory of territorial warfare which would become the defence doctrine of the Indonesian Army in the future. His treatise became one of the most studied books on guerrilla warfare along with Mao Zedong's works on the same subject matter.
He was one of the masterminds of the strategy used by the then fledgling Indonesian army fighting the Dutch colonial army in the 40s. He had studied the tactics of General Wingate who had practised
guerilla warfare against the Japanese.As Indonesia emerged as a nation he served as army chief, supreme military commander and national security minister.
Training, starting at the undulating tract of natural bushland of Scheyville (pronounced like ‘Sky-ville’) outside Sydney, was a tough,yet adventurous regime. My fellow rookies and I were subjected to a severe set of training methods designed to impart knowledge, test resolve and teach military skills.
From the day we weekend warriors arrived at boot camp we were moulded as part of a team: ‘Listen here,gentlemen, we’re going to teach you all about soldiering,the world’s oldest profession. This will separate you real men from the boys. Now first things first. When you’re in the army no matter in what capacity, you have to leave your normal self-centred thinking behind.All our units are co-dependent upon the other.Every individual, every small unit ranging to larger formations is co-dependent. Needless to say one weak link will cause the machine to malfunction.Then we all conk out.So if any of you step out of line,then we set you straight,our way.’
This message was driven home every reveille.Our bones, muscles and brains were shaken by angry shrieks and officer urgencies. At five a.m. sharp as the first post sounded, the leather lunged sergeants roused us from our beds: Wakey,wakey, rise and shine, you lot,Australia needs you.Got the sleeping sickness,have you.That’s enough stretching. Rub the sleep from your eyes and shake yourselves.
Greet the new day. All hands on deck! Alrighty,gentlemen-and I use the term loosely-listen to me now and listen to me good. We've got a big one ahead of us.Stand by your beds. Prepare for full hut and kit inspection!
For every action, there was an equal and opposite criticism.
Our beds had to be perfectly neat,footgear aligned in neat rows, our kit laid out on top.
‘The longest way up,the shortest way down’ was our instruction for saluting. ‘Up one two,down two three’,ending with your thumb pointing down the seam of your trousers.’
Everything had to be done a certain way and a certain way only. ‘This isn’t the Wentworth Hotel,Private’,bawled the sergeant finding fault with my bed’s
immaculate arrangement. ‘There is no room service,the maid doesn’t come in here.’Then seeing my bemusement adding, ‘And wipe that smile off your face,or I’ll do it for you.’
‘Oh brother! Are you really sure---‘I started to argue when he cut me out:
‘Who the devil do you think you are? I’m not your brother.You’ll speak when you’re told to and not before. When I want to hear you talk,I’ll give you a direct question.You’ll answer yes or no.
You’ll give no other unacceptable form of reply except the aforementioned.Is that clear?’
I would have replied, ‘Jawohl, mein Kommandant,’but I wasn’t sure he’d have understood.
‘Your rank?’he added,all gas and gaiters .
‘But not as much as you,’I replied,misinterpreting this as a statement rather than a question.
‘That’s enough from you.Now carry on.’
One morning after I had made my bed perfectly,he ordered me, ‘Now I want you to undo it and start again.This time properly.’
I said, ‘I’ll have to think about it.’
‘Think about it all you like-and then do it.’
Then came the constant marching. ‘Get a move on.By the left,quick march, left right,swing those arms,shoulders out,left,right,stomach in,left right,shoulders out.Straight on the heels,gentlemen, arms shoulder height all the time.Close the fist,push down the thumb,lock out the elbow,necks in the back of the collar,heel. That’ll keep you in step.Keep those arms pinned into the side. Halt,all present and correct, Sir! Atten-shun! Stand straight while your superior officer talks to you,you boofheaded ponces.No scratching or shuffling.No fidgeting or farting. I’ll jump on you from a great height if you so much as breathe.’
‘You can’t talk to us like----‘
‘Did I talk to you? How and why I discipline you is none of your business,Private.Is that clear?’
‘Das ist klar,mein Führer,’I said not.Instead ‘But I thought---’
‘It’s not up to you to think.Now get on with it.’
I learned how to hide my consciousness behind battle cries,pretended servility and bare,clench fisted obedience.
Each pacing movement was to be executed in a smart and soldierly manner with an audible clicking of the heels.
After learning how to march, salute,shoulder arms,present arms, how to stand at attention and fall out came the more interesting stuff. We got the feel of the steel. Our training included that in weapons system knowledge and field exercises .We ran along obstacle courses and hand over hand down a rope strung at a forty five degree angle across a creek. We had to crawl along the rope, then hang upside like monkeys and crawl headfirst downwards,dangle our legs over the water before throwing our bodies back up again.At least that was the idea. We jumped into and out of the back of army trucks and went on long route marches.
These seemed to go on endlessly.Forward with one leg,plant the foot,lock the knee,arch the ankle,push the leg into the ground,stiffen the spine,then the other leg unfolding,swinging out,the foot touching the ground .Legs counted the hours.Arms moved about,taking up the rhythm.
An officer spotted some of us very footweary infantrymen resting after a hard trek.He said with a salty look: ‘Look alive,men.Hands out of your pockets.The shape you’re in,most of you wouldn’t last three rounds with a Boy Scout.When I was of doing my training I thought nothing of a ten-mile hike.’
‘Well, I don't think much of it either,Sir!’ replied one of my mates .
The officer, who had introduced us to map reading and navigation, explaining about latitude, longitude, degrees and minutes decided to test us on it.He asked, “Suppose I asked your sewing circle to meet me for lunch at 23 degrees, 4 minutes north latitude and 45 degrees, 15 minutes east longitude…?”
One of our troupe who had difficulty picking it up volunteered, “I guess you’d be eating alone.”
We learned to lob hand grenades and to take great care.‘Watch out,’we were warned, ‘if you cough too hard,all that’ll be left of you is the gold in your teeth if that hasn’t melted.And never forget, the bursting radius of a hand grenade is always one foot greater than your jumping range. When the pin is pulled, Mr. Grenade is not your friend.’
We flew at dummies in a bayonet charge: ‘Chop chop boys, up and at 'em, if yer wanna get some in,’we were exhorted. ‘‘Stiffen those sinews and summon up your blood.Now I want to hear you screaming.’
‘En garde,placing one foot forward in a boxing stance,my knees bent,allowing my centre of gravity to be lowered, more easily controlled,I pointed the cutlery at the ‘enemy’.
‘You there.’
'Was that remark addressed to me?’
‘ Don’t just stand there.Stick it in,twist it,pull it out,’came the shout. ‘Give it some grunt.That’s a bayonet you’ve got there,Fraidy Cat,not a bunch of flowers’, was a more personalized blandishment. ‘Stick it in hard.Draw that blood. One day that might be a real belly you’re giving it to. It takes a lot to knock off a squirming man.’
They taught us to value our rifle as we value our lives. ‘Let me tell you the vital importance of the
L1A1-the Self Loading Rifle,our weapon of choice.This weapon will become part of you.Think of it as a prosthetic limb.If you can’t service it properly,you’ll turn yourself into a casualty.You’ll receive
a Special Delivery.’
‘The bullet with with my name on it’.
‘ It's theone addressed ‘to whom it may concern’ you've got to think about.’
We were shown how to hold the SLR. ‘This will be the easiest drill ever,’I thought beforehand.After cradling it in our arms, we were introduced to the overhead hold. ‘Now put the rifle above your head and hold it.’Even after a few minutes our muscles began to fatigue. ‘Now everyone,take your arms forward 90 degrees and straighten them out.Don’t move!’This punishing isometric drill was designed to test our strength and make the weapon feel lighter during sustained use.
We mastered the art of taking the metal hardware apart,cleaning and lubricating it,and then re-assembling it like greased lightning. ‘Don’t dilly dally.You haven’t got all day,’was our prod . ‘Wait til you do it blindfolded, standing on your head’.
“Don’t shoot where it is,” we were told during target practice. “Shoot where it’s going to be.”
We learned to blast in any conditions.I was hip wnen I’d shoot and I’d shoot from the hip without bringing it to the shoulder to zero in. In daylight, in darkness, to make the target look like swiss cheese. Around the campfire shooting the breeze.
‘Do you realise,’ I pointed out to my mates, ‘Swiss cheese is the only cheese you can draw which people can identify. You can draw Gouda cheese without the skin, but most will think it's cheddar. Swiss is the only cheese you can bite and miss. ‘Hey Allan,’you might ask me,’ does that sandwich have cheese on it?"
‘Every now and then’
We put together a gun pit from sandbags,it’s interlocking walls providing support for the rifle, allowing for less movement during shooting.We raced in teams filling and lugging the bags to construct these protective forts. ‘I’m the king of the castle, and you're the dirty rascal,’crowed our triumphant team leader.
The instructor's lessons followed a standard format and began with: ‘ Now hear this, You will learn by the numbers.In this lesson you will be taught... The reason you are being taught this ... and, "at the end of this lesson you will be able to ...’ etc.The lesson on the bayonet went something like this. ‘Now then,pay close attention. Follow my instructions.Nothing more, nothing less. My mother once pointed out to my aunt , ‘ The quickest way to a man's heart is through his chest’. That’s where the bayonet comes in. The bayonet itself is for close quarter battle.It can be thrusted into the enemy,O.K. First of all without being embedded into the bone. Also,situated here is the recess which is the blood channel. When you run it through the ribs,there’ll be no suction.When the metal meets the meat, you’ll be able to pull it out straightaway. Without it all the air wouldn’t escape. It would make it harder to pull it out .Are you with me? Say you’re in Vietnam,you set foot inside a hooch,you open the door and before you know it there’s a V.C. behind it.He won’t be there to say peekaboo.Your life can be over all at once.It can happen when you least expect it so be ready for anything.So you have the bayonet there ready,just in case the rifle does not operate. Always keep in mind that no one ever won a war by dying for his country. You win it by making your adversary die for his country.’
The conclusion of the lesson had a roundup and we students were asked questions just to check we were paying attention. Prior to moving on to the next phase of instruction, the instructor ensured that the fundamentals were understood. Otherwise we had to go through it again. Tests and more tests tracked us recruits through this ordeal. The aim of this style of instruction was to create concrete thinkers, black or white, but no shades of grey. ‘If you look in the Drill Manual’we were reminded, ‘ you will find that the aim of 'close order drill' is to instil into the individual instinctive obedience. Always remember our gospel, which is---‘
'Never question an order until after you carry it out',we chanted.
‘ Don’t knock it.It has a logic.It ensures that personnel don't think and their actions are instinctive. Be it a digger on an M60, a gunner on a 5 inch naval gun, or a flyboy in a Canberra bomber, you fire or drop your load when ordered to.You don't think- its instinctive due the nature of your training. It's ingrained into the individual to obey the order and never to question a superior. Ours is never to question but to carry out orders. Soldiers are not even allowed to die without permission.They have simply to do what they’re told.If we say all you can do is breathe,that’s all you’re allowed to do. While you’re with us you’re government property. We’ve got you.You belong to us.’ ’Tact in the warrant officers was often wanting and too often to get the recruit to hew to the line they used sarcasm or other dehumanising behaviours or comments.Teasing,threatening,humiliating. The slightest swerving from the rules or any hint of insubordination led to us being bawled out and dressed down:”Snap to it,you pigeon chested slowcoaches. Come along, come along, there .Jump to it. Pick 'em up! Pick 'em up, there! You’re a bloody disgrace.Listen up.This is Sydney University Regiment- not a three-ring circus!’
One abominable sergeant major, one eyebrow raised nearly to his hairline, walked slowly along the ranks, looking down his nose at us,his nostrils twitching slightly as if disgusted at having to inspect such carrion. No nudge or wink or smile or talk escaped him.
I felt this was the beginning of a very close relationship. His furious face was never more than inches away from our eyes. His eyes drilled into ours,daring us to move them a fraction of an inch.If he blinked,I missed it.He aimed his index finger between my eyes and thundered, ‘You,yeah you sad sack.Tilt your head more towards me.Chin up more. Belt,way too loose,buttons too dirty you excuse for a recruit. This one’s undone.You’ve got dandruff on your uniform.Brush it off. I’ll make infanteers out of you toy soldiers if I have to break you in half. Sort yourself out quick or it’s pack-drill for you.’
Here and there Dracula’s brother,smugly enthroned in his power to exact the trivial, would pause long enough to crack his knuckles or flick contemptuously with his little finger at an imaginary fragment of fluff on someone’s collar. Extra duties, pushups,squat-thrusts and side-saddle hops, or a quick sprint were just a few of the milder tools for conformity.‘On your face,Soldier. Get down,push up position down.Up,down,up,down.Just remember, I’m a very reasonable man.My mother told me so.Do you playmates disagree with me? he cried,stepping over our struggling bodies.’
‘No,sir!’
‘Up,down,up,down, up down’ until mercifully at last ‘As you were.’
‘Anything you say,Sir.’
‘That’s what I like to hear.’
‘Beautiful day,Sergeant Major,’I greeted him on one of our last days.
‘How do you know what kind of day it is? Are you studying to be a weatherman?’
Before we left,we wanted to give him a rousing farewell.
‘We asked to give him a 21 gun salute but were turned down.We had all been assessed crack marksmen.’
Our next training camp was in thick bushland north of Sydney.‘As close as we can get to jungle conditions without going north to Queensland,’we were told. ‘Definitely more rugged than any place in this state you'd like to mention. War in the jungle is the province of the infantry. This is the theatre we are preparing for.The dense vegetation and general lack of infrastructure means that tanks, aircraft, and even artillery are of little use.Reduced visibility and engagement ranges, make it extremely difficult to locate and close with enemy forces.Consequently you have to live close to the ground and learn from your instructors.’
Training us to move in formation,our first instructor was doing a major in poetry.‘My way of working is simple,’he told us.We want maximum effort from each of you.We will expect you to spit thunder out front .We will expect you to fart lightning out behind .’
I learned to choose very carefully whom to move in front of and whom to move behind.
We were shown how to dig foxholes :‘Keep shovelling, men.You’re not building sandcastles on Bondi Beach.’We learned to bivouac in the scrub. Crawling along the ground, flat on our bellies, diving into ditches,getting up,brushing ourselves off and back along the line of march.Alert to ‘booby traps’,watching where we walked.As we reached our first night position our sergeant instructed us ‘The sooner we get to sleep,the sooner we get this day over with.’
‘What’s the weather forecast for tonight?’ I asked him. ’Will it rain?’
‘We believe not.It will be dark. Continued dark overnight, with widely scattered light by morning.’
Before we bunked down,my mate looked up in the sky and said ‘Think about it. What are we?A couple of insignificant specks. What big heads we’ve got, thinking that what we do is going to matter all that much.’
Always remember that you are absolutely unique,'I said.Just like everyone else.'
‘Our time here means nothing to those stars.It's a split second we've been here,the whole lot of us. How small a part of this grand design. I can’t help but think if anything we do makes a difference. We don't count at all. When you look up at the stars and moon,what do you think of,Allan?’
‘ Don’t look through the wrong end of the telescope.Everything in this vast universe has a purpose. We earthlings might be a small part,but a unique one.The only life in it we know of so far.Maybe there is intelligent life on other planets also.’
‘I don't think so. Why should other planets be any different from this one?’
‘Well at least we are conscious creatures who are expanding our knowledge of it in quantum leaps,soon to travel to an extra-terrestrial satellite . What do you think of?’ I asked the sergeant inspecting our progress.
‘I think of the sandman.It’s you blokes rigged up your tent.It’s not going to put itself up.’
No sooner did we start dropping off than we learned the first law governing canvas shelter.It always rains on tents.rain will travel thousands of miles,against prevailing winds for the opportunity to rain on a tent.'
We action men learned how to camouflage our faces for night combat and crawl through the undergrowth and wade through creeks: ‘Never test the depth of the water with both feet’ was the rule.
‘Why is teamwork so essential?’ we were asked.
One bright spark answered, ‘It gives the enemy other people to shoot at.’
‘When you actually have rounds coming at you,when it really matters you won’t be able to make mistakes.If you make them now you can learn from them and not make them again.You have to protect the guy next to you.otherwise he gets it.Now what are the three things we’ve been drumming into your heads?
‘Speed, communication and controlled aggression.’
‘Precisely.Now keep your heads down,men. If the enemy is in range, so are you. If you can see him, he can see you. Remember, 'If it flies high, it dies;if it’s low and slow, it’ll go.’
After breaking camp we’d march like anything over fairly long distances. The worse the weather, the more we were required to be out in it.For some strange reason no matter which way we had to march, it was always uphill.Travelling in file formation, we learned to shun tracks and clearings, instead to 'scrub bash', picking our way carefully and quietly through the thickets and tangled foliage to take maximum advantage of concealment and cover.
‘Don’t walk there,too soft!’ whispered our instructors,motioning to us where to go,‘Step there and there,not there.Careful,watch!’And then ‘Green ahead!’
We trained to track by ear an enemy in waiting,one who was also intently listening for us. It was a tiring experience.Our patrol took hours to sweep a mile of terrain. We padded forward a few steps at a time, stopping, listening,eyes rolling in our sockets, then making with our feet again. All the time being heads-up, raking the tree lines for 'hides', listening, watching and waiting.
After our first bash up a steep, muddy path through shrubs and bushes,across creeks, the adversary finally emerged albeit somewhat lower down.After crawling under rocks,they’d been hiding, hoping for us to come by. Sensing the disturbances we made in the shallow water with their tiny eyes,they picked up on the passing shadows that the waves made. They jumped us silently one by one,impossible to shake off. They had us for breakfast.
Upon removing our boots and socks , we discovered we’d been attacked by the local leeches.Wet and windswept, none of us had seen any, but the welts and blisters on our legs and feet were proof of their persistent presence and testament to their cunning.After some days of this we got got used to them.For their part,they became very attached to us. The reward after all this blood, sweat and dirt being to fly off into that special technological high,the helicopter flight.
'What was the most important lessons you learned?’ Colonel Treloar asked me on my return.
' I learned that ours is not to reason why.That certain things are strictly forbidden.To respond to a lawful order with ‘Why?’ To argue that command decisions need to be ratified by a two thirds majority. To report to my Commander by ‘You can’t prove a thing!’ rather than ‘Private Davis, reporting as ordered, Sir’. To respond to a briefing with ‘That’s what you think’. All these things were forbidden-unless they were compulsory.’
‘How did you reservists find this stage of your training ?’
‘They put us through more than our paces.They put us through the works.It seems like they tried to break our will.But honestly do you really believe spotlessness will really be a vital factor in winning the war?’
‘We have to go extra hard on you at this early stage.To show you you can push your body further than you thought possible.Now there’s a logic to all those seeming torrents of grumbling abuse you copped for every minor infraction.We have to drive you hard,wait til you get in a tight situation ,then watch your reaction.We have to whittle you down,strip you to your core,expose your weaknesses. If you don’t have that in the beginning,you’ll never know the benchmark of your discipline.Otherwise you won’t last five minutes in the military.By putting such pressure on you,we get to know what you’re worth.If you think this is abuse,how will you be able to take the abuse you find in a real combat situation?’
In announcing his visit he said: ‘I’ve been offered a tour of Vietnam.It was too good to turn down. They offered to cover my costs plus funeral expenses.”
Typically he joked about the very ailments G.I. is cursed with.
I performed a Hope type sketch for my fellow recruits’ entertainment. Sauntering over the floor swinging a golf club, I teed off with a golfing gag. ‘‘Hello fellow holiday makers,I’m Major Mayhem.
'I’ll tell ya,I had an strange experience on the golf course yesterday. I had a hole in nothing. I missed the ball and sank the divot.’
I followed through with a sketch based on standard army medical techniques:
‘And this morning I visited some sick soldiers.I went up to one private and asked:
‘What's your problem, Soldier?’
‘Scabies, Sir.Those creepy,crawly,crusty crabs sure dug in.I picked them up in a damp foxhole.’
‘They can be a mite hard to get rid of.How are you dislodging them?’
‘Five minutes with the wire brush each day.’
‘And what's your ambition,Soldier?’
‘To get to the front, Sir.’
‘Good man.’ I said.
I went to the next bed. ‘What's your problem, Soldier?’
‘Chronic piles, Sir.I was assigned to clerical duties.’
‘What treatment are you getting?’
‘Five minutes with the wire brush each day.’
‘What's your ambition,Soldier?’
‘To get back to my desk, Sir.’
‘Good man’.
I went to the next bed. ‘What's your problem, Soldier?’
‘Chronic gum disease, Sir.From being out in the jungle.’
‘What treatment are you getting?’
‘Five minutes with the wire brush each day.’
‘What's your ambition,Soldier?’
‘To get the wire brush before the other two, Sir.’
‘I believe you have a Private Bates here in this ward’,I asked the care nurse.I’m told he was admitted last week after being brought in from the jungle.Could you tell me where he is right now?’I said, seeing there was no one else in the other beds.
More and more the aspiring intellectual, I plied David Evans with myriad questions about literature. I was set on my mind being as well stocked by reading as our shop had been with merchandise. “I want to be well read - not just well fed , David. How do I know which books stand the test?”
‘Try this for size: Read widely, read wisely,” David adjured me earnestly picking up the theme we had touched on earlier “Tous les genres. Writers of substance. Take up their invites. Enter the settings they bring so vividly to mind. Meet the vast array of characters they give birth to and share their lives. Explore the ideas running through them. Look for connections. Follow the tales they spin moving us through delight and fascination. Let them know what you think of their books. They welcome feedback - indeed rely on it to gauge their skill and shape whatever they’ve got in the pipeline. They ignore their readers’ thoughts at their peril. The same goes for the actors who bring the dramatist’s characters to life. They need to know how well they convey the spirit of the playwright. All in all the sky is the limit - so open your eyes, spread your wings and cover as much ground as you can”
“What do you see as great literature, David?” I enquired
“The gist of great literature in all its diversity, when it all boils down to it, once we look past the
particularities of place and time, is how it enriches our understanding of the human condition, what it tells us about ourselves,” he declared.
“Of course greatness is in the eye of the beholder” added David, “what a reader takes away from a particular work is a very individual thing depending on where he or she is coming from. We all relate differently in some way to the people, place and events we read about. As boys from the bush you and I probably relate more viscerally to accounts of the harsh realities of life on the land than some young city slickers.They in turn will be more familiar with the nitty gritty faster paced anonymity of city life. The crux of literary criticism and discussion is to seek out the very qualities that make for great literature and arrive at some common agreement about these.”
Alarums and excursions
What did you learn in school today,
Dear little boy of mine?
What did you learn in school today,
Dear little boy of mine?
I learned that war is not so bad;
I learned about the great ones we have had;
We fought in Germany and in France
And someday I might get my chance.
Pete Seeger.
In my first few years when I was a student at Armidale, I enlisted in the New England Company of Sydney University Regiment. This was part of the army reserve.
I had been encouraged to join by Alan Treloar who was in command of the Company. The Colonel was also a distinguished soldier and had published military papers. Soldiery ran in the family. He got it from his father John,who had been at Gallipoli. This facet of his life instilled in him a deep interest in the arts of soldiery, and he developed a blow by blow knowledge of it’s history, as well as a wealth of stories of his own military experiences.
On introducing me to the college in his office,he stood up,put his hand out and welcomed me,‘Take a seat,Allan.take the weight off your feet.’
‘ It's a real honour to meet you,Mr.Treloar.’I said.
After he had explained the workings of the College,he declared ‘Nunc est bibendum, Now we must drink,’ offering me some tea and biscuits.
‘Anzacs’I said,My favourites’,I said,Crispy and crunchy’.
‘As my father said, there’s nothing worse than a limp biscuit. Army provisions were a very important topic in the diary he kept. The Anzacs he chipped away at were hard tack.’
‘My grandfather said that ‘In the army, the biscuits are mighty fine , one rolled off the table, and killed a friend of mine.’
‘Like other wives, mothers and girlfriends of the Australian soldiers my mother was concerned for the nutritional value of the victuals being supplied to her man,’ he said, resting his arms at the back of his head. ‘Here was a problem. Any food they sent to the fighting men had to be carried in the ships of the Merchant Navy. Most of these were lucky to maintain a speed of ten knots. Most had no refrigerated facilities, so any food sent had to be able to remain edible after periods in excess of two months. It was the women who came up with the order of the day - a biscuit with all the nutritional value possible using rolled oats.’
‘What happened to him?’I asked.He must have been a huge influence on you.’
‘He went on to become the first director of the Australian War Memorial . It was only natural I would want to to follow in his tracks. I was capped as an army barmy student, joining Melbourne University Regiment. It’s motto is a phrase from Horace: 'Postera crescam laude' -I grow in the esteem of future generations.And so my father did for me.After serving in the war,I’ve always maintained my activity in university regiments while teaching.’
‘Whereabouts?’I asked.
‘In Nottingham and Glasgow.’
‘Hunting down Arthur Seaton?’I joked, alluding to the squaddies who set on the fictional Arthur in Nottingham for cuckolding.
‘He was making a total pig's ear of somethings,wasn’t he? He seriously needed to be straightened out, grow up and have all that fight in him properly channeled.Throwing grenades at targets,not stones at buildings. Shooting bullets in army ranges,not air pellets at old nosyparking crones. What do you know about our regiment here in New England?’
‘Not a lot’,I answered.What is it’s role?’
It’s purpose is to train officers for the Army Reserve in order to develop military capability.It provides military training for undergraduates.It’s basic aim is to develop leadership.What is that quality you might ask? Using Field Marshal Montgomery’s great definition,it’s the capacity and the will to rally men to a common purpose and the character that will inspire confidence.That leadership must be based on a moral authority and it must be based on the truth.’
‘What’s involved?’I asked,warming to the idea.
‘First you do a recruit training course.Training weekends are conducted once a month to improve the basic soldier and command skills.Ergo those who qualify may be selected to be officers.You could be in their ranks,but you’ll be expected to learn twice as much.. Do you have it in you?’
‘Why not.’I replied, pressing the tips of my fingers together to form a steeple. ‘I applied to get into Duntroon but missed out.’
‘That doesn’t rule you out in the scheme of things.It’s what you demonstrate rather than where. What do you see as the qualities of a leader?’
‘I would have to say,and it’s easier said than done, that a leader is brave and always the first one into the fray.He who dares wins. To follow his instincts and to inspire his men by his example, he has to be with them in the thick of things.’
‘An excellent summing up.Might I add, a leader must always be cool and calm.And oblivious to the horrors of the battle field.He has to have a strong stomach to ignore explosions, heat,sweat and dust and sadly the screams of the wounded.’
‘How is the regiment run,if I might ask?’
‘It is organised as an infantry battalion with the addition of a training Company where members undergo instructional courses aimed at promotion. Of course we expect in return nothing less than the very best. Our standard sets the standard. A commission with us sells itself.Are you built from the right material?’ Are you in fighting trim and ready for action? Do you have what it takes?’
‘ Why not,’ I replied,looking him straight in the eye, ‘I can hold my own as good as the next man.’
‘We’re not interested in the next man.We’re looking for standouts from the herd- fuglemen who’ll push themselves to their limits.Officers and gentlemen. Centurions for the modern age.There’s no telling where this could take you.A long way most likely. Let’s say for the sake of argument, you’re interested in becoming a future leader or shaping the future leaders of New South Wales and Australia, then our regiment is the place for you. A ladder of opportunity.’
‘Do you think that’s possible’,I replied, keen to win my spurs and epaulets,yet thinking this sounded a bit too good to be true.
‘To every man there comes in his lifetime that special moment when he is tapped on the shoulder and offered a chance to be someone special. A look at our history will show you that for our members this is no idle boast. From the Antarctic explorer Mawson, High Court Judge Sir Victor Windeyer, as well as Sir Rodan Cutler awarded the Victoria Cross during the Second World War, to name but a very few, former members of the Regiment have acted and continue to wield power and influence. After you’ve earned your stripes you may prove worthy of their example.
‘I hope I could but I hope I won’t have to.’
‘I hope so too.Today, soldiering is a choice, a profession - albeit one in which dying or losing a piece of yourself is a ‘What did you think was going to happen?’ part of the contract.
Carpe diem,’he said in conclusion, "Seize the day.Enjoy it while you may.Put as little trust as possible in the future. We must be forearmed, never let our guard down.When none dares draw the bow,soon the bowspring is weak.Weakness will rust a people. We never know when the next war will happen’.
It would not be long before the ‘imaginary’ enemy we were readying to combat was materializing. In August 1964 The Colonel told me ‘Things will start happening now. The North Vietnamese have attacked the USS Turner Joy and Maddox on the high seas.They’ve done their dash.The Americans have publicly ordered retaliatory measures .They’ll ratchet up the ground war and we’ll be with them .Watch this space.’
At the time of this incident in the Gulf of Tonkin, Secretary of State Rusk was questioned on NBC television.This was relayed to A.B.C. television :
REPORTER:What explanation, then, can you come up with for this unprovoked attack?
RUSK: Well, I haven't been able, quite frankly, to come to a fully satisfactory explanation. There is a great gulf of understanding, between that world and our world, ideological in character. They see what we think of as the real world in wholly different terms. Their very processes of logic are different. So that it's very difficult to enter into each other's minds across that great ideological gulf.’
Soon after I gave the Colonel my decision tersely: ‘I’m in.’
‘Spoken like a true patriot,’he replied. ‘You won’t regret it.’
Thereupon I signed up with the Company on the spot and started intensive training on fieldcraft, drill and army procedure .
By jingo I was young, full of patriotic fervour, spit and polish. On the double to fend off trouble.It’s a safe bet we Company boys decked out in our slouch hat with it’s upswept brim, with our SLRs and greens ,uniformly starched,creased sharply , would catch the ladies.Run for your lives,girls,the regiment’s around! The drums beat and the trumpets sounded left, right, left, right,in the government boots, on the feet of raw figure happy recruits.Tromping up and down the streets swinging my rifle fro and to,humming do wah diddy,diddy dum diddy do. Good training for me in terms of discipline.
‘Colonel Treloar asked of my progress ‘How did you rate basic training?Is it working?’
I told this lover of verse,‘It's effects are well rooted now that it’s done.Since starting our training ,I’ve gone and saluted a policeman, the milkman, a nun.’
‘Are you ready to proceed to the next stage?’
‘As ready as I’ll ever be.’
During my vacation time and weekends I passed muster,licked into good nick crawling and sneaking through thick bush fighting the imaginary enemy: ‘Easy,boys,easy.You’ve got to glide through the jungle,not clomp’. Such manoeuvres were aimed at confronting guerilla forces hidden in an unfamiliar jungle terrain.
I studied the ideas of General Abdul Haris Nasution who wrote a definitive work on this subject.
Nasution developed the theory of territorial warfare which would become the defence doctrine of the Indonesian Army in the future. His treatise became one of the most studied books on guerrilla warfare along with Mao Zedong's works on the same subject matter.
He was one of the masterminds of the strategy used by the then fledgling Indonesian army fighting the Dutch colonial army in the 40s. He had studied the tactics of General Wingate who had practised
guerilla warfare against the Japanese.As Indonesia emerged as a nation he served as army chief, supreme military commander and national security minister.
Training, starting at the undulating tract of natural bushland of Scheyville (pronounced like ‘Sky-ville’) outside Sydney, was a tough,yet adventurous regime. My fellow rookies and I were subjected to a severe set of training methods designed to impart knowledge, test resolve and teach military skills.
From the day we weekend warriors arrived at boot camp we were moulded as part of a team: ‘Listen here,gentlemen, we’re going to teach you all about soldiering,the world’s oldest profession. This will separate you real men from the boys. Now first things first. When you’re in the army no matter in what capacity, you have to leave your normal self-centred thinking behind.All our units are co-dependent upon the other.Every individual, every small unit ranging to larger formations is co-dependent. Needless to say one weak link will cause the machine to malfunction.Then we all conk out.So if any of you step out of line,then we set you straight,our way.’
This message was driven home every reveille.Our bones, muscles and brains were shaken by angry shrieks and officer urgencies. At five a.m. sharp as the first post sounded, the leather lunged sergeants roused us from our beds: Wakey,wakey, rise and shine, you lot,Australia needs you.Got the sleeping sickness,have you.That’s enough stretching. Rub the sleep from your eyes and shake yourselves.
Greet the new day. All hands on deck! Alrighty,gentlemen-and I use the term loosely-listen to me now and listen to me good. We've got a big one ahead of us.Stand by your beds. Prepare for full hut and kit inspection!
For every action, there was an equal and opposite criticism.
Our beds had to be perfectly neat,footgear aligned in neat rows, our kit laid out on top.
‘The longest way up,the shortest way down’ was our instruction for saluting. ‘Up one two,down two three’,ending with your thumb pointing down the seam of your trousers.’
Everything had to be done a certain way and a certain way only. ‘This isn’t the Wentworth Hotel,Private’,bawled the sergeant finding fault with my bed’s
immaculate arrangement. ‘There is no room service,the maid doesn’t come in here.’Then seeing my bemusement adding, ‘And wipe that smile off your face,or I’ll do it for you.’
‘Oh brother! Are you really sure---‘I started to argue when he cut me out:
‘Who the devil do you think you are? I’m not your brother.You’ll speak when you’re told to and not before. When I want to hear you talk,I’ll give you a direct question.You’ll answer yes or no.
You’ll give no other unacceptable form of reply except the aforementioned.Is that clear?’
I would have replied, ‘Jawohl, mein Kommandant,’but I wasn’t sure he’d have understood.
‘Your rank?’he added,all gas and gaiters .
‘But not as much as you,’I replied,misinterpreting this as a statement rather than a question.
‘That’s enough from you.Now carry on.’
One morning after I had made my bed perfectly,he ordered me, ‘Now I want you to undo it and start again.This time properly.’
I said, ‘I’ll have to think about it.’
‘Think about it all you like-and then do it.’
Then came the constant marching. ‘Get a move on.By the left,quick march, left right,swing those arms,shoulders out,left,right,stomach in,left right,shoulders out.Straight on the heels,gentlemen, arms shoulder height all the time.Close the fist,push down the thumb,lock out the elbow,necks in the back of the collar,heel. That’ll keep you in step.Keep those arms pinned into the side. Halt,all present and correct, Sir! Atten-shun! Stand straight while your superior officer talks to you,you boofheaded ponces.No scratching or shuffling.No fidgeting or farting. I’ll jump on you from a great height if you so much as breathe.’
‘You can’t talk to us like----‘
‘Did I talk to you? How and why I discipline you is none of your business,Private.Is that clear?’
‘Das ist klar,mein Führer,’I said not.Instead ‘But I thought---’
‘It’s not up to you to think.Now get on with it.’
I learned how to hide my consciousness behind battle cries,pretended servility and bare,clench fisted obedience.
Each pacing movement was to be executed in a smart and soldierly manner with an audible clicking of the heels.
After learning how to march, salute,shoulder arms,present arms, how to stand at attention and fall out came the more interesting stuff. We got the feel of the steel. Our training included that in weapons system knowledge and field exercises .We ran along obstacle courses and hand over hand down a rope strung at a forty five degree angle across a creek. We had to crawl along the rope, then hang upside like monkeys and crawl headfirst downwards,dangle our legs over the water before throwing our bodies back up again.At least that was the idea. We jumped into and out of the back of army trucks and went on long route marches.
These seemed to go on endlessly.Forward with one leg,plant the foot,lock the knee,arch the ankle,push the leg into the ground,stiffen the spine,then the other leg unfolding,swinging out,the foot touching the ground .Legs counted the hours.Arms moved about,taking up the rhythm.
An officer spotted some of us very footweary infantrymen resting after a hard trek.He said with a salty look: ‘Look alive,men.Hands out of your pockets.The shape you’re in,most of you wouldn’t last three rounds with a Boy Scout.When I was of doing my training I thought nothing of a ten-mile hike.’
‘Well, I don't think much of it either,Sir!’ replied one of my mates .
The officer, who had introduced us to map reading and navigation, explaining about latitude, longitude, degrees and minutes decided to test us on it.He asked, “Suppose I asked your sewing circle to meet me for lunch at 23 degrees, 4 minutes north latitude and 45 degrees, 15 minutes east longitude…?”
One of our troupe who had difficulty picking it up volunteered, “I guess you’d be eating alone.”
We learned to lob hand grenades and to take great care.‘Watch out,’we were warned, ‘if you cough too hard,all that’ll be left of you is the gold in your teeth if that hasn’t melted.And never forget, the bursting radius of a hand grenade is always one foot greater than your jumping range. When the pin is pulled, Mr. Grenade is not your friend.’
We flew at dummies in a bayonet charge: ‘Chop chop boys, up and at 'em, if yer wanna get some in,’we were exhorted. ‘‘Stiffen those sinews and summon up your blood.Now I want to hear you screaming.’
‘En garde,placing one foot forward in a boxing stance,my knees bent,allowing my centre of gravity to be lowered, more easily controlled,I pointed the cutlery at the ‘enemy’.
‘You there.’
'Was that remark addressed to me?’
‘ Don’t just stand there.Stick it in,twist it,pull it out,’came the shout. ‘Give it some grunt.That’s a bayonet you’ve got there,Fraidy Cat,not a bunch of flowers’, was a more personalized blandishment. ‘Stick it in hard.Draw that blood. One day that might be a real belly you’re giving it to. It takes a lot to knock off a squirming man.’
They taught us to value our rifle as we value our lives. ‘Let me tell you the vital importance of the
L1A1-the Self Loading Rifle,our weapon of choice.This weapon will become part of you.Think of it as a prosthetic limb.If you can’t service it properly,you’ll turn yourself into a casualty.You’ll receive
a Special Delivery.’
‘The bullet with with my name on it’.
‘ It's theone addressed ‘to whom it may concern’ you've got to think about.’
We were shown how to hold the SLR. ‘This will be the easiest drill ever,’I thought beforehand.After cradling it in our arms, we were introduced to the overhead hold. ‘Now put the rifle above your head and hold it.’Even after a few minutes our muscles began to fatigue. ‘Now everyone,take your arms forward 90 degrees and straighten them out.Don’t move!’This punishing isometric drill was designed to test our strength and make the weapon feel lighter during sustained use.
We mastered the art of taking the metal hardware apart,cleaning and lubricating it,and then re-assembling it like greased lightning. ‘Don’t dilly dally.You haven’t got all day,’was our prod . ‘Wait til you do it blindfolded, standing on your head’.
“Don’t shoot where it is,” we were told during target practice. “Shoot where it’s going to be.”
We learned to blast in any conditions.I was hip wnen I’d shoot and I’d shoot from the hip without bringing it to the shoulder to zero in. In daylight, in darkness, to make the target look like swiss cheese. Around the campfire shooting the breeze.
‘Do you realise,’ I pointed out to my mates, ‘Swiss cheese is the only cheese you can draw which people can identify. You can draw Gouda cheese without the skin, but most will think it's cheddar. Swiss is the only cheese you can bite and miss. ‘Hey Allan,’you might ask me,’ does that sandwich have cheese on it?"
‘Every now and then’
We put together a gun pit from sandbags,it’s interlocking walls providing support for the rifle, allowing for less movement during shooting.We raced in teams filling and lugging the bags to construct these protective forts. ‘I’m the king of the castle, and you're the dirty rascal,’crowed our triumphant team leader.
The instructor's lessons followed a standard format and began with: ‘ Now hear this, You will learn by the numbers.In this lesson you will be taught... The reason you are being taught this ... and, "at the end of this lesson you will be able to ...’ etc.The lesson on the bayonet went something like this. ‘Now then,pay close attention. Follow my instructions.Nothing more, nothing less. My mother once pointed out to my aunt , ‘ The quickest way to a man's heart is through his chest’. That’s where the bayonet comes in. The bayonet itself is for close quarter battle.It can be thrusted into the enemy,O.K. First of all without being embedded into the bone. Also,situated here is the recess which is the blood channel. When you run it through the ribs,there’ll be no suction.When the metal meets the meat, you’ll be able to pull it out straightaway. Without it all the air wouldn’t escape. It would make it harder to pull it out .Are you with me? Say you’re in Vietnam,you set foot inside a hooch,you open the door and before you know it there’s a V.C. behind it.He won’t be there to say peekaboo.Your life can be over all at once.It can happen when you least expect it so be ready for anything.So you have the bayonet there ready,just in case the rifle does not operate. Always keep in mind that no one ever won a war by dying for his country. You win it by making your adversary die for his country.’
The conclusion of the lesson had a roundup and we students were asked questions just to check we were paying attention. Prior to moving on to the next phase of instruction, the instructor ensured that the fundamentals were understood. Otherwise we had to go through it again. Tests and more tests tracked us recruits through this ordeal. The aim of this style of instruction was to create concrete thinkers, black or white, but no shades of grey. ‘If you look in the Drill Manual’we were reminded, ‘ you will find that the aim of 'close order drill' is to instil into the individual instinctive obedience. Always remember our gospel, which is---‘
'Never question an order until after you carry it out',we chanted.
‘ Don’t knock it.It has a logic.It ensures that personnel don't think and their actions are instinctive. Be it a digger on an M60, a gunner on a 5 inch naval gun, or a flyboy in a Canberra bomber, you fire or drop your load when ordered to.You don't think- its instinctive due the nature of your training. It's ingrained into the individual to obey the order and never to question a superior. Ours is never to question but to carry out orders. Soldiers are not even allowed to die without permission.They have simply to do what they’re told.If we say all you can do is breathe,that’s all you’re allowed to do. While you’re with us you’re government property. We’ve got you.You belong to us.’ ’Tact in the warrant officers was often wanting and too often to get the recruit to hew to the line they used sarcasm or other dehumanising behaviours or comments.Teasing,threatening,humiliating. The slightest swerving from the rules or any hint of insubordination led to us being bawled out and dressed down:”Snap to it,you pigeon chested slowcoaches. Come along, come along, there .Jump to it. Pick 'em up! Pick 'em up, there! You’re a bloody disgrace.Listen up.This is Sydney University Regiment- not a three-ring circus!’
One abominable sergeant major, one eyebrow raised nearly to his hairline, walked slowly along the ranks, looking down his nose at us,his nostrils twitching slightly as if disgusted at having to inspect such carrion. No nudge or wink or smile or talk escaped him.
I felt this was the beginning of a very close relationship. His furious face was never more than inches away from our eyes. His eyes drilled into ours,daring us to move them a fraction of an inch.If he blinked,I missed it.He aimed his index finger between my eyes and thundered, ‘You,yeah you sad sack.Tilt your head more towards me.Chin up more. Belt,way too loose,buttons too dirty you excuse for a recruit. This one’s undone.You’ve got dandruff on your uniform.Brush it off. I’ll make infanteers out of you toy soldiers if I have to break you in half. Sort yourself out quick or it’s pack-drill for you.’
Here and there Dracula’s brother,smugly enthroned in his power to exact the trivial, would pause long enough to crack his knuckles or flick contemptuously with his little finger at an imaginary fragment of fluff on someone’s collar. Extra duties, pushups,squat-thrusts and side-saddle hops, or a quick sprint were just a few of the milder tools for conformity.‘On your face,Soldier. Get down,push up position down.Up,down,up,down.Just remember, I’m a very reasonable man.My mother told me so.Do you playmates disagree with me? he cried,stepping over our struggling bodies.’
‘No,sir!’
‘Up,down,up,down, up down’ until mercifully at last ‘As you were.’
‘Anything you say,Sir.’
‘That’s what I like to hear.’
‘Beautiful day,Sergeant Major,’I greeted him on one of our last days.
‘How do you know what kind of day it is? Are you studying to be a weatherman?’
Before we left,we wanted to give him a rousing farewell.
‘We asked to give him a 21 gun salute but were turned down.We had all been assessed crack marksmen.’
Our next training camp was in thick bushland north of Sydney.‘As close as we can get to jungle conditions without going north to Queensland,’we were told. ‘Definitely more rugged than any place in this state you'd like to mention. War in the jungle is the province of the infantry. This is the theatre we are preparing for.The dense vegetation and general lack of infrastructure means that tanks, aircraft, and even artillery are of little use.Reduced visibility and engagement ranges, make it extremely difficult to locate and close with enemy forces.Consequently you have to live close to the ground and learn from your instructors.’
Training us to move in formation,our first instructor was doing a major in poetry.‘My way of working is simple,’he told us.We want maximum effort from each of you.We will expect you to spit thunder out front .We will expect you to fart lightning out behind .’
I learned to choose very carefully whom to move in front of and whom to move behind.
We were shown how to dig foxholes :‘Keep shovelling, men.You’re not building sandcastles on Bondi Beach.’We learned to bivouac in the scrub. Crawling along the ground, flat on our bellies, diving into ditches,getting up,brushing ourselves off and back along the line of march.Alert to ‘booby traps’,watching where we walked.As we reached our first night position our sergeant instructed us ‘The sooner we get to sleep,the sooner we get this day over with.’
‘What’s the weather forecast for tonight?’ I asked him. ’Will it rain?’
‘We believe not.It will be dark. Continued dark overnight, with widely scattered light by morning.’
Before we bunked down,my mate looked up in the sky and said ‘Think about it. What are we?A couple of insignificant specks. What big heads we’ve got, thinking that what we do is going to matter all that much.’
Always remember that you are absolutely unique,'I said.Just like everyone else.'
‘Our time here means nothing to those stars.It's a split second we've been here,the whole lot of us. How small a part of this grand design. I can’t help but think if anything we do makes a difference. We don't count at all. When you look up at the stars and moon,what do you think of,Allan?’
‘ Don’t look through the wrong end of the telescope.Everything in this vast universe has a purpose. We earthlings might be a small part,but a unique one.The only life in it we know of so far.Maybe there is intelligent life on other planets also.’
‘I don't think so. Why should other planets be any different from this one?’
‘Well at least we are conscious creatures who are expanding our knowledge of it in quantum leaps,soon to travel to an extra-terrestrial satellite . What do you think of?’ I asked the sergeant inspecting our progress.
‘I think of the sandman.It’s you blokes rigged up your tent.It’s not going to put itself up.’
No sooner did we start dropping off than we learned the first law governing canvas shelter.It always rains on tents.rain will travel thousands of miles,against prevailing winds for the opportunity to rain on a tent.'
We action men learned how to camouflage our faces for night combat and crawl through the undergrowth and wade through creeks: ‘Never test the depth of the water with both feet’ was the rule.
‘Why is teamwork so essential?’ we were asked.
One bright spark answered, ‘It gives the enemy other people to shoot at.’
‘When you actually have rounds coming at you,when it really matters you won’t be able to make mistakes.If you make them now you can learn from them and not make them again.You have to protect the guy next to you.otherwise he gets it.Now what are the three things we’ve been drumming into your heads?
‘Speed, communication and controlled aggression.’
‘Precisely.Now keep your heads down,men. If the enemy is in range, so are you. If you can see him, he can see you. Remember, 'If it flies high, it dies;if it’s low and slow, it’ll go.’
After breaking camp we’d march like anything over fairly long distances. The worse the weather, the more we were required to be out in it.For some strange reason no matter which way we had to march, it was always uphill.Travelling in file formation, we learned to shun tracks and clearings, instead to 'scrub bash', picking our way carefully and quietly through the thickets and tangled foliage to take maximum advantage of concealment and cover.
‘Don’t walk there,too soft!’ whispered our instructors,motioning to us where to go,‘Step there and there,not there.Careful,watch!’And then ‘Green ahead!’
We trained to track by ear an enemy in waiting,one who was also intently listening for us. It was a tiring experience.Our patrol took hours to sweep a mile of terrain. We padded forward a few steps at a time, stopping, listening,eyes rolling in our sockets, then making with our feet again. All the time being heads-up, raking the tree lines for 'hides', listening, watching and waiting.
After our first bash up a steep, muddy path through shrubs and bushes,across creeks, the adversary finally emerged albeit somewhat lower down.After crawling under rocks,they’d been hiding, hoping for us to come by. Sensing the disturbances we made in the shallow water with their tiny eyes,they picked up on the passing shadows that the waves made. They jumped us silently one by one,impossible to shake off. They had us for breakfast.
Upon removing our boots and socks , we discovered we’d been attacked by the local leeches.Wet and windswept, none of us had seen any, but the welts and blisters on our legs and feet were proof of their persistent presence and testament to their cunning.After some days of this we got got used to them.For their part,they became very attached to us. The reward after all this blood, sweat and dirt being to fly off into that special technological high,the helicopter flight.
'What was the most important lessons you learned?’ Colonel Treloar asked me on my return.
' I learned that ours is not to reason why.That certain things are strictly forbidden.To respond to a lawful order with ‘Why?’ To argue that command decisions need to be ratified by a two thirds majority. To report to my Commander by ‘You can’t prove a thing!’ rather than ‘Private Davis, reporting as ordered, Sir’. To respond to a briefing with ‘That’s what you think’. All these things were forbidden-unless they were compulsory.’
‘How did you reservists find this stage of your training ?’
‘They put us through more than our paces.They put us through the works.It seems like they tried to break our will.But honestly do you really believe spotlessness will really be a vital factor in winning the war?’
‘We have to go extra hard on you at this early stage.To show you you can push your body further than you thought possible.Now there’s a logic to all those seeming torrents of grumbling abuse you copped for every minor infraction.We have to drive you hard,wait til you get in a tight situation ,then watch your reaction.We have to whittle you down,strip you to your core,expose your weaknesses. If you don’t have that in the beginning,you’ll never know the benchmark of your discipline.Otherwise you won’t last five minutes in the military.By putting such pressure on you,we get to know what you’re worth.If you think this is abuse,how will you be able to take the abuse you find in a real combat situation?’
‘ The Soldier in Greasepaint’.
Towards the end of 1964 I read that Bob Hope was to make a Christmas tour of Vietnam.He was to perform before U.S. personnel
Towards the end of 1964 I read that Bob Hope was to make a Christmas tour of Vietnam.He was to perform before U.S. personnel
and visit the sick and wounded.
In announcing his visit he said: ‘I’ve been offered a tour of Vietnam.It was too good to turn down. They offered to cover my costs plus funeral expenses.”
Typically he joked about the very ailments G.I. is cursed with.
I performed a Hope type sketch for my fellow recruits’ entertainment. Sauntering over the floor swinging a golf club, I teed off with a golfing gag. ‘‘Hello fellow holiday makers,I’m Major Mayhem.
'I’ll tell ya,I had an strange experience on the golf course yesterday. I had a hole in nothing. I missed the ball and sank the divot.’
I followed through with a sketch based on standard army medical techniques:
‘And this morning I visited some sick soldiers.I went up to one private and asked:
‘What's your problem, Soldier?’
‘Scabies, Sir.Those creepy,crawly,crusty crabs sure dug in.I picked them up in a damp foxhole.’
‘They can be a mite hard to get rid of.How are you dislodging them?’
‘Five minutes with the wire brush each day.’
‘And what's your ambition,Soldier?’
‘To get to the front, Sir.’
‘Good man.’ I said.
I went to the next bed. ‘What's your problem, Soldier?’
‘Chronic piles, Sir.I was assigned to clerical duties.’
‘What treatment are you getting?’
‘Five minutes with the wire brush each day.’
‘What's your ambition,Soldier?’
‘To get back to my desk, Sir.’
‘Good man’.
I went to the next bed. ‘What's your problem, Soldier?’
‘Chronic gum disease, Sir.From being out in the jungle.’
‘What treatment are you getting?’
‘Five minutes with the wire brush each day.’
‘What's your ambition,Soldier?’
‘To get the wire brush before the other two, Sir.’
‘I believe you have a Private Bates here in this ward’,I asked the care nurse.I’m told he was admitted last week after being brought in from the jungle.Could you tell me where he is right now?’I said, seeing there was no one else in the other beds.
‘I’ll tell you what happened to him,’said the official. ‘Private Bates was in poor shape. His hair was found to be infested with lice.He had severe caries and testicular torsion. After our thorough examination he was gradually issued the usual requisites.
On his first morning here, the hospital issued him a comb. That afternoon the orderly sheared off all his hair.
On his second morning, they issued Bates a toothbrush. That afternoon the Army dentist extracted four of his teeth.
On the third morning, he was issued an athletic support.’
On the third day at noon he went AWOL.’
I wished Bob season’s salutations and reminded him to take care. ‘Avoid all water and ice because much is unsafe to drink.Don’t forget the insect repellent.The mozzies are so big,they need their own landing strips. Stay away from all milk products,and watch out for any little man in a red suit and sandals slipping into your hotel room.Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh. Stay away from windows in restaurants and in rooms, keep your drapes closed,keep a wet hanky handy for the hundred degree heat,a steel umbrella for the driving rain- and a final caution, ‘Drop to the floor if you hear an explosion and if ‘it’ hits the fan, put your head between your legs and kiss your sweet arse good bye.Otherwise enjoy yourself and have yourself a merry little Christmas.’The comedian thanked me with the lyrics of his signature tune.
As it turned out,all his Christmases appeared to have come at once. On the afternoon of Christmas Eve, 1964, two Vietcong agents put a bomb in the basement carpark of the Brinks Hotel. The hotel attracted off-duty personnel with its highly regarded food and drink, rooftop seating areas and movie screenings. The Vietcong duo had been observing their target over the past month, mixing with the crowds in the busy street outside. Noting that South Vietnamese officers mingled freely with Americans, they wangled ARVN uniforms from Saigon's black market, enabling them to get closer. One of them,Xuan disguised himself as a military chauffeur, while his partner dressed as a South Vietnamese major. They mingled with the real officers so that they could duplicate their mannerisms, speaking style and even their way of smoking. The pair then procured the two cars and explosives needed for the operation.Having reconnoitered the target meticulously, they managed to park a car containing the stashed explosives without being observed or suspected. The number of American officers at the Brinks Hotel had swelled on Christmas Eve because they were using the building to coordinate their celebrations, therefore the attack would therefore cause more casualties than on a normal day.The bombers had set a timing device to trigger the bomb at 17:45, during the ‘happy hour' in the officers' watering hole. Knowing from their intelligence that a certain American colonel had returned to the US, the "Major" inveigled their way into into the hotel's grounds,claiming he had an appointment with the Colonel.He then parked his vehicle in the car park beneath the hotel, before ordering his chauffeur to cut out and fetch the American with the other vehicle. He then left the hotel grounds, asking the guard to tell the American colonel to wait for him. The "Major" claimed that he had not eaten all day and was going to a nearby café.
At 5:45 P.M., while the Americans were eating dinner and planning the Christmas Eve party for later that evening, the bomb exploded while the 'Major' nonchalantly observed from a restaurant across the street. The bomb flattened the Brinks
On his first morning here, the hospital issued him a comb. That afternoon the orderly sheared off all his hair.
On his second morning, they issued Bates a toothbrush. That afternoon the Army dentist extracted four of his teeth.
On the third morning, he was issued an athletic support.’
On the third day at noon he went AWOL.’
I wished Bob season’s salutations and reminded him to take care. ‘Avoid all water and ice because much is unsafe to drink.Don’t forget the insect repellent.The mozzies are so big,they need their own landing strips. Stay away from all milk products,and watch out for any little man in a red suit and sandals slipping into your hotel room.Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh. Stay away from windows in restaurants and in rooms, keep your drapes closed,keep a wet hanky handy for the hundred degree heat,a steel umbrella for the driving rain- and a final caution, ‘Drop to the floor if you hear an explosion and if ‘it’ hits the fan, put your head between your legs and kiss your sweet arse good bye.Otherwise enjoy yourself and have yourself a merry little Christmas.’The comedian thanked me with the lyrics of his signature tune.
As it turned out,all his Christmases appeared to have come at once. On the afternoon of Christmas Eve, 1964, two Vietcong agents put a bomb in the basement carpark of the Brinks Hotel. The hotel attracted off-duty personnel with its highly regarded food and drink, rooftop seating areas and movie screenings. The Vietcong duo had been observing their target over the past month, mixing with the crowds in the busy street outside. Noting that South Vietnamese officers mingled freely with Americans, they wangled ARVN uniforms from Saigon's black market, enabling them to get closer. One of them,Xuan disguised himself as a military chauffeur, while his partner dressed as a South Vietnamese major. They mingled with the real officers so that they could duplicate their mannerisms, speaking style and even their way of smoking. The pair then procured the two cars and explosives needed for the operation.Having reconnoitered the target meticulously, they managed to park a car containing the stashed explosives without being observed or suspected. The number of American officers at the Brinks Hotel had swelled on Christmas Eve because they were using the building to coordinate their celebrations, therefore the attack would therefore cause more casualties than on a normal day.The bombers had set a timing device to trigger the bomb at 17:45, during the ‘happy hour' in the officers' watering hole. Knowing from their intelligence that a certain American colonel had returned to the US, the "Major" inveigled their way into into the hotel's grounds,claiming he had an appointment with the Colonel.He then parked his vehicle in the car park beneath the hotel, before ordering his chauffeur to cut out and fetch the American with the other vehicle. He then left the hotel grounds, asking the guard to tell the American colonel to wait for him. The "Major" claimed that he had not eaten all day and was going to a nearby café.
At 5:45 P.M., while the Americans were eating dinner and planning the Christmas Eve party for later that evening, the bomb exploded while the 'Major' nonchalantly observed from a restaurant across the street. The bomb flattened the Brinks
sending shards of glass and other debris across the street towards the hotel where Bob and his troupe were staying and shaking it.Two soldiers in the Brinks bought it, no one in the troupe was injured, but the explosion left all the hotels without water or electricity.
All forms of our instruction and training had varying undertones of patriotism, glory and honour.The Colonel stressed to Company members that the U.S. was of vital import to our national security:
‘Gentlemen, we’re living in a very dangerous neighbourhood. The Americans have their hands full with their own backyard and in Europe.It’s vital that we boost their continued presence in this area and orient it to our interests.If our alliance with the U.S. were to change, then the pressure points in the region could indeed become very painful. What are these points you might ask? ,he said,pointing to a map of East Asia.
‘There are three security issues of concern to the region. First, there is the Korean Peninsula. The uneasy peace on the Korean Peninsula has remained in place because the solid commitment of the United States - its deterrent against any resort to force - has remained unwavering. America has persistently held to a military deployment in South Korea which has stopped cold Communist advances.
The Brinks Hotel bombing was important for several reasons. It demonstrated the ability of the Vietcong to operate anywhere in South Vietnam, even in the capital of its enemy. Even our Vietnamese allies had difficulty in distinguishing friend from foe.
It also demonstrated the inability of the ARVN to protect its citizens and allies, a crucial prerequisite to successful guerrilla or insurgency warfare. Coming soon after the American bombing of North Vietnam following the Tonkin Gulf incident, it demonstrated the form of escalation or response that any further bombing of North Vietnam would take. Lastly, it presented the policymakers in Washington with a basic question that would characterize the war throughout its history: would bombing the North reduce enemy hostilities in the South?
The attack epitomized the situation for Americans in Vietnam in the mid-1960s. No place was completely safe from any Vietcong terrorist act and the result was apprehension for the allied forces.They didn’t know whether they were coming or going.Many were going feet first. Who was going to win was anybody's guess. The boldness of the Vietcong attack contributed to the escalation of the war during a critical period in the Beltway policy-making.
True to form, Hope stitched this incident into his act at Tan Son Nhut the next day: "I want to thank General Westmoreland for that wonderful welcome yesterday. We opened with a bang!’ He had had talks with Westmoreland about the war,what was happening at home and what it all meant.The general assured him and the world an attack of this nature was a one-off and would never happen again.
Their talks touched on the instability in South Vietnam.There were repeated coups by military men.This gave rise to Bob declaring: ‘Vietnam is a very democratic country.Everyone gets to be president.’
I would have declared my variant of this and passed it on onto Bob when George Bush Junior came to the presidency : ‘The U.S. is a very democratic country.Anyone can get to be president. That’s the problem.Anyone can grow up to be president, and anyone who doesn't grow up can be president.At a small outpost in the Mekong Delta, Bob joked: "A funny thing happened to me when I was driving
through downtown Saigon to my hotel last night. We met a hotel going the other way."
In spite of all this,the show went on.Thousands of GI’s enjoyed seeing America’s favourite funnyman sauntering across the stage wagging his putter.
Many were transported to the show from the hospital wards in just their blue hospital gowns, some in beds attached to IV's. and were escorted to the front of the theatre for up front seats. Visiting others in the hospital wards,Bob was extremely cut up by what he saw,trying hard to be glib with men whose guts were sticking out.
It took a well humoured wounded medic to restore Bob’s sense of offhand ease.The medic told him , ‘After I got shot I was operated on in a field hospital. I woke up just as another medic I knew to be just out of training was about to finish operating on me.
‘What’s going on,I asked groggily?
‘Take it easy.I’m about to close, said this medic.
I grabbed his hand and said, “I’m not going to let you do that. I’ll close my own incision.’
He handed me the needle and thread and said, ‘Suture self.’
It also demonstrated the inability of the ARVN to protect its citizens and allies, a crucial prerequisite to successful guerrilla or insurgency warfare. Coming soon after the American bombing of North Vietnam following the Tonkin Gulf incident, it demonstrated the form of escalation or response that any further bombing of North Vietnam would take. Lastly, it presented the policymakers in Washington with a basic question that would characterize the war throughout its history: would bombing the North reduce enemy hostilities in the South?
The attack epitomized the situation for Americans in Vietnam in the mid-1960s. No place was completely safe from any Vietcong terrorist act and the result was apprehension for the allied forces.They didn’t know whether they were coming or going.Many were going feet first. Who was going to win was anybody's guess. The boldness of the Vietcong attack contributed to the escalation of the war during a critical period in the Beltway policy-making.
True to form, Hope stitched this incident into his act at Tan Son Nhut the next day: "I want to thank General Westmoreland for that wonderful welcome yesterday. We opened with a bang!’ He had had talks with Westmoreland about the war,what was happening at home and what it all meant.The general assured him and the world an attack of this nature was a one-off and would never happen again.
Their talks touched on the instability in South Vietnam.There were repeated coups by military men.This gave rise to Bob declaring: ‘Vietnam is a very democratic country.Everyone gets to be president.’
I would have declared my variant of this and passed it on onto Bob when George Bush Junior came to the presidency : ‘The U.S. is a very democratic country.Anyone can get to be president. That’s the problem.Anyone can grow up to be president, and anyone who doesn't grow up can be president.At a small outpost in the Mekong Delta, Bob joked: "A funny thing happened to me when I was driving
through downtown Saigon to my hotel last night. We met a hotel going the other way."
In spite of all this,the show went on.Thousands of GI’s enjoyed seeing America’s favourite funnyman sauntering across the stage wagging his putter.
Many were transported to the show from the hospital wards in just their blue hospital gowns, some in beds attached to IV's. and were escorted to the front of the theatre for up front seats. Visiting others in the hospital wards,Bob was extremely cut up by what he saw,trying hard to be glib with men whose guts were sticking out.
It took a well humoured wounded medic to restore Bob’s sense of offhand ease.The medic told him , ‘After I got shot I was operated on in a field hospital. I woke up just as another medic I knew to be just out of training was about to finish operating on me.
‘What’s going on,I asked groggily?
‘Take it easy.I’m about to close, said this medic.
I grabbed his hand and said, “I’m not going to let you do that. I’ll close my own incision.’
He handed me the needle and thread and said, ‘Suture self.’
Hands Across The Sea.
All forms of our instruction and training had varying undertones of patriotism, glory and honour.The Colonel stressed to Company members that the U.S. was of vital import to our national security:
‘Gentlemen, we’re living in a very dangerous neighbourhood. The Americans have their hands full with their own backyard and in Europe.It’s vital that we boost their continued presence in this area and orient it to our interests.If our alliance with the U.S. were to change, then the pressure points in the region could indeed become very painful. What are these points you might ask? ,he said,pointing to a map of East Asia.
‘There are three security issues of concern to the region. First, there is the Korean Peninsula. The uneasy peace on the Korean Peninsula has remained in place because the solid commitment of the United States - its deterrent against any resort to force - has remained unwavering. America has persistently held to a military deployment in South Korea which has stopped cold Communist advances.
Secondly, there is the tension between Peking and Taipei in the Taiwan Strait. Had the United States not played the role it has played over the past years, it is hard to believe conflict would have been avoided.
Thirdly, there is South-East Asia where the Communists are a major threat,’he said,pointing to the map with his cane as officers elsewhere were doing.
‘This is no mirage,no illusion.Their force is a knife levelled at our throat. Unfortunately they are recalcitrant and reject negotiations. We resile at the notion of standing on the sidelines as they take over.
We have to be prepared to project our interests beyond our borders. Forward defence means stopping the enemy before he gets close. We can’t just sit back and watch the Chinese set up a bridgehead on our side. Such provocation has it’s limits.We can’t just tell them ‘Come and get it. They won’t leave politely.we have to convince them.’
Both our political parties encourage the Alliance. Their interests are co-incident.You can’t put a cigarette paper between them. It’s above and apart from party politics. We all wish to maintain the freedoms that make life in this great country the envy of half the world. When you join my command,you take on a debt of gratitude to those who come before us. You have to take responsibility as defenders of our country to consolidate the Alliance. We don’t have the luxury of playing it safe.Too many lives are in the balance. We can stand by like overfed ducks, faffing about,asking for divine guidance, frothing at the mouth or we can stand shoulder to shoulder with the Americans in making a stand.Just what Dean Rusk is asking us.’
Thirdly, there is South-East Asia where the Communists are a major threat,’he said,pointing to the map with his cane as officers elsewhere were doing.
‘This is no mirage,no illusion.Their force is a knife levelled at our throat. Unfortunately they are recalcitrant and reject negotiations. We resile at the notion of standing on the sidelines as they take over.
We have to be prepared to project our interests beyond our borders. Forward defence means stopping the enemy before he gets close. We can’t just sit back and watch the Chinese set up a bridgehead on our side. Such provocation has it’s limits.We can’t just tell them ‘Come and get it. They won’t leave politely.we have to convince them.’
Both our political parties encourage the Alliance. Their interests are co-incident.You can’t put a cigarette paper between them. It’s above and apart from party politics. We all wish to maintain the freedoms that make life in this great country the envy of half the world. When you join my command,you take on a debt of gratitude to those who come before us. You have to take responsibility as defenders of our country to consolidate the Alliance. We don’t have the luxury of playing it safe.Too many lives are in the balance. We can stand by like overfed ducks, faffing about,asking for divine guidance, frothing at the mouth or we can stand shoulder to shoulder with the Americans in making a stand.Just what Dean Rusk is asking us.’
‘ The Secretary of State? I queried. ‘He with the inscrutable Buddha-like face and half-smile?
‘That’s him-to the life.’ The Colonel confirmed. ‘ Tall and sturdy,standing sentinel for the U.S. over an uneasy globe. ‘A quiet,thoughtful man.’
Rather like Colonel Treloar himself,I thought.Not surprisingly he had a high estimate of this public face of U. S. diplomacy.
‘He’s done a great job since President Kennedy appointed him. Ever the good soldier,he sees his role as to serve the Chief Executive.Kennedy never made final decions on vital security issues until he heard his view.If The President is the captain of the ship,the Secretary is the pilot,at his side on the bridge charting the drifts,shoals and channels that guide the captain’s course.This one’s got guts.You’ll be interested to know he rose to the rank of colonel, serving from 1943 to 1945 in the China-Burma-India theatre, where he began a lifelong interest in Asian affairs.’
‘What’s his approach to international matters?’I asked.
‘He takes a cautious approach. He stresses the importance of America's relationship with its allies and feels that unilateral action by the United States is not a good choice. He came out of the Second World War thinking that collective security was the key to the prevention of World War III. He carries on the policy of not challenging the Communists where they are already established, but doing everything possible to see to it that their sphere does not enlarge itself at the expense of free nations.
‘How does he put this into practice?’I asked.
‘He advocates a “dignified diplomacy” emphasizing civility and communication between the United States and the Soviet Union. Rusk’s diplomatic orientation and his ability to evaluate and judge competing points of view contributed toward the successful negotiation of the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in August 1963.Before that he defused tensions during the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. In the wake of it Rusk cautioned the press and the President not to gloat or claim victory. He rightly worried about undermining Khrushchev's position of power. If the Soviets felt as if they lost too much in the crisis,hardliners could have ousted Khrushchev. Then the careful agreement reached by both sides could have collapsed and the crisis situation resumed.’
‘The Republicans would presumably see him as soft on Vietnamese Communism.Is he?’
‘He’s against repeating the ‘Munich mistake''. At the same time he’s understandably wary of escalating the war to a point where the Chinese might feel compelled to intervene, as they had during the war in Korea. While he favours a gradualist approach to U.S. involvement in Vietnam—in order to maintain the U.S. obligation to Vietnam under SEATO-he takes a tough line on Communists pursuing `wars of national liberation.' He derides this term as upside-down language. He embraces the principle that the aggression they export should be contained and that force should be met with force.
‘Otherwise?’ I asked.
‘Otherwise, he says, the United States would be perceived as toothless, and would invite further Communist aggression, which could touch off nuclear wars.He believes if the Communist world finds out we are not pursuing our commitments, he doesn't know where they will stay their hand. He compares his position to that of a soldier in a foxhole, defending his country against the Communist forces. The foxhole represents the democratic ideals we cherish together and fight for.’
This sounded reasonable enough to me.
It was about a quarter to nine in the morning some time later when the black Cadillac arrived at the basement entry of the shapeless hulk of the State Department Building in Washington.Depositing the Secretary underground before the private lift that opened to his key.After stepping in,the doors closed and the lift automatically shot up,with no other stops,to the seventh floor.There it opened within the glass-walled green-planted inner sanctum where he kept his office.
His tasks were waiting at his desk. Sorting out the message traffic flowing from departmental outposts around the world, the flood of words from all sources that arrived overnight for his consideration . Hush hush reports of the intelligence agencies CIA,Army and others,summarized for his first briefing.Messages from various parties to national conflicts trying to elist understanding and support of things as they saw it. By instinct,philosophy and experience he found his way through it. More than any other individual,he was deputized to develop from all this information a picture clear enough for the President to act and the people to respond. Some dispatches making him pause, others he could dismiss to others. Some eyes-only, signalling alarm, he of course being in the popular imagination the bearer of ill tidings.Such as those from Saigon delivering the daily tally of killing and intrigue from the jungle war.With news of impending defeat the inertial force of habit and of bureaucracy overpowered the evidence at hand.This would have required too much of a counter-effort. Personal plans would have to be altered; holidays and leave cancelled; daily habits of comfort and convenience abandoned.
It was easier to accept the other dispatches flashing opportunity and hope. As usual General Westmoreland’s ever-optimistic line about how things were going.He had said it would be a ‘cakewalk’- no more than a ‘brush-fire war’. The North Vietnamese or the Vietcong were incapable of dry-gulching his troops;they only ever came across them playing it by ear, in unexpected encounters. The NLF were unable to replace their huge losses. The U.S. was reaching the cross over point, when the enemy’s losses would exceed their ability to replace them through either infiltration from the north or recruitment in the south.They were being worn down and their will broken. The end of the war was in sight,in fact just around the corner.Rusk sharply drew in breath as Westmoreland added if only,as he repeatedly requested, the number of troops on the case could be bumped up. Hundreds of thousands over and above the half million that were already there.
And then crossing his desk was a letter of assurance like mine,urging Rusk that U.S. foreign policy in South East Asia continue to provide emerging nations with technical and humanitarian assistance to speed them along the path toward modernity and democracy. That we had to wheedle and needle the South Vietnamese officials to mend their ways and broaden the base of a creaky government,to modernize their whole society.They should provide greater security for their allied forces against any act of terrorism.Any military involvement was to be to protect the population from guerrilla attacks and those carrying such relief.In nation building,we had to help the South Vietnam0ese help themselves. Ultimately they had to sink or swim on their own. This was what Arthur Calwell had called for.How simple it all sounded.
‘That’s him-to the life.’ The Colonel confirmed. ‘ Tall and sturdy,standing sentinel for the U.S. over an uneasy globe. ‘A quiet,thoughtful man.’
Rather like Colonel Treloar himself,I thought.Not surprisingly he had a high estimate of this public face of U. S. diplomacy.
‘He’s done a great job since President Kennedy appointed him. Ever the good soldier,he sees his role as to serve the Chief Executive.Kennedy never made final decions on vital security issues until he heard his view.If The President is the captain of the ship,the Secretary is the pilot,at his side on the bridge charting the drifts,shoals and channels that guide the captain’s course.This one’s got guts.You’ll be interested to know he rose to the rank of colonel, serving from 1943 to 1945 in the China-Burma-India theatre, where he began a lifelong interest in Asian affairs.’
‘What’s his approach to international matters?’I asked.
‘He takes a cautious approach. He stresses the importance of America's relationship with its allies and feels that unilateral action by the United States is not a good choice. He came out of the Second World War thinking that collective security was the key to the prevention of World War III. He carries on the policy of not challenging the Communists where they are already established, but doing everything possible to see to it that their sphere does not enlarge itself at the expense of free nations.
‘How does he put this into practice?’I asked.
‘He advocates a “dignified diplomacy” emphasizing civility and communication between the United States and the Soviet Union. Rusk’s diplomatic orientation and his ability to evaluate and judge competing points of view contributed toward the successful negotiation of the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in August 1963.Before that he defused tensions during the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. In the wake of it Rusk cautioned the press and the President not to gloat or claim victory. He rightly worried about undermining Khrushchev's position of power. If the Soviets felt as if they lost too much in the crisis,hardliners could have ousted Khrushchev. Then the careful agreement reached by both sides could have collapsed and the crisis situation resumed.’
‘The Republicans would presumably see him as soft on Vietnamese Communism.Is he?’
‘He’s against repeating the ‘Munich mistake''. At the same time he’s understandably wary of escalating the war to a point where the Chinese might feel compelled to intervene, as they had during the war in Korea. While he favours a gradualist approach to U.S. involvement in Vietnam—in order to maintain the U.S. obligation to Vietnam under SEATO-he takes a tough line on Communists pursuing `wars of national liberation.' He derides this term as upside-down language. He embraces the principle that the aggression they export should be contained and that force should be met with force.
‘Otherwise?’ I asked.
‘Otherwise, he says, the United States would be perceived as toothless, and would invite further Communist aggression, which could touch off nuclear wars.He believes if the Communist world finds out we are not pursuing our commitments, he doesn't know where they will stay their hand. He compares his position to that of a soldier in a foxhole, defending his country against the Communist forces. The foxhole represents the democratic ideals we cherish together and fight for.’
This sounded reasonable enough to me.
It was about a quarter to nine in the morning some time later when the black Cadillac arrived at the basement entry of the shapeless hulk of the State Department Building in Washington.Depositing the Secretary underground before the private lift that opened to his key.After stepping in,the doors closed and the lift automatically shot up,with no other stops,to the seventh floor.There it opened within the glass-walled green-planted inner sanctum where he kept his office.
His tasks were waiting at his desk. Sorting out the message traffic flowing from departmental outposts around the world, the flood of words from all sources that arrived overnight for his consideration . Hush hush reports of the intelligence agencies CIA,Army and others,summarized for his first briefing.Messages from various parties to national conflicts trying to elist understanding and support of things as they saw it. By instinct,philosophy and experience he found his way through it. More than any other individual,he was deputized to develop from all this information a picture clear enough for the President to act and the people to respond. Some dispatches making him pause, others he could dismiss to others. Some eyes-only, signalling alarm, he of course being in the popular imagination the bearer of ill tidings.Such as those from Saigon delivering the daily tally of killing and intrigue from the jungle war.With news of impending defeat the inertial force of habit and of bureaucracy overpowered the evidence at hand.This would have required too much of a counter-effort. Personal plans would have to be altered; holidays and leave cancelled; daily habits of comfort and convenience abandoned.
It was easier to accept the other dispatches flashing opportunity and hope. As usual General Westmoreland’s ever-optimistic line about how things were going.He had said it would be a ‘cakewalk’- no more than a ‘brush-fire war’. The North Vietnamese or the Vietcong were incapable of dry-gulching his troops;they only ever came across them playing it by ear, in unexpected encounters. The NLF were unable to replace their huge losses. The U.S. was reaching the cross over point, when the enemy’s losses would exceed their ability to replace them through either infiltration from the north or recruitment in the south.They were being worn down and their will broken. The end of the war was in sight,in fact just around the corner.Rusk sharply drew in breath as Westmoreland added if only,as he repeatedly requested, the number of troops on the case could be bumped up. Hundreds of thousands over and above the half million that were already there.
And then crossing his desk was a letter of assurance like mine,urging Rusk that U.S. foreign policy in South East Asia continue to provide emerging nations with technical and humanitarian assistance to speed them along the path toward modernity and democracy. That we had to wheedle and needle the South Vietnamese officials to mend their ways and broaden the base of a creaky government,to modernize their whole society.They should provide greater security for their allied forces against any act of terrorism.Any military involvement was to be to protect the population from guerrilla attacks and those carrying such relief.In nation building,we had to help the South Vietnam0ese help themselves. Ultimately they had to sink or swim on their own. This was what Arthur Calwell had called for.How simple it all sounded.
Action
Stations.
In early 1965 the Colonel had told members of our Company in a briefing:
‘Word has it we’re sending combat troops to Vietnam. A battalion. Our instructors have been preparing the way.’
‘What’s the go with conscription ?’he was asked.
‘Our military need supplementary personnel’,said the Colonel. ‘We have to build the Australian Army to a size where enough infantry battalions are available to rotate into the war and then return home for retraining and equipping.
We face a serious threat from our north. The Soviet Union and China have regional designs.China, so large, looms over our neighbours’ frontiers. The fall of the South Vietnamese government would lead to other allied governments going bung like ‘dominos’. The takeover of this country would be a direct military threat to Australia and all the countries of South and South-East Asia’, he intoned . Totalitarianism would follow suit below the seventeenth parallel, replacing Western oriented governments.
It must be seen as part of a thrust by Red China between the Indian and Pacific Oceans. President Kennedy says it is part of a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that if it achieves its ends in Laos and Vietnam, “the gates will be opened wide.”
This won’t be anything like the siege of the Boxers at Peking that Mao praises so highly. This will last more than 55 days if we just fold our arms and yield to them. It’s our duty to support our American brothers in arms to bolt the gates. To keep Australia safe and inviolable.We have to take the fight to them. We must fight them over there so that we do not have to fight them here.
Westmoreland’s the one holding the line,’ he said holding up the cover of Time’ magazine showing him as ‘Man of the Year’. ‘The thin red line as it were. Mark my words, his fighting men are all that stands between battalions of Chinese on the move,thrusting downwards towards us. His men are a tripwire,our first line of defence’
Westmoreland certainly looked the part of such a commander: a textbook version of how a general should look: ramrod straight, well over 6ft tall, with a purposeful jut-jawline and always confident of victory.
‘What’s his military background?’I asked.
‘‘He saw action in North Africa, Sicily and Europe during World War II. He attained the rank of colonel by the time he was 30.As commander of the 34th Field Artillery Battalion fighting German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, he earned the loyalty and respect of his troops for joining in the thick of battle rather than remaining behind the lines at a command post. He later led troops in conflicts in France, Germany, and Belgium.
‘You would have heard a lot about him,wouldn’t you,Colonel’,I said.
‘His reputation preceded me when I was stationed on the Rhine after the War. He faced particularly brutal times when his division was able to capture and hold the last standing bridge on the Rhine River, the bridge at Remagen. He and his men had to defend it from enemy troops for two weeks; this gave the Allies time to build their own bridge. Their actions helped end World War II in Europe. Kennedy picked him for Vietnam when he was superintendent of West Point.’
‘He must inspire confidence’.
'He’s a force to be reckoned with.A man of his word. We need to come through for him. To be on the front foot. To stand fast.Think of it as a down payment for US help if Australia were ever attacked’,continued the Colonel.
‘ An insurance policy’,I suggested.
‘You could put it that way’,he said. ‘War is one of those possible unfortunate events for which we have to pay a premium to protect ourselves against.’
‘How do you remember the world war yourself?’ I said,still having in mind the gleaming white battleship in front of which Eleanor Powell, backed by an extravagantly costumed chorus, sings and dances “Swingin’ the jinx away’, culminating in a patriotic salute, and finally a blast of cannon fire.
‘As an amateur theatre production.Unrehearsed and over long.We must never leave our defences down again.Never be caught napping.Never let the enemy draw first blood.We must get any combat over and done with swiftly and decisively.’
Under such influence and those of my provenance, I went along with the war in it’s initial phase,an ever so brief dalliance. I started out with generally conventional views formed by global containment and the sense that the flow of refugees was east to west. I was increasingly critical of the U.S. government's tactical failures, the ridiculously disproportional bombing campaign, but not its gambit. ‘Can we get away with it?’was my commonly asked question. American forces often went into these battles in helicopters,beating a hasty retreat the way they had come but leaving many to wonder why ground won with such difficulty could be surrendered with such ease. I took it as read the war could be won if only the right tactics were used. I was wary of any large conventional combat commitment. There was little discussion of right or wrong.We were training to be steely eyed dealers of death, disfigurement and dismemberment.
At a lecture given at one of our basic training classes,a senior officer explained the nature of the war we were entering:
‘A word of warning to all you would be warriors.This conflict and those our fathers fought are chalk and cheese. In those both sides had huge citizens armies,men in uniform who volunteered for the duration of the war.The boundaries were clearly drawn, there were rules and codes of conduct for both soldiers and civilians. The enemy was clearly distinguishable and there were clear procedures to follow if you were either captured or wounded.Today we have a relatively small professional standing army .We are up against a well equipped, elusive human enemy,the NVA, with supplies filtering through from China and Russia as well as the NLF,the “Viet Cong” who blend invisibly with the local population until they chose to fight. The enemy has no size,no shape and no rules.Nailing them is like trying to pin jelly to a wall.Like an apparition,they appear and disappear at will. They use the population as a source of recruits, food, taxes and intelligence on enemy movements . They own the country at night, hiding in the shadows,picking at ARVN scabs til they bleed.’
‘How do you counter such an elusive enemy?’ I asked. ‘How do we shoot if we don’t know where they’re going to be?’
‘As hunters we have to flush these cunning foxes out of their coverts into open ground. They’re not fireproof.So we fumigate.Smoke them out of their hidey-holes.Fire in the hole! We entice them into showing their hand. We have to deny them access to the people by mounting intensive ambuscades and patrolling around populated areas. Eventually, the insurgents are forced to come out and fight to maintain access to the population.At that point we can hit them with all we’ve got.We deliver the deathblow.They don’t know what’s hit them.’
‘How can they counter this?’I asked. ‘
‘They have an ace in the hole. You never knew who is the enemy and who is the foe. They all look alike. They all wear the same garb. You never know if they’re going to help you or shoot you in the back.’
‘Who decides who is Charlie and who is not.”I asked. ‘From pictures I have seen of him,I wouldn’t know him from Adam.Or from Madam.’
‘It’s up to the individual soldier to decide’,he replied. ‘I know what you’re thinking. Innocent civilians get rubbed out in this game of hide and seek. Of course sometimes we have to use a little gentle persuasion.It’s up to the V.C. to stop using civilians to hide behind. They’ve got extensive staging areas and infiltration routes impervious to permanent denial by our air or ground forces.Their’s are generally indistinguishable from the village population we are meant to protect.They don’t wear uniforms and blend into the people and the countryside.
‘You don’t know where you stand,’I commented.
‘Or what you’re standing on.The enemy includes women and children who might be implicated in setting lethal ambushes and maiming booby traps as well as landmines.They are fierce,skilled,well organised fighters and don’t stand and fight on conventional terms, offering targets. They don’t stick around and generally they fight on ground of their own choosing.They know it like the back of their hand.They feint, use quick hit-and-run tactics, and, when fighting pitched battles, only engage us at close quarters to make it hard for us to use our air superiority. Often after combat the only trace of the enemy is a blood trail. The Viet Cong are known to lift mines we have planted and used them as a source of supply in their own operations. When the VC find we aren't using the tracks but fanning out through the jungle,they re-position these toe poppers and bouncing betties so we will trigger them ourselves. The easy way is always mined. Meanwhile the VC use the jungle trails like highways, because they know the tracks are free .You’ve got to imagine the whole country like this. One complete area of operations.No front line.The next turn can be the wrong turn.Death can come from anywhere,at any time. In past wars the soldier endured major campaigns and battles with periods of respite.Today he’ll endure a shorter tour of duty with constant irregular sequences of skirmishes with little or no respite. Sleep comes in irregular and ill-timed little chunks to those on operations.It’s a combination of intense stress, fear and endless boredom.Much of his time comprises pumped up, enervating patrols, clad in clothes and boots that are dabby for days on end, with constant threats from foul water, unsafe local food, composite rations, skin eruptions, intestinal disorders,and malarial infection . His campaign comprises an irregular sequence of skirmishes in which apparent successes are measured by ground half-secured and counts of enemy dead, which might again be innocent villagers.On top of all this is friendly fire?’
‘No guesses from where’, I remarked. ‘There’s an World War II saying,’:"When the British shoot, the Germans duck, when the Germans shoot, the British duck, when the Americans shoot, everybody ducks....." We hear stories of Americans moving through the jungle smoking cigarettes and listening to the radio.Is this for real?’I asked, ‘in light of our national servicemen being able to be sent to Vietnam for secondment to American forces.
‘Australians fight a different war to the Americans,’was the reply. ‘Less thunder and lighting- but better . We fight fire with fire.With mundane search and destroy missions, ambush patrols, the constant stress of slow movement through the bush, taking even several hours to cover a few kilometres,grid square by grid square, constant stopping, listening for enemy activity and then moving on again.Our huckleberry friends, on the other hand, often mount large scale actions supported by immense artillery and air support, are highly mobile and use different tactical doctrine. At the same time they have exposed themselves to lethal ambushes that have claimed so many dead.When our patrols give chase to the guerrillas often covering the same ground and running into similar enemy emplacements our response is different.The Americans would do well to follow our example’.
‘How do they learn this?’I asked.
‘They’ll never know unless we tell them,’came back the reply.
I passed on my critical support to Westmoreland.
He came on like his feet were firmly planted on the ground.I had heard this old warhorse in a rarely mentioned radio interview in November 1965 when he showed a sense of reality about what he faced in Vietnam: "When the American people read the headlines about victories, there may be a tendency for them to magnify the magnitude of these actions. I do believe that there is a certain danger that we will be overwhelmed by a feeling of optimism and may lose sight of what I consider a true appraisal of the situation ... It involves a long conflict and we must be prepared to accept this.’
I reminded him of the rules of engagement and against violating the established strategic injunction. Never to commit Western military power to an extended large-scale land war on the mainland of Asia. Our naval and air power's effectiveness would be diluted, and any adversaries could exploit their great preponderance of manpower and pin us down for an uncertain duration. The Night Of The Long Knives.
As it turned out there was said to be an even more most immediate threat. The Communists were said to be on our doorstep. Indonesia, the Cold War’s coveted prize, had a populist President who had an alliance with the PKI or Indonesian Communist Party. Behind the policies that led us to Vietnam, ‘the other side of the hill’, lay a preoccupation with Indonesia’s real or supposed ambitions:a fear that Indonesia might cause trouble across the border between the western half of New Guinea which came under control in 1962,and the eastern half,administered by Australia.
On September 30, 1965, a portentous event took place in Java that would embolden those who believed that Communism should and could be physically defeated.
A stillborn military coup led to the abduction and murder of six generals. Abdul Nasution escaped this fate when armed men entered his home and tried to arrest him, but his infant daughter was killed.
The event convulsed Indonesia and was a turning point which eventually led to the replacement of the non-aligned President and a change in the direction of the country towards the capitalist West.During this time Indonesia became quite cut off from the world and one heard of serious numbers of of killings.
With
Studious Care.
“Our Indonesian friends feel a great sorrow. These events are very much to their detriment. We can expect that there will be an impact, both personal and academic, on anyone from there” David said. “Their families have all been affected. They must be worried sick about their safety in the wake of this turmoil. It’s hard for them to talk about it expansively as the situation back home is so muddied and perilous. The least we can do is to help them put their minds to rest about their studies while they get through this tragedy”.
We redoubled our efforts paying special attention to their needs. I enjoined Rick Lay to take a breather at my place in Gunnedah which he took me up on. He responded to my family’s warm hospitality with great gaiety, clearly enjoying the region’s peaceful calm.
Too calm deemed some,trumpeting with loud clangour. Lulled into a false sense of security, moves were afoot to rouse us with a clarion call to arms.
The Gathering Storm.
What did you learn in school today,
Dear little boy of mine?
I aimed to come to a fully satisfactory explanation of Communism that Rusk found elusive. To bridge that great gulf of understanding between that world and our world, ideological in character. To enter into their minds across that great ideological gulf and find out if and in what ways their processes of logic were so different.
Culling ideas from far and wide,barely scratching the surface, I raised many of the pertinent questions piling up.I was only nineteen,too young to vote,too young to drink. Green in judgement and in uniform, I thought long and hard, determined to listen to all sides. These informed my ideas even if I couldn’t agree with them less. Now those pushing for the War in Vietnam depicted it as a crucial struggle by the ‘Free World’ against a clear and present danger. This was the view I received from an unimpeachable source- the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The complete master of the bureau's huge flow of paper work.From his fiefdom,throned amid flags behind a raised, polished mahogany desk at the end of a 35-foot office,the dark curled head of the state security apparatus wrote encouraging me to read what he had written.
I found his comments on Communism of great interest.Mmm. This was a lot to take in.
I wanted to know more and discussed it with David over a meal of gristly lamb chops..
‘Russel Ward has his views about him..Let me ask him if he’s got a spare moment”.
David approached this dapper looking gentleman of my father’s vintage, eating his breakfast alone at the next table.
‘May I have a word,Russel.’
Russel was only too happy to oblige.
‘ Go for your life.Be my guest. Let’s chew the fat together,’he said in his pukka accent.
David said, ‘You shouldn’t be eating such blue ribbon lamb chops alone.’
‘Oh,no,not alone. As you can see, I’ve got mashed spuds and peas.’
Looking like a retired colonel he sported a neatly clipped military style soup strainer, leather patches on the elbows of his tweed jacket, and a cravat.His nose slanted downward from right to left at an angle of about ten degrees from the perpendicular,the result David told me later of a body surfing mishap. After introducing me, David brought up the matter of Hoover.
I asked Russel to discuss his ideas.
‘So what does he write about Communism?’asked Russel.
‘Feel free to read his speech, ‘Faith of Free Men’.Shall I pass it on to you?’
‘Thank you, I'll waste no time reading it.’
‘He portrays the Communists as “Masters of Deceit”, preying on the innocent so as to deliver the ‘ Land of the Free’ into the hands of the Soviets. He decries other authorities as being too lenient on those they see as subversives. Holding the thin blue line, he will weed them out if given a free hand. He claims to have been primed in the works of Marx and Lenin, and Stalin.’
‘He should know’,said Russel. ‘ Stalin created a state of terror based upon fearmongering- in which an enemy is created and targeted and its numbers exaggerated. While not on the same scale,Hoover did something outrageous in a country that prides itself in it’s democracy. He executed the ‘red raids’-the hysterical dragnet arrests of thousands of innocent aliens in 1919 and 1920.That’s one monumental ego you’ve stroked. What on earth inspired you to make nice with such a person?’he asked? ‘He’s not famous for his compassion.’
‘ In the first instance I thanked him for the F.B.I. seizing the slayers of Mrs. Viola Gregg Liuzzo last year.They captured them only hours after the civil rights worker's shotgun death in Alabama last year.I thanked him on behalf of his men who foiled wartime attempts to carry out acts of sabotage along the New York waterfront. It arrested German saboteurs within days after their submarines landed them on the Atlantic Coast.’
‘There are those who say he represents everything that is good and right about America’,said Russel. ‘They say the sun shines out of his arse.’
‘While he has steered clear of the Mafia,allowing it to operate nationally, his bureau did carry out some seemingly miraculous sweeps in the thirties when gangsterism ruled the land. It made the once epidemic crime of kidnapping a rarity. He has been touted like gangbusters by Cardinal Spellman as the nation’s saviour’.
‘And he rested on the seventh day,’said Russel. ‘This is all very good,but let’s skip the puffery and forget the op shots.Let’s face facts- nabbing gangsters is what he’s supposed to do.Credit where credit’s due.And incidentally,most of it is due to his agents.The comic books you read showed him swinging a machine gun to make arrests.That’s pure fiction.
There’s another less appealing aspect to this man’s record. Now get this-he’s better known for his antipathy to the civil rights movement.He’s always had a problem with African Americans.He hounded Marcus Garvey out of the country in 1923.When the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said that Southern blacks could not turn to their local F.B.I. offices with any assurance of sympathy or zeal for civil rights, Hoover called the reverend of peace "the most notorious liar in the country. Later, he had his staff invite newsmen to hear the taped record of F.B.I. bugs in Dr. King's hotel rooms.He cited this as hard evidence that ‘moral degenerates were leading the movement.’
‘ Who is the liar here. If this is true,Hoover has allowed himself to aid and abet the salacious claims of Southern racists and the extreme right-wing elements.’
‘Hoover claims that there’s nothing ‘political’ about the F.B.I.,that it’s tout court a ‘fact-finding agency’ that it ‘never makes recommendations or draws conclusions.Most revealingly he believes that Justice is merely incidental to law and order.
‘That coming from the head of the Justice Department! So this image of him as a tough honest to God,incorruptible streetfighting man is bunkum?’
‘It’s tough at the top,Allan.The daily restaurant dining, only the best hotel rooms,the lickspittle service,the sun that falls on the racecourse stands.It’s rumoured that when he loses,his losses are covered.
‘Are there no regulations to prevent this?Are there no checks and balances?
‘The Mafia make out the cheques and Hoover improves his bank balance. He doesn’t have to listen to the feedbox noise.He listens to gangsters like Meyer Lansky.For most people a race track is a place where windows clean people. For Hoover it’s a place where everything is completely covered.’
‘So it is true.Crime doesn’t pay.’
‘He is said to spend more time there rubbing shoulders with mobsters and washing his hands after people shake them than busting organized crime syndicates. In fact he denies they exist. In practice he puts just enough pressure on them to get them in a flap,not to raise their hackles completely. Why do people honour this man? Have we run out of human beings? I don’t know what people see in him.’
‘That makes two us.’
‘So if you were asked now if you go along with him,Allan,what would you say?’
‘‘Nothing doing.I’ve got my life savings that says he’s a bad pony.I wouldn’t bet on him if you paid me.I can see now his lukewarmness to the civil right movement.If that’s the case he’s not fit to breathe the same air as Dr.King. He’s obviously got a big axe to grind about Communism. With him,it’s all very black and white-and red.’
‘His boast is his agents are very highly trained’,said Russel.’To further the application of science to police work, many are attending universities to do research.’
‘DNA testing,fingerprinting,laboratory procedures’,I said.
‘Those too,but also archiving the views and activities of people of interest.Sleuthing the most intimate details of their lives, their sexual peccadillos and personal matters. Conducting ‘black bag jobs’- illegal break-ins and stings, planting microphones, and tapping telephones. This twisted,squirrely plenipotentiary is pushing for more penitentiaries.While he is playing the ponies, his men in black suits with spit polished shoes seem to show up wherever American student activists repair after being beaten up.He claims anti-war protesters are ‘halfway citizens who are neither
morally nor mentally mature.’He wants them to think there are red agents behind every letter box,under every bed. Trying to disrupt constitutionally protected political activities,his special agents use all kinds of hanky panky to stifle dissent on the campus.
‘What’s so special about these agents? And who is their main target?’I asked,my jaw dropping.
‘ The Free Speech Movement at the University of California at Berkeley in particular has sent up red flags with the F.B.I.’ Russel said. ‘Here is a public university that offers a tuition-free education rivalling those offered by Harvard, Princeton, or Yale; employing a constellation of Nobel laureates, and holds millions of dollars in government research contracts.
‘I can imagine how envious fundamentalist free marketeers would feel about that’,I said. ‘Lay out for me the agency’s activities there,Russel.’
‘Even as the university was helping the nation win World War II by overseeing the development of the atomic bomb, Hoover sent his agents were on a long fishing expedition. He suspected Berkeley students and professors of spying for the Soviet Union. In the cold war atmosphere of the late 40s and early 50s, the director's concern had grown when scores of faculty members refused to sign a special loyalty oath for university employees.
‘What’s the situation there now? Are they biting?’’
‘Over the last year the university’s been posing an even greater challenge to authority, generating one provocation after another. Hoover is said to be still spitting chips about the optional essay question for applicants in 1959.It asked, "What are the dangers to a democracy of a national police organization, like the FBI, which operates secretly and is unresponsive to public criticism?" He was concerned about student participation in the protest against the House Un-American Activities Committee at San Francisco City Hall and attempts to belay trains carrying troops bound for Vietnam.
‘Have they landed any big fish?Is there any one particular official Hoover holds responsible for allowing these actions,I asked?’
‘The campus President, Clerk Kerr. The wire haired attack dog for the corporate state saw him as insubordinate. Clerk opened it to free speech in more ways than one. He lifted the ban against Communist speakers, saying the role of the university is not to make ideas safe for students but to make students safe for ideas. He believes that students can make up their minds and make the correct decision if they are allowed to consider all sides of a dispute.’
‘Have all sides accepted this being fair to all?’
‘All this ran counter to the direction of the conservative leadership of the UC Regents and, last year, of the newly elected Republican governor, Ronald Reagan. In January 1967, three weeks after Reagan took office, the Regents dismissed Kerr.’
Aha! I was on the ball at last clued in straight from the horse’s mouth as well as it’s critics’.Carrying out a full field investigation, I deconstructed Hoover’s writings further. The name of the game became abundantly clear . The greatest tool of unscrupulous politicians wherever, without necessarily reaching the extent it did in Russia, or Germany or Indonesia,had to be fearmongering.It was the bullish Hoover’s skilful stage-management of publicity and emotional appeals to patriotism, as much as his heavy fisted,long reaching tentacles that made him the powerful incontestable figure he cut. Capturing the headlines and the public fancy, the making of the Hoover folk hero had established him securely. Sowing division and mistrust,aiming to disrupt. To successive presidents, wary of offending him,aware of his hair-trigger sensitivity to criticism, he was known as ‘The Boss’. To many others he was ‘Public Enema Number One’.
Reds Under The Bed.
Taking all this in,it dawned on me that it was this police czar who was the driving force behind the Red Scare, that pivotal episode in modern history. It was a largely successful attempt to sit on those expressing themselves and organizing legitimately, a national spasm of hatred and curtailment of liberties. It would be replicated a generation later after the Second World War, and once more Hoover and the Bureau were centrally involved.His fingerprints were all over McCarthy’s ackamaracka. He supplied writers for them and instructed this strawman how to release a story just before press deadline. That way reporters wouldn't have time to ask for rebuttals. Even more important, he advised him to avoid the phrase 'card-carrying Communist' which usually couldn't be proven, substituting "Communist sympathizer' or 'loyalty risk.' which required only some affiliation, however slight.
Hoover was both a product of and a major contributor to some of the ugliest moments in American history. This publicity bloodhound’s achievements are a particular kind of American success story, and a very disturbing one. The star chamber inquisition in which suspected Communists were hunted out,muckraked and removed officially lasted from 1950 to 1954 but its corrosive effect lingered for much longer. It’s hard to overstate the strength of the hysteria it vented. It aroused fears and suspicions and created hatred and bitterness. It stifled debate and dissent. Its hallmarks were a warlock's brew of character assassination, guilt by association and trial by publicity. Its techniques were the innuendo, the fast and loose charge, the big baldfaced lie. Its rhetoric was to harp ad nauseam on an all encompassing and largely spurious threat – that of domestic Communism.All levels of government were said to be riddled with these traitors. The racial origins of most interest to those behind the campaign were Jewish although they obviously couldn’t spell this out. This compounded the suspicion factor in the same way it did in the show trials in Prague. The Communist Party officials who were purged also just happened to be Jewish. As early as 1943 Joe Kennedy’s F.B.I. file, making clear his willingness to uncover Communists in the film industry, said he had ‘many Jewish friends’ there. Kennedy’s many snide aspersions and comments about Jews are found in his private notes and letters to family and intimates. He was anti-semitic to the point of accusing them of deliberately provoking Hitler with their movies.
What did you learn in school today,
Dear little boy of mine?
What did you learn in school
today,
Dear little boy of mine?
I learned that policemen are my friends.
I learned that justice never ends.
I learned that murderers die for their crimes
Even if we make a mistake sometimes.
As the clouds of war gathered on the horizon and Vietnam went up in flames,Australia’s military involvement there gathered pace. Tiny glimmerings of the massive human suffering under the bombardment came to the outside world. I read as extensively as I could about the struggle between Communism and the Western states, immersing myself in all the documents, books and articles I could find on the subject.Dear little boy of mine?
I learned that policemen are my friends.
I learned that justice never ends.
I learned that murderers die for their crimes
Even if we make a mistake sometimes.
I aimed to come to a fully satisfactory explanation of Communism that Rusk found elusive. To bridge that great gulf of understanding between that world and our world, ideological in character. To enter into their minds across that great ideological gulf and find out if and in what ways their processes of logic were so different.
Culling ideas from far and wide,barely scratching the surface, I raised many of the pertinent questions piling up.I was only nineteen,too young to vote,too young to drink. Green in judgement and in uniform, I thought long and hard, determined to listen to all sides. These informed my ideas even if I couldn’t agree with them less. Now those pushing for the War in Vietnam depicted it as a crucial struggle by the ‘Free World’ against a clear and present danger. This was the view I received from an unimpeachable source- the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The complete master of the bureau's huge flow of paper work.From his fiefdom,throned amid flags behind a raised, polished mahogany desk at the end of a 35-foot office,the dark curled head of the state security apparatus wrote encouraging me to read what he had written.
I found his comments on Communism of great interest.Mmm. This was a lot to take in.
I wanted to know more and discussed it with David over a meal of gristly lamb chops..
‘Russel Ward has his views about him..Let me ask him if he’s got a spare moment”.
David approached this dapper looking gentleman of my father’s vintage, eating his breakfast alone at the next table.
‘May I have a word,Russel.’
Russel was only too happy to oblige.
‘ Go for your life.Be my guest. Let’s chew the fat together,’he said in his pukka accent.
David said, ‘You shouldn’t be eating such blue ribbon lamb chops alone.’
‘Oh,no,not alone. As you can see, I’ve got mashed spuds and peas.’
Looking like a retired colonel he sported a neatly clipped military style soup strainer, leather patches on the elbows of his tweed jacket, and a cravat.His nose slanted downward from right to left at an angle of about ten degrees from the perpendicular,the result David told me later of a body surfing mishap. After introducing me, David brought up the matter of Hoover.
I asked Russel to discuss his ideas.
‘So what does he write about Communism?’asked Russel.
‘Feel free to read his speech, ‘Faith of Free Men’.Shall I pass it on to you?’
‘Thank you, I'll waste no time reading it.’
‘He portrays the Communists as “Masters of Deceit”, preying on the innocent so as to deliver the ‘ Land of the Free’ into the hands of the Soviets. He decries other authorities as being too lenient on those they see as subversives. Holding the thin blue line, he will weed them out if given a free hand. He claims to have been primed in the works of Marx and Lenin, and Stalin.’
‘He should know’,said Russel. ‘ Stalin created a state of terror based upon fearmongering- in which an enemy is created and targeted and its numbers exaggerated. While not on the same scale,Hoover did something outrageous in a country that prides itself in it’s democracy. He executed the ‘red raids’-the hysterical dragnet arrests of thousands of innocent aliens in 1919 and 1920.That’s one monumental ego you’ve stroked. What on earth inspired you to make nice with such a person?’he asked? ‘He’s not famous for his compassion.’
‘ In the first instance I thanked him for the F.B.I. seizing the slayers of Mrs. Viola Gregg Liuzzo last year.They captured them only hours after the civil rights worker's shotgun death in Alabama last year.I thanked him on behalf of his men who foiled wartime attempts to carry out acts of sabotage along the New York waterfront. It arrested German saboteurs within days after their submarines landed them on the Atlantic Coast.’
‘There are those who say he represents everything that is good and right about America’,said Russel. ‘They say the sun shines out of his arse.’
‘While he has steered clear of the Mafia,allowing it to operate nationally, his bureau did carry out some seemingly miraculous sweeps in the thirties when gangsterism ruled the land. It made the once epidemic crime of kidnapping a rarity. He has been touted like gangbusters by Cardinal Spellman as the nation’s saviour’.
There’s another less appealing aspect to this man’s record. Now get this-he’s better known for his antipathy to the civil rights movement.He’s always had a problem with African Americans.He hounded Marcus Garvey out of the country in 1923.When the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said that Southern blacks could not turn to their local F.B.I. offices with any assurance of sympathy or zeal for civil rights, Hoover called the reverend of peace "the most notorious liar in the country. Later, he had his staff invite newsmen to hear the taped record of F.B.I. bugs in Dr. King's hotel rooms.He cited this as hard evidence that ‘moral degenerates were leading the movement.’
‘ Who is the liar here. If this is true,Hoover has allowed himself to aid and abet the salacious claims of Southern racists and the extreme right-wing elements.’
‘Hoover claims that there’s nothing ‘political’ about the F.B.I.,that it’s tout court a ‘fact-finding agency’ that it ‘never makes recommendations or draws conclusions.Most revealingly he believes that Justice is merely incidental to law and order.
‘That coming from the head of the Justice Department! So this image of him as a tough honest to God,incorruptible streetfighting man is bunkum?’
‘It’s tough at the top,Allan.The daily restaurant dining, only the best hotel rooms,the lickspittle service,the sun that falls on the racecourse stands.It’s rumoured that when he loses,his losses are covered.
‘Are there no regulations to prevent this?Are there no checks and balances?
‘The Mafia make out the cheques and Hoover improves his bank balance. He doesn’t have to listen to the feedbox noise.He listens to gangsters like Meyer Lansky.For most people a race track is a place where windows clean people. For Hoover it’s a place where everything is completely covered.’
‘So it is true.Crime doesn’t pay.’
‘He is said to spend more time there rubbing shoulders with mobsters and washing his hands after people shake them than busting organized crime syndicates. In fact he denies they exist. In practice he puts just enough pressure on them to get them in a flap,not to raise their hackles completely. Why do people honour this man? Have we run out of human beings? I don’t know what people see in him.’
‘That makes two us.’
‘So if you were asked now if you go along with him,Allan,what would you say?’
‘‘Nothing doing.I’ve got my life savings that says he’s a bad pony.I wouldn’t bet on him if you paid me.I can see now his lukewarmness to the civil right movement.If that’s the case he’s not fit to breathe the same air as Dr.King. He’s obviously got a big axe to grind about Communism. With him,it’s all very black and white-and red.’
‘His boast is his agents are very highly trained’,said Russel.’To further the application of science to police work, many are attending universities to do research.’
‘DNA testing,fingerprinting,laboratory procedures’,I said.
‘Those too,but also archiving the views and activities of people of interest.Sleuthing the most intimate details of their lives, their sexual peccadillos and personal matters. Conducting ‘black bag jobs’- illegal break-ins and stings, planting microphones, and tapping telephones. This twisted,squirrely plenipotentiary is pushing for more penitentiaries.While he is playing the ponies, his men in black suits with spit polished shoes seem to show up wherever American student activists repair after being beaten up.He claims anti-war protesters are ‘halfway citizens who are neither
morally nor mentally mature.’He wants them to think there are red agents behind every letter box,under every bed. Trying to disrupt constitutionally protected political activities,his special agents use all kinds of hanky panky to stifle dissent on the campus.
‘What’s so special about these agents? And who is their main target?’I asked,my jaw dropping.
‘ The Free Speech Movement at the University of California at Berkeley in particular has sent up red flags with the F.B.I.’ Russel said. ‘Here is a public university that offers a tuition-free education rivalling those offered by Harvard, Princeton, or Yale; employing a constellation of Nobel laureates, and holds millions of dollars in government research contracts.
‘I can imagine how envious fundamentalist free marketeers would feel about that’,I said. ‘Lay out for me the agency’s activities there,Russel.’
‘Even as the university was helping the nation win World War II by overseeing the development of the atomic bomb, Hoover sent his agents were on a long fishing expedition. He suspected Berkeley students and professors of spying for the Soviet Union. In the cold war atmosphere of the late 40s and early 50s, the director's concern had grown when scores of faculty members refused to sign a special loyalty oath for university employees.
‘What’s the situation there now? Are they biting?’’
‘Over the last year the university’s been posing an even greater challenge to authority, generating one provocation after another. Hoover is said to be still spitting chips about the optional essay question for applicants in 1959.It asked, "What are the dangers to a democracy of a national police organization, like the FBI, which operates secretly and is unresponsive to public criticism?" He was concerned about student participation in the protest against the House Un-American Activities Committee at San Francisco City Hall and attempts to belay trains carrying troops bound for Vietnam.
‘Have they landed any big fish?Is there any one particular official Hoover holds responsible for allowing these actions,I asked?’
‘The campus President, Clerk Kerr. The wire haired attack dog for the corporate state saw him as insubordinate. Clerk opened it to free speech in more ways than one. He lifted the ban against Communist speakers, saying the role of the university is not to make ideas safe for students but to make students safe for ideas. He believes that students can make up their minds and make the correct decision if they are allowed to consider all sides of a dispute.’
‘Have all sides accepted this being fair to all?’
‘All this ran counter to the direction of the conservative leadership of the UC Regents and, last year, of the newly elected Republican governor, Ronald Reagan. In January 1967, three weeks after Reagan took office, the Regents dismissed Kerr.’
Aha! I was on the ball at last clued in straight from the horse’s mouth as well as it’s critics’.Carrying out a full field investigation, I deconstructed Hoover’s writings further. The name of the game became abundantly clear . The greatest tool of unscrupulous politicians wherever, without necessarily reaching the extent it did in Russia, or Germany or Indonesia,had to be fearmongering.It was the bullish Hoover’s skilful stage-management of publicity and emotional appeals to patriotism, as much as his heavy fisted,long reaching tentacles that made him the powerful incontestable figure he cut. Capturing the headlines and the public fancy, the making of the Hoover folk hero had established him securely. Sowing division and mistrust,aiming to disrupt. To successive presidents, wary of offending him,aware of his hair-trigger sensitivity to criticism, he was known as ‘The Boss’. To many others he was ‘Public Enema Number One’.
Reds Under The Bed.
‘Everybody’s
afraid of being called a ‘Red.’ I cut myself shaving and was afraid to bleed”.
Bob Hope.
‘What did Napolean do for relaxation? He read a book. What did
Lincoln do for relaxation? He read a book. What does Congress do for
relaxation? They book a red.’ Jimmy Durante.
Taking all this in,it dawned on me that it was this police czar who was the driving force behind the Red Scare, that pivotal episode in modern history. It was a largely successful attempt to sit on those expressing themselves and organizing legitimately, a national spasm of hatred and curtailment of liberties. It would be replicated a generation later after the Second World War, and once more Hoover and the Bureau were centrally involved.His fingerprints were all over McCarthy’s ackamaracka. He supplied writers for them and instructed this strawman how to release a story just before press deadline. That way reporters wouldn't have time to ask for rebuttals. Even more important, he advised him to avoid the phrase 'card-carrying Communist' which usually couldn't be proven, substituting "Communist sympathizer' or 'loyalty risk.' which required only some affiliation, however slight.
Hoover was both a product of and a major contributor to some of the ugliest moments in American history. This publicity bloodhound’s achievements are a particular kind of American success story, and a very disturbing one. The star chamber inquisition in which suspected Communists were hunted out,muckraked and removed officially lasted from 1950 to 1954 but its corrosive effect lingered for much longer. It’s hard to overstate the strength of the hysteria it vented. It aroused fears and suspicions and created hatred and bitterness. It stifled debate and dissent. Its hallmarks were a warlock's brew of character assassination, guilt by association and trial by publicity. Its techniques were the innuendo, the fast and loose charge, the big baldfaced lie. Its rhetoric was to harp ad nauseam on an all encompassing and largely spurious threat – that of domestic Communism.All levels of government were said to be riddled with these traitors. The racial origins of most interest to those behind the campaign were Jewish although they obviously couldn’t spell this out. This compounded the suspicion factor in the same way it did in the show trials in Prague. The Communist Party officials who were purged also just happened to be Jewish. As early as 1943 Joe Kennedy’s F.B.I. file, making clear his willingness to uncover Communists in the film industry, said he had ‘many Jewish friends’ there. Kennedy’s many snide aspersions and comments about Jews are found in his private notes and letters to family and intimates. He was anti-semitic to the point of accusing them of deliberately provoking Hitler with their movies.
In the early 1950s fears of Russia and the bomb were based on a solid enough foundation and enabled McCarthy a backing he could never have received at another time. The Chinese Communist Party had gained power, Eastern Europe was under Soviet control,blocking the United States’ access to markets and spheres of investment in one-sixth of the earth’s territory.It was feared Communist domination of world markets and food supplies would slowly strangle the West’s economies, greatly lower our standards of living and relegate the U.S. in particular to the position of second-class power. As if that wasn't bad enough there was a series of spy scandals involving American collaborating with the Soviet Union.
The success of the McCarthyists in feeding into these fears brings to mind the old adage that there where is smoke, there has to be fire. No senator could be so impolitic or devil may care to make such unfounded charges. There had to be something true to it.Well wadda ya know, representatives of Bush the Lesser’s Administration would get up to the same old tricks,crying wolf,throwing out the red meat, convincing people of the imminent threat posed by Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction.Would anybody care? Hollywood had introduced us to them in ‘Vietnam:The Sequel’. They’re Muslims,aren’t they? And they all want to blow up everybody, don't they? To liberate the oil fields,the neocons carried out a totally unjustified pre-emptive strike in full view of the world. Setting one Middle Eastern group, whether it be by religion, by sect, by ethnicity, against the other,they gave birth to a fundamentalist frankenstein that would turn on them and all. This time it took people less time to see through their intentions as the cracks in the imperialist façade of supremacy and strength become so wide.Everybody’s got to learn sometime.
One of the main targets of McCarthyism was government officials. Many people had to prove their loyalty. In 1947 loyalty boards were established which were empowered to examine federal employees who could be sacked on the basis of anonymous accusations to the FBI without any specific finding that they had done anything disloyal. Thousands of federal employees were summoned before kafkaesque loyalty hearings and many were forced from government work. Under these circumstances they found their career prospects truncated. The House of un-American Activities (H.U.A.C) was set up to buffalo targets more widely. People with a liberal outlook.. Burt Lancaster was nearly blacklisted in the late 40’s because of this. The FBI kept a file on him detailing his activities,as they had done on "the Almanac gang",the folk musicians led by Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger back in 1942. Following the directive of J. Edgar Hoover they watched them for signs of a conspiracy to overthrow the government. Others under surveillance included Paul Robeson and Pearl Buck. ‘ J. Eager Beaver’, the literary critic, amassed a dossier on Pearl which rounded out to a hefty three hundred pages.
Even Bob Hope was deemed by a Wisconsin newspaper to be a “communist’ and got some hate-mail to that effect when he joked about McCarthy.He made with a whole series of jokes involving the colour red. In his Christmas 1952 TV show, Hope made out he'd had a letter from Santa Claus: "Dear Robert, thank you for ... the beautiful new brown suit you sent me ... But tell Senator McCarthy I'm going to wear my old red one anyway."
He announced "I have it on good authority that McCarthy is going to disclose the names of two million communists. He has just got his hands on the Moscow telephone directory."
"Eisenhower admitted that the budget can't be balanced and McCarthy said the Communists are taking over. You don't know what to worry about these days – whether the country will be overthrown or overdrawn."
Referring to the security surrounding his game of golf with Eisenhower,he said: ‘I had to be cleared by the F.B.I.,the Secret Service,the army and the navy-and they all had to be cleared by Senator McCarthy.’
Charlie Chaplin would lose his clearance. He had attracted the hostile interest of the FBI. under Hoover’s direction. I hadn’t been aware how any one could have hounded such a treasure for his alleged political sympathies.It would appear Hoover felt that the target of the film The Great Dictator was as much the U.S. as Germany.
Charlie had posed the question as to why the world of respectability and authority offered so little to the soul of man.It’s representatives interrogated him about his racial origins and sexual activities. In a smear campaign, he was accused of practically every sin under the sun. He drew fire particularly over his black comedy Verdoux, which was an attack on the morality of war. This was the story of a modern Bluebeard who considers it only right and proper to bump off his wives, seeing that the state, rather than coming down on mass murderers, hails them as heroes and the saviours of their country. The direct allusion to the atom bomb, and the way its use by the Allies against Japan was put morally on the same plane as the German concentration camps, injured the patriotic pride of the American public, and Chaplin was accused of ingratitude to the country in which he had achieved such wealth and fame. The release of Monsieur Verdoux provoked boycotts.
Charlie shrugged off all these assaults “If you step off the plane with your left feet, they accuse you of being a Communist”, he lamented. He was accused of being unpatriotic by a spokesman for the Catholic war veterans. He retorted that he himself had backed the war effort through donations and speeches and his two sons had fought in the war. He had even been taken to task for having floated the idea of opening a new front against Germany in 1942. Along with other luminaries such as Pearl Buck he had played an active role in the American Committee for Russian War Relief. He denied ever having had connections to the Communist Party: “I have thirty million dollars of business – what am I talking Communism for?” When asked if he thought the Communist way of life outshined that of the US, his answer was firm: “No, of course. If I did, I’d probably go there and live. At the same time I am not antagonistic. But if they were to invade America, I’d take up arms.’ Summing his feelings on where he belonged, he stated: “I have always had a sense of internationalism. My great love has always been in this country, but I don’t feel allied to any one particular country. I am a citizen of the world.'
The success of the McCarthyists in feeding into these fears brings to mind the old adage that there where is smoke, there has to be fire. No senator could be so impolitic or devil may care to make such unfounded charges. There had to be something true to it.Well wadda ya know, representatives of Bush the Lesser’s Administration would get up to the same old tricks,crying wolf,throwing out the red meat, convincing people of the imminent threat posed by Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction.Would anybody care? Hollywood had introduced us to them in ‘Vietnam:The Sequel’. They’re Muslims,aren’t they? And they all want to blow up everybody, don't they? To liberate the oil fields,the neocons carried out a totally unjustified pre-emptive strike in full view of the world. Setting one Middle Eastern group, whether it be by religion, by sect, by ethnicity, against the other,they gave birth to a fundamentalist frankenstein that would turn on them and all. This time it took people less time to see through their intentions as the cracks in the imperialist façade of supremacy and strength become so wide.Everybody’s got to learn sometime.
One of the main targets of McCarthyism was government officials. Many people had to prove their loyalty. In 1947 loyalty boards were established which were empowered to examine federal employees who could be sacked on the basis of anonymous accusations to the FBI without any specific finding that they had done anything disloyal. Thousands of federal employees were summoned before kafkaesque loyalty hearings and many were forced from government work. Under these circumstances they found their career prospects truncated. The House of un-American Activities (H.U.A.C) was set up to buffalo targets more widely. People with a liberal outlook.. Burt Lancaster was nearly blacklisted in the late 40’s because of this. The FBI kept a file on him detailing his activities,as they had done on "the Almanac gang",the folk musicians led by Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger back in 1942. Following the directive of J. Edgar Hoover they watched them for signs of a conspiracy to overthrow the government. Others under surveillance included Paul Robeson and Pearl Buck. ‘ J. Eager Beaver’, the literary critic, amassed a dossier on Pearl which rounded out to a hefty three hundred pages.
Even Bob Hope was deemed by a Wisconsin newspaper to be a “communist’ and got some hate-mail to that effect when he joked about McCarthy.He made with a whole series of jokes involving the colour red. In his Christmas 1952 TV show, Hope made out he'd had a letter from Santa Claus: "Dear Robert, thank you for ... the beautiful new brown suit you sent me ... But tell Senator McCarthy I'm going to wear my old red one anyway."
He announced "I have it on good authority that McCarthy is going to disclose the names of two million communists. He has just got his hands on the Moscow telephone directory."
"Eisenhower admitted that the budget can't be balanced and McCarthy said the Communists are taking over. You don't know what to worry about these days – whether the country will be overthrown or overdrawn."
Referring to the security surrounding his game of golf with Eisenhower,he said: ‘I had to be cleared by the F.B.I.,the Secret Service,the army and the navy-and they all had to be cleared by Senator McCarthy.’
The
Red Light.
Charlie had posed the question as to why the world of respectability and authority offered so little to the soul of man.It’s representatives interrogated him about his racial origins and sexual activities. In a smear campaign, he was accused of practically every sin under the sun. He drew fire particularly over his black comedy Verdoux, which was an attack on the morality of war. This was the story of a modern Bluebeard who considers it only right and proper to bump off his wives, seeing that the state, rather than coming down on mass murderers, hails them as heroes and the saviours of their country. The direct allusion to the atom bomb, and the way its use by the Allies against Japan was put morally on the same plane as the German concentration camps, injured the patriotic pride of the American public, and Chaplin was accused of ingratitude to the country in which he had achieved such wealth and fame. The release of Monsieur Verdoux provoked boycotts.
Charlie shrugged off all these assaults “If you step off the plane with your left feet, they accuse you of being a Communist”, he lamented. He was accused of being unpatriotic by a spokesman for the Catholic war veterans. He retorted that he himself had backed the war effort through donations and speeches and his two sons had fought in the war. He had even been taken to task for having floated the idea of opening a new front against Germany in 1942. Along with other luminaries such as Pearl Buck he had played an active role in the American Committee for Russian War Relief. He denied ever having had connections to the Communist Party: “I have thirty million dollars of business – what am I talking Communism for?” When asked if he thought the Communist way of life outshined that of the US, his answer was firm: “No, of course. If I did, I’d probably go there and live. At the same time I am not antagonistic. But if they were to invade America, I’d take up arms.’ Summing his feelings on where he belonged, he stated: “I have always had a sense of internationalism. My great love has always been in this country, but I don’t feel allied to any one particular country. I am a citizen of the world.'
Charlie was denied a re-entry visa to America when he left to attend the premiere of ‘Limelight’. He would have had to submit to any inquiry to prove his moral worth. In 1957 he produced ‘A King in New York’, a comedy taking to task HUAC- ‘a dishonest phrase to begin with, elastic enough to wrap around the throat and strangle the voice of any American citizen whose honest opinion is a minority of one.’ The film brought fresh accusations of pro-Communism which Charlie specifically denied.
The Lives Of Others.
Russel had noticed the sender’s name printed on the envelope I placed beside my place at the table. ‘Has it already been opened?’he asked.
‘What do you mean?’I asked.
‘I see it’s from Aaron Copland ? May I?’ He held it up to the light. ‘Steaming open an envelope is one of the oldest tricks in the book,’he said. ‘It's really a cinch, and, if done carefully, is barely noticeable by the recipient. They go for the very end of either side of the flap, because some envelopes don't have any glue there. Watch for any wrinkling, rubbing and tearing.’
’Why would anyone tamper like that”I asked.
‘I was only half joking’,he said. ‘This wouldn’t happen to you- hopefully.But Copland’s correspondences were scrutinised by the FBI.’
‘Didn’t they have anything better to do?I asked.’Moreover it’s a felony’.
‘Too right,but they are a law to themselves.They investigated Copland In 1936 for having defended the American Communist Party.As from that moment he was blackballed. In 1953 his Abraham Lincoln Tribute was withdrawn from the Inauguration concert for President Eisenhower. He testified to the Congress that he had never been a member of the Party. McCarthy was interested in the reasons for Copland being hired to give US Embassy sponsored lectures on music in Italy and Latin America. He asked Copland “If you were a member of the Communist Party, let’s assume you were, and you were selected to lecture you would be bound to try wherever you could to sell the Communist idea, wouldn’t you”.
Copland replied “No doubt” adding “I had no fear of sitting down at a table with a known Communist because I was so sure of my position as a loyal American”.
The Senator fired back “With what known Communists have you sat down at a table”.
“Copland replied that there were the Soviet composers he had met during his international musical career. “Well, I assume they are Communists” he said. He was not asked to come back to any more public hearings.’ Transcripts of Copland’s hearing before McCarthy released fifty years afterwards confirmed what Russel had said. It was said that Aaron had parried the Senator with a compound of ‘languor’ and ‘outrage’.What us lesser mortals might call ‘language’.
I supported the encouragement of accountable government by Senator Wayne Morse and his open views on social and civil issues. He appreciated my kind comments. I agreed with him on the need for greater transparency in political horse trading. Such precaution would do away with the problem of locking the stable door after the horse had bolted. I spoke of his ideals of foresight, intellectual independence and integrity. A fiery maverick, he was known as ‘the conscience of the Senate’. Once he got on his hobbyhorse and starts talking about human rights, you can't get him to discuss anything else. A constant thorn in the backside of his collegial troglodytes, there undoubtedly would have been a sigh of relief when on one occasion he was kicked in the mouth by one of his precious horses in training. This left him in hospital seemingly out of the running with his mouth wired shut. His colleagues would have some respite from this zealot from Oregon. However he would have a note taker in his hospital room relaying messages to the Senate. Later he said it was amazing how much a man could talk with his mouth wired shut. It was this spirit and exuberance that characterized his career.
He believed that if you give people the truth, they will make the right decision: “The interests of my country are more important than the interests of my party”.
I thanked Senator Morse for having the spunk to dare snaffle McCarthyism.
He said “McCarthyism is a dangerous threat to the freedom and liberty of every American because it substitutes trial by accusation for a trial by proof”. He asked the Senate: “What is a nation if its gains security and loses its liberty?”
Senators Morse and McCarthy were slated to debate each other on the topic ‘The Fairness of Congressional Investigations’. The debate was sponsored by the American Federation of Labour. It did not take place because McCarthy backed out at the last minute. However they would square off like two prizefighters in a 45 minutes Senate debate. Senator Morse accused McCarthy of “political thuggery”. McCarthy had claimed that Morse was a “Communist sympathizer”. Morse was instrumental in pushing through the censure that would ultimately decide the fate of Senator
McCarthy. There were times when he would bend ideologically under McCarthy’s bulldog hectoring but he never broke.
One area in which Morse would not bend in his principles was the use of wiretapping as evidence to seek out suspected Communists. In a statement to the American Bar Association, he said wiretapping was a police state practice and its members should resist such totalitarian methods. He believed the wiretapping was not selective, that the privacy of those innocent of crime would be jeopardized. He said the practice was ‘a lazy policeman’s tool and that it was a Communist tool’.
Related to his stand against McCarthy was that he took against the China Lobby which resisted recognition of the newly created People’s Republic of China. He requested that this powerful lobby be investigated for reason of illegal activities. He believed there was an exorbitant use of Treasury funds for personal financing of the lobby. He feared they would suck the US into a long and costly land war with the People’s Republic.
Another of the few men and women in public life to dare confront the rabid senator from Wisconsin was J. William Fulbright, the Senator from Arkansas. I thanked him for this daring which he appreciated. And encouraged him in his many pursuits which I will mention in the coming pages..
jackal Lehman around your foul coyote neck and jump into the Potomac”. On the contrary the three Senators reached the critical numbers necessary to censure McCarthy leading to his political demise.
Noticeably one of the numbers missing was Congressman Kennedy who later conceded that the censure was just too difficult both politically and personally. He was loath to fall in with more full-blooded liberals in his party, such as Morse and Fulbright, seen as “fuzzy-minded” by some.
In a short period I had changed my idea of this war and the alliance totally. Too many sensitivities to tamp down were flagging up.At first my pavlovian ovation was one influenced by my roseate thoughts on the Second World War. It had conferred unquestionable prestige on men in uniform.I could now see the Emperor in his real clothes. I was an easy mark. I was only nineteen.In Vietnam every battle,every crisis was raw material for writers and the cameras.In turn the news gatherers focused the impact of every act of drama or violence for millions of viewers and readers. Now through the open eyes of others,
recoiling with revulsion at the carnage, I saw the war being prosecuted by an industry whose sole business was death . And my oh my,was this funny business booming.
Like those who ran the show,my initial understanding of the cauldron was frighteningly superficial and simplistic.I didn’t know enough. It was a doddle to invade Vietnam but what to do on day two if we got boxed in.
There were too many imponderables. They,the decision takers were making it up as they went along. We,the public, were woefully informed. I had got swept up in the momentary illusion that our involvement with such a pre-eminent power was appropriate. Like many,I had bought into a myth. For my part the more bombs they dropped on people, the lower the discomforting penny dropped for me.I experienced an epiphany, a spiritual flash,the first of many that would change the way I viewed myself. Ding dong,I was catching on, growing sceptical of tendentious official accounts and, kept up at night, uneasy about how the war was going. It was impossible to see the corner let alone around it.
The chaotic reality unfolding on the ground in Vietnam bore little resemblance to the upbeat accounts offered by geopoliticians and generals who were prosecuting the war. These life takers and heart breakers were more concerned about ink being spilled over their activities than blood.
I had had no idea the extent of the lie nor the level of deception. ‘I wasassured the decision to intervene militarily was bipartisan,’I told Russel.
‘The word bipartisan usually means some larger than usual deception is being carried out.’
I pointed out to him, ‘Have you ever realized that the term Secretary of State contains the word ‘secret’.
‘ What’s the difference between an archaeologist and the Secretary of State?’ asked Russel.
'An archaeologist uncovers the unknown. The top diplomat covers the known.’
I wanna do I wanna do
Lord I wanna do the Blood Boogaloo
I'm just a Redneck son of a gun
I wanna kill me a gook before dawn.
The chance "meeting engagements" described by Westmoreland involved upwards of 50 US troops ending up bagged and tagged. His press conference in October 1965, after the slaughter of 155 US troops at Landing Zone Albany, in the battle of Ia Drang was a devil of this wilful misrepresentation: "I consider this an unprecedented victory. At no time during the engagement were American troops forced to withdraw or move back from their positions, except for tactical manoeuvres. The enemy fled from the scene." Of course we weren’t told told the real facts ‘til later.
Facing the facts flat on,with my moral squint I read critical reports by probing,unembedded journalists on the frontlines, who prized truth more than access to the powerful,who didn’t tailor their reports. I was horrified by the coldness, the calculatedness, and in particular the language of American military men. Like ‘Stomp them to death’, the words of General William De Puy,Westmoreland’s chief of operations. It would turn out they were only falling in line with their boss . In the summer of 1966, shortly before Neil Sheehan of The New York Times left to return stateside, Westmoreland did him the farewell courtesy of a personally escorted day in the field. “At one point in the trip,” Sheehan recalls later, “I asked the general if he was worried about the large number of civilian casualties from the air strikes and the shelling. He looked at me carefully. ‘Yes, Neil, it is a problem,’ he said, ‘but it does deprive the enemy of the population, doesn’t it?”’ . If Mao had described guerrillas as fish swimming in the sea,he was going to empty the sea. His object, in his own words, was to decimate the North Vietnamese population "to the point of national disaster for generations to come.’ Westmoreland had accepted the death of a whole countryside because he despaired of any other way to ease the secretary of defense’s disquiet or to sustain the national security adviser’s imbecile optimism.
The countryside alone,it was stressed repeatedly, was where the Viet Cong had any real support and influence on a broad base in. Later the general opined that "The Oriental doesn't put the same high price on life as does a Westerner...We value life and human dignity. They don't care about life and human dignity."
‘ And I suppose he does. For all he cares, the entire country could go up in flames. War is a sordid business for sure,’ I said to Russel.
'It’s as dirty as the businesses who cash in on it,’said Russel. ‘It reflects the demands of their representatives to get them the super profits that they want but can’t get in the usual way. In the words of von Clausewitz, ‘War is a continuation of politics by other means." A function of class society,the capitalists of the stronger industrial states no longer wage war against each other as in the past but combine to exploit and control systematically the poorer countries.The poorer,the better.At their expense,today’s multi-nationals will better absorb the turbulent cycles of boom and depression generated.
‘The system is one of destructive creativity. Capital’s endless pursuit of new outlets for class-based accumulation requires for its continuation the destruction of both pre-existing natural conditions and previous social relations. Class exploitation, imperialism, war, and ecological devastation are not mere unrelated accidents of history but interrelated, intrinsic features of capitalist development. There has always been the danger, moreover, that this destructive creativity can turn into what has been called the “destructive uncontrollability” that is capital’s ultimate destiny. The destruction built into the logic of profit can take over and predominate, undermining not only the conditions of production but also those of life itself.’
Today it is clear that such destructive uncontrollability has come to characterize more and more the entire capitalist world economy,fighting to encompass the planet as a whole.’
‘When did you become aware how this destructive system is shaped?’
‘In my salad days I too was ignorant and naïve. A real schnook,I didn’t know the first thing about the relationship between politics and life. Like any well brought up conservative,I felt politics was to be severely avoided.Because I had no desire to change anything in the divinely ordered social arrangement of the world,it suited me very well to consider I had no politics.
‘Yet you had another think coming,Russel?’
‘It was an exercise as a cadet sergeant in my School Cadet Corps that sowed the seeds of my doubts. The enemy,we were told,was a party of unemployed rioters,led by Communist agitators who had marched off into the hills plundering farms and orchards. ‘Intelligence’ reports came in that,intoxicated with pillaged wine,they were heading towards Adelaide which we had to stop from being sacked. In what we were told was a simulation of actual warface we took up up defensive positions along the road, bushwhacking them, firing off hundreds of blank cartridges. That was my road to Damascus. The great lesson that came out of that day was that the ultimate enemy we were training to come up against was not the Germans, French or other bodgy foreigners we learned about in history lessons, but one in our very midst- our unemployed fellow countrymen. Why did so many their authority exceed rather than heed what we were told about Jesus Christ,the prince of peace who made wars to cease unto the ends of the earth.Who loved the poor and needy.
'I guess they needed a class system.’
‘Exactly. Something they use to discriminate against someone who looks like you and me.’
‘If they can drum up a fight against enemies as white and similar in appearance to us,how much easier is it for them crying wolf, to vilify one that looks different- a poor people with different coloured skin and an epicanthic fold.’
‘That’s when it’s easy for them to quote Matthew. "Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.’
Westmoreland's fatal flaw was that,unable to extend the war, he thought that if he confronted the communist forces directly, either on the ground or with his massive airpower, he could simply win by attrition. At the time, few in America would have believed that a suzerain power like the U.S. would have had any problems in claiming Vietnam’s scalp. One had an army based around the most prosperous economy in the world whereas Vietnam was seen as a ‘third world’ nation.It’s resistance army of peasants, at first armed with homemade and captured weapons, then with modern firearms supplied from outside, were still without an air force, navy, or heavy artillery.It was inconceivable that it could humble the global superpower.
For many in the US military, victory was only a matter of time.They believed that this time span would be short. The Communists' death toll was very heavy, and this encouraged the delusion that the U.S. was romping home , as Westmoreland could not imagine how relatively small countries like North or South Vietnam could sustain such massive casualties.
This led to the deliberately aggressive policy policy of search and destroy,with Westmoreland seeking to draw the forces of the National Liberation Front into the open where they could be eliminated. He believed that the NLF could be defeated through saturation use of anti-personnel ordnance, high-tech mobility, and large-unit battles, air power, massive bombing, and defoliation campaigns.
Westmoreland was once asked: "What is the answer to insurgency?" He replied: "Firepower." America needed to hit North Vietnam “surely, swiftly, and powerfully...with sufficient force to hurt”, as at Khe Sanh, where B-52s dropped more than 100,000 tonnes of bombs over two months. And troops needed to be poured in. General Westmoreland's tactics were simple:ring Saigon in a series of giant impenetrable forts-a direct echo of French thinking,and take the war to the enemy in the countryside, and kill him faster than he could be replaced. Where possible, apply overwhelming, stunning force. Through the sledgehammer strategy of "Harassment and interdiction fire," anything that moved could be killed.
'A great country”, he liked to say, quoting the Duke of Wellington, “cannot wage a little war.” His idea was not to seize or hold territory but to kill enemy soldiers in their jungle redoubts. Fast machines,massive damage,quick getaway.However the resistance’s guerrilla style of warfare allowed it to dictate the strategic pace and deny the Empire it’s technological advantage. The resistance was taking the punishment, and ever and again having success in their military confrontation, but they still relentlessly pursued their political campaign from village level up. Westmoreland did not understand - nor did anyone else understand - that there was not a breaking point. Instead of breaking it’s morale, it was breaking that of the Empire.
After much reflection I concluded my call for a massive aid program to improve Vietnamese living standards was rather utopian. The Saigon regime was incapable of carrying out land reform, and with all the best will in the world,with whatever force we applied, we would always be building on sand.We were actually fighting the war to prevent Indochina from carrying out successful social and economic development. Even if we had wanted to,the Communists had control of the North and significant support in the South .Besides, the Americans,putting aid on the backburner, still felt they were militarily invincible.
'What about working through the U.N.?'
With both the USA and USSR able to veto decisions, the UN was a nullity in cases in which there was any element of superpower conflict. A 'neutral' government with NLF participation could have been only temporary or superficial.
Like most of the rest of the world I came to loathe the wholesale destruction heaped on Indochina by the prosecution of the war.I was at odds with my enlistment. It was the stabs of my conscience,not my bayonet that would now be my prod .No more soldierly silly buggers .
‘ That does it!’I said.‘I wouldn’t touch these warlords with a bargepole now,"I told Russel. ‘Not on your life.I’ve been had. I fell for their line,hook,line and sinker. They’ve led me along. Where they’re going to is the edge of darkness-but not in my name.I’m sick to death of it .’
‘Now you’re talking. It was only a question of time until your gorge would rise,’ he said. ‘You can be
forgiven for feeling betrayed. I’m going to give it to you straight.They’re pulling the wool over most peoples’ eyes’,said Russel. ‘ In war,as is often said, truth is still the first casualty, and information is as powerful as bullets. To defend their precious ‘credibility’,they’re selling a big pack of lies.As usual.They don’t see them as lies.They convince themselves they’re just stretching the truth,revising it’s parameters.’
‘Does it have to be that way?
‘Suppose you were a member of Parliament and suppose you were a liar- but I repeat
myself.’
‘So what’s true in their stories isn’t new and what’s new in their stories isn’t true.’
‘Most politicians lie between their teeth all the time, not just occasionally, but all the time.’
‘How do we know when they prevaricate so?’
‘The cynical answer is that it’s when their mouths are moving. Of course not everything these pinocchios say is a lie, but anything they say could be a lie.Then there are the few who can handle the truth.’
‘Like all good Americans, following the example of George Washington. Not only doing something senseless and destructive like chopping down a cherry tree, but admitting to it immediately.’
‘If only this romantic legend was true.Do you know why I think his father wouldn’t have punished him?’
‘ George still had the hatchet in his hand.’
‘Unfortunately in the case of these wartime atrocities it’ll take time for the truth to come to light.’
‘I feel shameful I didn’t cotton on to this much sooner,I said defensively. ‘I feel a real chump. Mind you, I meant well.I wasn’t trying to ingratiate myself with them. I felt safe to assume what they were doing was for the protection of our people and country.I believed our leaders had integrity by definition.I wasn’t applying to be part of any imperialist cheer squad. I don’t want any more affiliations with these hitmen, the blood of innocents on my hands. I don’t want any mark on my record an accomplice to crimes against humanity.’
‘Look Allan,every national grouping is capable of the most brutal acts and the most self-righteous excuses.Like any national entity, the Vietnamese themselves are no angels.They are obviously a divided people,but our barging in only inflames that.All people must have the right to rule-or misrule themselves. We’ve got a job of our own- righting the wrongs in our own country. We have to look at the moral failures of other nations not in isolation, but against our own .’
Touché.Failures I failed to see.’
‘Allan,said Russel, ‘ our ideas do not spring like Athena, fully-armed from Zeus's brow. Nothing in politics grows in a vacuum.Our masters do all in their power to ensure they’re not exposed as the liars and killers that they are.Any countervailing currents take time to flow . The older you grow the more you’ll realise you are but a child of your age.
‘I guess everybody has the right to be suckered once,’I said.’ To not see they’re entitled to an even break.’
‘As long as they don’t abuse the privilege ,Allan.Sure,while only fools go walking on thin ice, twice, everybody has the right to be a dunce, once.You're only young once. After that you have to think up some other excuse.When I was a student,I listened intently to all shades of opinion,running my own by others before casting my lot.I too was impressed by the rhetoric of certain ideologues whose views I would differ from. I once attended the inter-university debating competition in Sydney.The debater who impressed me as the cleverest- and most fanatical- was Bob Santamaria.Many since,just as fanatical though usually in different directions,were not nearly as clever,nor,it is fair to add,possessed of such a powerful mind. This silver tongued devil preached incessantly the virtues of Franco’s Falange,of the Spanish rebels,and of Franco himself.
To back up these views,he passionately expounded a whole theory of authoritarianism.Fascism in Germany,Italy or elsewhere was the gold standard of government,the most viable to which modern man could aspire,and all human history went to prove it.Art,science and learning,he argued had always flourished most under royal,imperial or dictatorial rule;the more authoritarian the better.In this respect Louis ,the Sun-King, was the nonpareil of all times,though the absolute and continuing moral authority the Pope ought to wield over all living creatures was even more important. As debaters go, never an ‘um’ or an ‘er’, Santa seemed the best alive, but I was never converted wholly to his point of view-then or ever.’
‘You never became one of Santa’s little helpers?’
‘I’d never be a subordinate claus.I endorse the general welfare clause.’
‘I’ve got a lot to learn.’
‘You haven’t had the benefit up to now of exposure to such a wide range of views.As this war unfolds further,the clearer your understanding of the issues involved will be.
And so it came to pass. The more I read about this war, the more my doubts multiplied as to its morality and its direction. I would have to live with myself over this and needed to be sure.I had to be on the right side of history. By virtue of my training and leisure, I had to man up more than ordinary citizens for the actions of the state.To strip back the coats of lies and deception. It was my special responsibility to call it like I saw it.To replace my initial nescience with wiser prescience.
I was part of the generation that I held responsible for getting our country out of that war.When asked by our children what we did about it,not to be stuck for an answer. Ours was to reason why,not to cop out, follow and fiddle blindly while Vietnam burned.My country right not wrong.
Some might invoke Horace: ‘Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori’ -It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country-but wasn’t it Horace who claimed that he saved himself in battle by throwing away his shield and fleeing.
Le Cafard.
One strong message coming out of Vietnam was that the war was taking a severe psychological toll on U.S. servicemen.They were bringing it home with them. Terms like ‘acute depressive reaction’ amongst American soldiers began appearing in reports. They were being left with invasive memories, nightmares, loss of concentration, feelings of guilt, irritability and hallucinations. Servicemen may return home as tainted intruders likely to seek continuing outlets for a pattern of violence to which they have become habituated.’
‘What’s being brought to public attention is the trauma they’ve endured as a result of their service to their country.And some don’t have to have experienced combat. They’ve contracted ‘le cafard’,said Russel, ‘as did the Frenchmen before them.’
‘Cafard’ is French for cockroach,isn’t it?’
‘It is and all,and I’ll explain why in a minute.One of it’s more malignant symptoms is a hatred of everything and everyone,with urges to kill others and oneself.With these moods the slightest irritation can set them off.’
‘Is this condition peculiar to soldiers in Vietnam?I asked.
‘The term originated from the French colonies in general. Members of the French Foreign Legion suffered extreme boredom in their stockades and took to letting fly at cockroaches (les cafards) with their rifles.’
‘So it’s about men in the army going barmy.When time crawls like a sick cockroach.Is it in all armies?’I asked.’
‘In all armies and navies since time immemorial.’
‘What brings this about and how do military personnel deal with it?’
‘It’s caused inevitably by regimentation,hardship and prolonged separation from wives and loved ones. Common soldiers since civilization began have found effective means of releasing psychological pressure.In extreme solitude the individual soldier has to deal with it in the same way as prisoners in isolation do to get through. When time slows down they have to fill it.Between madness and sanity there’s a shifting boundary and in solitude one must push away from the border of madness. One has to look for any little bit of life,admire it and study it.The ants,the cobwebs,even the rats that gather crumbs in the middle of the night.’
‘The birds of the air that perch on one’s window sill,’I said thinking of Burt Lancaster as the Birdman of Alcatraz.
‘Those too.These are insignificant things in the normal world.But each of these things is a universe.As diverting as that of our fellow humans.’
‘I remember reading ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’. To pass the time, The German soldiers in the
trenches competed amongst themselves to smash the corpse rats.To vary their diet,the rats skittered brazenly amongst them to snatch the piles of rotten,mouldy bread away.Their tiny pink feet ran between the men’s legs and through the deadly gauntlet of carefully aimed boots and stabbing bayonets.In the film ‘King and Country’,the British soldiers court martial and execute a trench rat for biting the ear of one of them. ’
‘You can see it in‘The Long and the Short and the Tall’. Remember Private Bamforth played by Laurence Harvey.He’s bedded down in the Burmese jungle with his small British sonic war patrol, sent to investigate the movements and strength of the Japanese opposition.And what do we see Private Banforth in doing in the dilapidated store-hut?’
‘He’s prancing around , dancing with his arms around his comrades, singing "Hey-jig-a-jig".All these pressures come to bear in this drama ,don’t they?’’I said. ‘Hindered by a malfunctioning radio, the young recruits,far from home, face a futile but perilous stand-off with Japanese forces.They can’t guess whether or when to move on. Sweating it out in the intense heat and humidity of the jungle, rain dripping down from the roof and steam rising up through the undergrowth,they curse those who sent them,and each other.’
‘Men invent neurotic patterns of ritualistic criticizing,if only symbolically those responsible for their boredom, depression or pointlessness’,Russel said.
‘This claustrophobic story, is shot through with all these feelings,isn’t it? The army banter is all about military incompetence and how poorly led they are, the sergeant who, despite his best efforts, is worse than useless at leading.The young privates exchanging insults, revel in the exotic natures of each others’ regional identities as though Britain contained the whole human race and the rest of the world were made up only of faceless enemy soldiers. There’s lots they don’t know about their own countrymen and women.They confront the enemy within when class tensions and personal rivalries erupt.They threaten each other.’
’And can lead them to do terrible things.’This comes with ‘Le cafard’,’said Russel,. ‘the collective name for all the inconceivable stupidities, excesses and crimes which jangled nerves can commit.’
‘All this reminds me of ‘The Bedford Incident’ which I saw recently.The skipper of this ship is all triggered up,geared to humiliate a Russian submarine in Arctic waters.Chainsmoking,his stomach tied up in knots,he’s frustrated from the endless hours of waiting,the uncertainty and doubt. Whacked up, he’s fuming,feeling ‘trussed,tired and nailed to the wall.’ because the High Command is holding him back.The situation was abnormal, inhuman and dangerous.A mistaken command led to a nuclear explosion.’
‘Le Cafard has become the ubiquitous shorthand for the blackness of the soldier’s situation,a very unnatural one.The paralysing fear and anguish in the face of death. In “cafard” murder hides, and suicide and mutiny. It means self mutilation and impromptu flight.It is the height of madness and the depth of despair. It can start with the enlisted man gloomy, sitting glumly on his bed for hours, speaking to no one, answering with gross insults, doing the queerest things. Suddenly the madness may turn into a senseless explosion or fit of fury; men suffering from a bad case of “le cafard” will run a bayonet through their comrade’s ribcage, without any reason, without any outward cause.’
‘I wonder why.Where do we find it at it’s worst?’
‘The “cafard” is at its worst the more desolated the outpost,the more extreme and unfamiliar the climate. When the sun burns down relentlessly from the cloudless, deep blue sky, the wind-whipped sand stings the face, when the steaminess of the jungle clogs the body’s pores,this is time for ‘le cafard’.
‘It sounds like ‘going ‘troppo’,’I said, ‘as my father and our men in the Pacific theatre called it.’
‘For young men ,closer to the frontlines, under tremendous stress, the fear, loneliness and firearms can be a deadly cocktail. A lot of suicides and accidental deaths in war are labelled as combat casualties,but in fact due to soldiers falling prey to ‘le cafard.’ It doesn’t help that the military is permeated with a cult of machismo that does not allow anyone to show fear or weakness. And it’s not something the army will encourage you to study up.’
‘I guess so,Russel.’
‘ I know so,Allan.I worked amongst men affected so during the War’,he replied.
‘What steps do the military take to counter this malaise?’
‘Well as you know to defuse frustrations and boost morale, they send movie and radio entertainers to perform for military audiences at bases wherever. In the jungle,in the desert,and in all weathers. They brought comfort to isolated outposts and combat zones. The British did this famously with concert units that included Vera Lynn and Peter Sellers.’
‘And the Americans with Bob Hope’,I said.
‘Exactly. help to break the monotony, ease the loneliness and give the troops in combat zones across Vietnam a couple of hours splitting their sides laughing—and a memory for a lifetime.For the few who get to his shows ,it takes their minds off their surroundings and the goings on even if only for a little while.’
‘Those who see him perform in Vietnam say his shows make them feel they are not forgotten in this increasingly unpopular war. They believe- right or wrong- that their sacrifices,in their war,are as important as the "Big One" in which their fathers fought.’
‘It must be hard to get laughs in such a setting? A lot of his jokes are pretty twee,I must admit.’
‘ All successful comedians have to dissect contemporary culture, politics and changing societal mores. Hope’s classic opening monologues of rapid-fire jokes always take jabs at the GIs and the specifics of the local situation. His country club putter patter has had to take on a sharper edge.He’s not going to get away with the same material on soldiers in Vietnam as with his usual family oriented audiences. His shtick includes a constant, sometimes bawdy banter with the other performers, taking plenty of shots at the absurdities of military life while conveying a real sense of how difficult it is for the troops to be away from home during the holidays.He’s also making recreational drug use in America and among troops in Vietnam his comedic target.Oh thud and blunder! He’s started appearing onstage in military uniform shirts and jackets outlandishly decorated with patches, stripes, stars and insignias.’
‘A few Christmases ago his troupe flew next to Cam Ranh Bay, where Bob scolded the troops: "I don't know what you guys did to get here, but let that be a lesson to you!" Baking in the hot sun, the troops roared in agreement.The tenor of his Christmas tour last year reflects changing attitudes in the United States regarding the course of the war, and Hope's flippancy didn't shy away from it. He reassured the troops that "the country is behind you 50 percent." He then added, "I'm very happy to be here; I'm leaving tomorrow!"
Now Russel, tell me about your own work with servicemen going troppo.’
'That’s another story,Allan.I’ll tell you about that on another occasion.’
The Dinner Party and the Revolution.
“Whey Out.What a choice!” I marveled as David and I scanned the dishes sitting on the hotplates, poised to serve ourselves from the vast selection of foods laid out on the sideboard. This was international students night and the main drawcard was the smorgasboard of varied dishes that one could discover.This way of serving worked well as there weren’t enough chairs for everyone. My gastric juices flowing full pelt, I homed in on my favourites, the range of tasty Chinese appetisers.
“Yum,” I said with anticipation.
“Yum Cha” added David,rounding out their name.
“I’ll have a bash at this,” I said heaping some bean curd with cabbage onto my plate.
“Little Miss Muffet, served from the buffet,” punned David, rhyming ”buffet” with” muffet” – as I had done myself on a childhood train trip, not yet ‘au fait’ with the worldly-wise way.
“Eating her curds and whey,” He went on.
“No whey José”, I struck back, “just the lumpy stuff. Whether its cottage cheese or soyabeans, it’s the curdled solid where the value lies.”
‘Hanging’s too good for a man who makes puns,’said David. ‘He should be drawn and quoted.’
I then treated David to my variation of the Miss Muffet rhyme:
“Little Miss Pearl, a slip of a girl,
Eating her curds and kraut.
Along came a Boxer who sat down beside her
And frightened her all about”
“My goodness” exclaimed David. “What inspired you to that?”
“My reading of ‘The Good Earth’ whose author ate thus as a child. Who was given the screaming willies by the Boxers. Who witnessed blood curdling events. The author was Sai Zhen Zhou.”
“Sai Zhen Who?’’ queried David,” don’t you mean Pearl Buck?’
“ The one and the same. Sai Zhen Zhou is the Chinese persona of Pearl Buck. A highly cultured rare pearl in my literary oyster. She wrote “The Good Earth” while thinking in Chinese, translating it as she went into clear, strong English. Wen Chung must have smiled encouragement upon her. Profusely. Prolific writings I can do no more that sweep through. These I imagine must be up your street what with your interest in cultural interplay. Not to mention your desire to foster greater mutual understanding between Australia and Asia. If our friends from the north and their hosts experience cultural shock in the Australian context, spare a thought for fair wee blue-eyed Pearl threading her way through a sea of oriental faces. Great day in the morning,can you imagine the start this girl with her Valkyrean looks and straw-colored hair brought to these when she revealed her fluent Chinese, her first language.
Ditto the reaction of the Englishman in her novel ‘The Promise’ when he encounters a local girl and his words fail him. “One doesn’t expect a Chinese – to…”
“- be wholly human” she adds, finishing the sentence for him.
‘Hardly a Christian approach,’said David.
‘Pearl’s father had similar expectations.He was a missionary.’
One of those blue eyed bible thumpers who couldn’t stand the commercial pace back home.’
‘He was from a slave owning American family, steeped in the idea that racial hierarchy is natural. In her biography of her parents she speaks of his lack of warmth and ‘holier-than-thou’ attitude towards the Chinese. Needless to say this would have rubbed off on them, he being one of the limited Westerners they would ever come into contact with.’
As were the venture capitalists making sorties outside their coastal strongholds – “No dogs or Chinese allowed” – to smell out new sources of profit,’said David. ‘Likewise the occupation armies stationed there to enforce these interests through their gunboat diplomacy. Speaking softly, carrying a big stick. The White man’s burden as interpreted by the President Theodore Roosevelt calling the Chinese “an immoral, degraded and worthless race”.
'Not unlike how some haughty Chinese viewed Caucasians’I said. ‘As a child Pearl was taunted as a ‘foreign devil’. Robbed of the upper hand of history ,resentful nationalists, feeling powerless could only lash out wildly at the white ‘civilisers’.The barbarians at the gate to the centre of the known world’.
‘What conclusion did Pearl draw from this unfortunate coming together of different cultures?asked David.
‘Pearl realized the importance of people from different cultures reacting with one another in a constructive way, leaving all enriched, not at the expense of the other. She looked for good in people and found the qualities that she rated highly – kindness, dignity, compassion, courage, wisdom and love in the most lowly. She aimed to reciprocate these through her words and actions. Seeking to prove to her readers that universality of man and woman can exist if people want it, she concluded our common humanity.’
“What did she base her stories on Allan? What is their setting?” He asked,pausing to sip his jasmine tea.
“She relied on her life experiences as the basis for her authentic stories,” I said. “She was a keen eyewitness to the making of the modern Chinese nation. She has taken me beyond those journalistic accounts I am familiar with, primarily concerned with China’s political fate. Having grown up and lived in impoverished rural communities she set her stirring stories against the backdrop of the turmoil and revolution that have rocked this century in China. She populated them with peasants, bandits, warlords, slaves, concubines, women beset by bound feet, floods, famine, pestilence, occupiers, and looting.People dropping like flies. Biblical in proportions”
“Meaty stuff for such a babe in the woods,” commented David “What were some of the events she and her characters had to contend with?”
“The saddest thing she came across during her childhood was the bodies of babies left abandoned on hillsides. She took it on herself to bury them and to carry a big stick herself, one especially sharpened. She wielded it to drive off the dogs feeding off the young corpses. The point she made was that the Chinese were being overwhelmed by the endless calamitous events visited upon them. Her famous character O-Lan resorted to strangling her fourth child. Otherwise she would have died from starvation. It wasn’t them that were cruel or degraded but the times they were living in. They needed food and family planning.”
'How did she fare during the momentous events that shook China’s industrial and political catch up?’
“She got way-laid more than once on China’s turbulent road to modernity and freedom from foreign interference. Caught up in the internal divisions and periodic out breaks of anti-foreigner violence in 1900 she had to be evacuated to Shanghai during the Boxer rebellion.”
“Better there than Peking”, commented David. The cinematic scenes of the 55 days spent there by Westerners under siege were still fresh in our minds.’
‘Her father never went out without a stick to beat the dogs loosed on him by the Chinese wherever he went.’
“I must point out that sooling Westerners into leaving was akin to the anti- Chinese violence on the Australian gold fields.The Chinese were feared to be getting more than their fair share. There were rowdy demonstrations against Chinese labor feared to be driving living standards down. But don’t let me digress, Allan. Please carry on,” he said.
“She and her family had to flee again during the blood-soaked civil wars of the twenties and thirties. She experienced the violence known as the Nanking incident. In a bamboozling battle involving elements of Chiang Kai Shek’s nationalist troops, Communist forces and associated Warlords, several westerners were murdered. Pearl’s family escaped by a hair’s breadth, spending a terrified day in hiding after which they were rescued by an American gun boat.
“That rings a bell,” said David. “If she were there today she’d once more be fearful for her safety. From the frenzied chaos of the great cultural revolution going on right now.’
‘From what I’ve heard of it I’m better off being here tonight.’I said, ‘advancing softly, gradually, carefully, considerately, respectfully, politely, plainly and modestly.At a dinner party,not Mao’s revolution’,I said rejigging the elements of Mao’s dictum .
“ Do you see a common theme running through Pearl’s books?” asked David.
“I’d say they deal with personal suffering in a world racked by social upheaval and how one copes with it.”
“A universal theme if there ever is one,” David commented pithily. “Do you enjoy reading this literary leading light?” he asked.
“On the whole, very much so,” I replied. “She really takes us somewhere. You can truly feel what it is like to be a poor, Chinese farmer. Her books pull you their very world so that all else disappears. Indeed I have written to her telling her to that effect. I told her what I find particularly appealing about her works is the balance she achieves writing about heavy violent behaviour by humans on one hand – our unfortunate reality – and their light sensitive touch on the other.”
“This concept of balance of opposites is central to Chinese philosophy” said David.
“So I gather,” I replied, adding some cashews and sliced water chestnuts to my plate to balance textually the softness of the beancurd, and drizzling it with piquant soy sauce to balance flavour-wise its blandness.
“The idea is that everything is made up of opposites which are inextricably intertwined.’
“Try, try, try to separate them,
Its an illusion”, I sang sotto voce, sampling “Love and Marriage”, the hit from Tin Pan Alley.
“This I tell you brother, You can’t have one without the other” came back David, getting into the swing of things, proud to be as quick to quote Ol’ Blue Eyes as he did Chaucer.
“You say you’ve conveyed your feelings to Pearl?” David asked.
“I have, David, and await her reply with baited breath. I’ve put a lot of thought into my comments and would love her to acknowledge this.”
The Response
It would take some time before I could breathe more easily and relay Pearl’s warm response.
'What’s the latest bulletin?’asked David.
“Pearl thanked me for the kind things I said about her books and was happy that I enjoyed them.
I think I’m entitled just this once to be unashamedly corny. I can lay claim to having bucked Pearl Buck up.”
“Half your luck.What did you say to her, Allan?”
“I thanked her for the penetrating perception she provided of China and her particular sensitivity to many aspects of life there which Chinese writers have taken for granted. I thanked her for changing the distorted image of it in the public mind – one of dark mystery and unspeakable vice – and for cutting across stereotypes at a time when these were – and still are – so entrenched. I pointed out to her that there was an influential current of thought in the student body here at U.N.E. which sees even educated Chinese – including our students from the Chinese diaspora – as sneaky, crafty and at best inscrutable. I assure my peers there is no mystery in the Chinese way of thinking if you take the time to talk to them. I told Pearl how moved I was by her intricate and truly epic portrayal of peasant life in a land still out of bounds to most of us.
Moved by those of her books which contained narrative and descriptive passages of considerable drama. Composed of innumerable intimate commonplace details, they make up a storehouse of knowledge about Chinese traditions and customs. I cited her scrutinizing description of the groom, Wang Lung’s rigmarole on the morning of his wedding – plaiting a tassled black cord into his pigtail, taking care not to waste any precious dried grass, leaves, and stalks as he kindles his fire.
I drew her attention to how she had covered much of the same ground with her near-photographic depictive precision as had Cecil Beaton with his lens. Their graphic representations of Chinese life complement each other so well.
Pearl’s minute observations breathed life and movement into the characters and scenes Cecil captured on his camera during the Second World War.She had an abundant ability to enter imaginatively into other people’s lives. The daily struggles , the ebbs and flows, the relationships, human needs and human nature all summed up in her novels. Aware of David’s interest in the visual arts, I later showed him my collection of superb photographs of China, in which Cecil produced a vivid picture of Nationalist China in its last years. Poring over this invaluable record David shared my sense of awe, that which I had expressed to Cecil as well as to Pearl. His evocative portraits of the Chinese heartland captured images of a period long gone.
‘How about that?’,David said admiringly,’He’s left us a view of the past that seems so lost- yet so immediate.’
The scenes he took reveal the essence of China at work, the beauty and grace of the buildings and landscapes, the appalling bare-foot poverty, the hardship and the doughty fight against the Japanese invaders. In the propaganda campaign against the invasion, the subject matter of Cecil and Pearl strategically overlapped.
I complimented her on the vast array of unforgettable characters she had introduced me to, characters she had represented with empathy, compassion, honesty and forthrightness. In particular I shared the feelings of the strong women in her pages, often reflecting her own character – stoic, energetic, independent-minded sisters I was stunned by the scene in “The Good Earth” in which a peasant gives birth over a bucket… then goes straight back to hoeing the fields. I was moved to pity for her and horror at her plight. At that of another in “Mother” who endures untold tragedies – being deserted, rearing a blind child, becoming sterile, but never accepting defeat. Of real flesh and blood, she expresses clamant sexual needs and longings. I was eager to learn more about the connubially unhappy Chinese woman who falls in love with a western priest. Relationships between men and women across ethnic and class lines particularly fascinated Pearl. I felt the ignominy of corpulent unlovely O-Lan, devoted wife to Wang Lung, traded-in for a newer sleeker model after she had served her purpose. Such lack of appreciation. I was full of admiration for the heroic women in her stories of war and resistance. I was amazed by the elderly Mrs Wang in “The Old Demon” who saved her village by opening a dyke gate and drowning the entire advancing Japanese along with herself. Ditto the hero in “Dragon Seed” who manages to poison a gathering of Japanese officers. And the female head of a band of guerillas in “Golden Flower” who harasses the Japanese in a long series of audacious raids. As did Vietnamese women warriors to the south, as they do today against Saigon’s forces. Women valued by their male comrades for their military skills rather than for their appearance.
“Do her characters ring true for you? Are they realistic or are they cardboard cut-outs?” David asked. ‘Do they really speak to you? Can you relate to them?”
“ They are real for sure.What I find appealing about them is that I can identify with them so closely.They resonate within me as I discovered commonalities I scarce thought possible.They are not the caricatures we’ve received via Hollywood of depraved, imbecilic opium smokers with long fingernails and chopstick-size mustaches. You forget quickly that they’re foreign. Their joys, sorrows, problems and disillusionments transcend cultural barriers. You live their lives as they see them and feel them. They are specifically Chinese living at a certain time and in a certain place. But the more you get to know them, the more you recognize them as others you know right here. They are so alive that I see them as people around me. Her farmers are representative of farmers everywhere – their thought processes, their habits, their industriousness, their frugality, their god-fearing ways, and their attachment to a particular patch is no different to those of the farmers you and I know so well. Like Dad and Dave, Wang Lung, the farmer is out of his element in the fast-paced, big bad city. In reduced circumstances all we humans react to life events in much the same way.”
‘So you enjoy reading her writings on China?’
‘So much so that after reading one I want to go back and read it again.’
“Did you single out any particular book as having made the greatest impression on you?”
“Indubitably her masterpiece “The Good Earth”. I read it in one sitting.’
Putting me to the test, he asked exacting questions that emerged from my reading of the text.
“What is its story lines and themes?”
‘This poignant story is about the changing circumstances of Wang Lung whose undying love of the land sustains him through years of hard times. Its subject is the compelling intimacies of life,it’s cyclical nature, the new coming to take the place of the old, the passions and desires that motivate a human being, of good and evil, and the desire to survive and thrive against great odds. This saga traces Wang’s rise from the abject poverty of his early years to later when accumulates great property and power. Along the way he comes up against some hard facts of life. He observes the extravagant consumption of the indecently rich, contemptuous of the needs of the starvelings, drawing the ire of protesting revolutionaries while armies shanghai civilians,forcing them to carry their materiel and enter the fray.’
‘He takes refuge in his family,I suppose.’
‘The hardest facts to swallow involve his own well to do family. He discovers that rolling up wealth can bring unforeseen vices and woes in its train – blind jealousy, cupidity, selfishness, complacency and profligacy to name a few. Having fallen on hard times his malignant uncle tries to gull him, offering him silver for his possessions at considerably less their value. His eyes are on Wang’s parcel of land. Coming from a stranger this would have been understandable but from a close relative unpardonable. When Wang achieves prosperity himself, his eldest two sons will engage in dispute, the third running away from home. The two eldest assure Wang they will retain the farm upon his demise but we know their real intentions.
“Blood may be thicker than water” commented David, “but also stickier.Money changes people and relationships. Tainted by lucre, the free flow of family love can get really clogged.It can happen in the best of families. Financial transactions involving family members are fraught with danger. It's a classic recipe for trouble. A breakdown in trust can rent the family asunder. Does this surprise you?”
“Wang’s immediate family was not so different to my father’s, David” I replied. “He and his siblings squabbled about their father’s estate, picking over his properties, him not yet cold, over his freshly dug grave, with accusations of humbug and mismanagement.’
‘Love flies out the door when money comes innuendo.’
‘This let to permanent estrangement between my father and his brother. I daresay this would never happen in our family. We could never put our foot wrong again like this. Moreover, my father’s business has gone to the wall what with the self-service supermarket revolution and his being rendered crippled. So I don’t envision any great bone of contention like this ever arising. We respect him too much not to honour his wishes.”
“I’m glad to hear that Allan. Just bear in mind that family members can have such high expectation of each other and correspondingly such great disappointment Greater than in other people. In families things are never as simple as what you’d expect.'
“Right you are, David. In my estimate this deceptively simple parable is all about complexity – the complexities of marriage, parenthood, joy and human frailty. What I could not have known while giving such utterance was that this would be a leitmotiv I too would pursue one day. Looking back on my own saga, in my own book.”
“What else did you tell her?” asked David.
“I congratulated her for broadening the reach of literature, making asian voices heard for the first time in western literature. For highlighting the role of women. In China’s patriarchal culture, wives were forbidden to speak unless spoken to. Her principal subjects – women and China – have too long been peripheral.
I thanked her for not shying away from matters considered taboo in my own schooling – matters concerning bodily functions, particularly sex that she approached, like the Chinese with a healthy candour.Her novel’s unvarnished talk of these matters disturbed some delicate sensibilities. One Presbyterian pastor said it should have been titled “The Dirty Mud.”
I thanked her for raising questions such as abortion and family planning, unsettling as these may have been for the official custodians of the moral status quo.
I saluted her for helping prepare us in the thirties to consider the Chinese as allies in the coming war with Japan and for supporting their struggle both in her public rhetoric and in books. For drawing attention to failures in this respect so that we can learn from them. In “The Promise” she touched on the incompetence of the British and their lack of concern for their Chinese allies. Basing her story on historical fact, she recounts how retreating British troops crossed a bridge and scuppered it, leaving the Chinese behind to be massacred. She had warned Roosevelt that Churchill’s insistence on preserving an empire in the East would hamper the war effort.
I thanked her for using her personal influence to prepare us to institute normal relations with the People’s Republic of China, a stance that like her earlier expression of Sino-Western solidarity, would have important strategic implications.”
“You are aware Allan, that not everyone has such kind things to say about Pearl. She has fallen out of critical favour for different reasons. Some turned up their noses at her when she received the Nobel prize, claiming her work fell short of the stature and complexity worth of such recognition. Admittedly the quality of her work is patchy which is what you’d expect from someone who writes so abundantly. But we have to look at her overall contribution. Hers is an extremely valuable body of work that merits closer examination if only because of her wide popularity” he said.
“You’ve put your finger on it, David. I put it to Pearl that some high-brows who sniffle at her work do so from an attitude of sour grapes, that they may be envious of her success. That Chinese intellectuals never embraced “The Good Earth,” resentful perhaps that an American was exploring aspects of Chinese life they’d neglected. That the literary judgement of American intellectuals is clouded by the tight political climate still in force in which it is difficult to mention China in a positive light. In which paltry, hostile innuendo has been dished on her in the West. In which it was difficult for mainland Chinese to mention the West in a positive light. In which Pearl gained the obloquy of the Party for her petty bourgeois background and subjects, for being a reactionary proponent of American cultural imperialism, for exposing too much of China's darker aspects and denigrating the New China and putting down the fieldworkers. Under Mao Tse Tung her work is banned.”
‘This all sounds very vulgar,infantile and dogmatic’I commented. ‘They would have bristled at her depicting the practices of feudal society.I guess the thoughts of Wen Chang , Chu-I and other Confucian sages are out of favour,’I said.
‘It’s all about the thoughts of The Great Helmsman,the wellspring of all wisdom’,David said bitingly. ‘The Godhead who is worshipped accordingly.’
The East Is Red.
We continued this discussion soon after one morning at breakfast. The cook had referred to me the latest breakfast addition-stewed pears.There had been a glut of the crop and stewing them was the best solution.
‘As for a persons background being an obstacle to a country’s progress,come off the grass. All industrial and commercial concerns have been nationalized, thus making good on the revolution's economic promise . Why all this infantile hysteria?’ I asked.
‘Why don’t we put this question to Dr.Ward,’he said,nodding his head towards him ‘Are you free,Russel?’
‘You know I’m always free for you,David.’
Dr.Ward motioned to me that I should join him too.Tearing open his packet of Weet Bix,he gathered his thoughts and gave his interpretation of this monumental motion of the masses.
‘I used to write captions for the series of cards you find in these cereal boxes,’he said. Enticing more childish demands for these cards which put the price up as well as the roughage. The series was titled ‘Wonders of the Pacific’.
‘You presumably wrote one titled ‘The East Is Red’: A quarter of the worlds population away from capitalist control being led by the peasantry rather than the expected proletariat’,I joshed.
‘I don’t think so’,Allan,he said. ‘Look at the manufacturer’s name,’he said,holding up the the packet.The Sanitarium Health Food Company.The holy corporation whose fundamentalist owners still hold that God’s seven day labour of creation ended at 9 o’clock on the dot in the morning one day in the year 4004.Need I say more?'
‘Just about childish demands in China,’I said.
‘Allan, After the initial victory of the people's revolutionary forces the Party was faced with a serious question: what can be done to keep on the "socialist road"? What measures can be taken to restrict the class differences inherited from the old society, fend off imperialist hostility and intervention, and prevent a new capitalist class from developing within socialist society itself? Socialist revolution is much more complex and scabrous than most revolutionaries have hitherto supposed.The seizure of power is only the first step in a protracted revolutionary process.’
’What’s with this process right now’I asked.
‘The various factions of the Communist Party are locked into a power struggle on how to resolve this. You have to bear in mind that the Maoist leadership does not permit any direct information to filter out about it’s real motives and the opinions of its various adversaries. The cultural revolution underway at present is an inward looking ultra-leftist campaign,an eruption of elementary forces.’
'Who does it target?’
‘It’s directed specifically against the ‘Four Olds’: old ideas, old culture, old customs and old habits. Feeling China bogged down by the ideological weight of it’s past, Mao launched it to revitalise what he sees as revolutionary zeal and ideological purity at a time of great social tensions. You’ve seen pictures of those long open mass panoplies of loyalty where he calls on those waving the Little Red Book and chanting hoarse slogans to take on the toughness necessary for action’.
‘ Bladders of steel’, for starters’,I suggested. ‘Tie a knot in it when caught short.’
‘The view of Mao’s and his supporters is that, in a socialist society, new generations have to experience the process of revolution themselves, to think through for themselves what kind of society they want, who opposes that vision, and how to struggle against those forces.’
'All genuine knowledge originates in direct experience’
‘That’s where he brings in the metaphor of a pear,isn’t it,’I said,raising a spoonful of the stewed variety to my mouth. ‘If you want to know the taste of a pear,you must change the pear by eating it yourself.'
'They look very appetizing,’Russel said.How do they taste?’
‘Even better’,I said.They’ve got honey and cinnamon.You wouldn’t know that just looking at them of course.Stewing them is an excellent option for overripe pears, as the method works well with their texture.’
'So by mobilising the idealistic youth against a powerfully entrenched bureaucracy,’Russel continued, ‘he is able to appeal over the heads of these cadres to the wide masses. To mobilize this youth all that was needed was to close down the schools.’
‘And keep the bureaucracy stewing in what he considered a country over ripe for continued revolution.What about the workers?’I asked.
‘Mobilizing the workers on the same scale and for the same period would have meant disorganizing and even halting industrial production. Being less politicalized than the vanguard workers, particularly those who were members of the Communist Party, these young camp followers are easier to indoctrinate in a narrow factional way.They accept more readily certain accusations against long-standing leaders of the party and the state than would be the case with the workers, who still retain memories of the history of the revolution.
‘So it’s not only their bodies that are softer’,I commented.
‘This may be true but together they can share and act on fierce feelings of resentment. It’s hardly difficult to incite a feeling of revolt against the bureaucrats in this youth.It’s demagogy corresponds to their needs. For the mass of the youth, a professional career seems blocked, the number of positions in the entire state sector being limited.
‘Is it good or bad?I asked.
‘It’s considered destructive by some and as constructive by others, depending on their understanding of the current problems confronting the Chinese revolution.Without a doubt things have gotten out of hand.China seems a society where disruption seems to exist for its own sake. There have been terrible excesses.Some have destroyed valuable works of the feudal past-books,temples,antiques ’.
‘Bulls in the china shop,I suggested.’
‘One of the most mouthed slogans features the phrase “nothing can stand without destruction” ,
encouraging destruction of old, feudal things.
‘I’d like your two bob’s worth on this,Russel? ‘I said.
It’s a variant of ‘You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs,’said Russel.Whether the eggs are cooked or otherwise,it doesn’t matter.Do you see your way clear to making this goog stand upright?” he asked, handing me a boiled one.
After grappling with it for several minutes, I still drew a blank, so giving in,I said,‘ Your point well taken.What’s the solution?’
“Elementary my dear Watson,” said Russel,grinning, as he forcefully smashed the egg down into the table.“Chairman Mao has said, ‘nothing can stand without destruction,’” said this seditious sage, “look, isn’t the egg standing upright now?”
So it was. No flies on him, he had made his point about this tomfoolery. Many a true word is spoken in jest.
‘ As things stand,in this free for all anyone can be targeted to meet the quota, excoriated as ideologically shonky,’he went on, ‘arraigned for being ‘running dogs’, ‘capitalist roaders’, ‘rightist devils’ and enemies of the people’.This has even included prominent Party leaders such as Deng Xiaoping. There’s a story circulating about his rapidly changing fortunes.Three men are in jail comparing their reasons for being incarcerated. The first says: ‘I'm in here for being a supporter of Deng Xiaoping.’
The second replies, ‘That's funny, I’m in here for attacking Deng Xiaoping!’
The two turned to ask the third, ‘What are you in for?’ Shaking his head sadly, he replied ‘I AM Deng Xiaoping.’
‘If this can happen to leaders with such prestige as Deng,what hope is there for ordinary people?’
‘Such class ‘labelling’ even involves pre-school children.Some teachers and officials have had their homes muscled in on, been dragged into the streets before ad hoc crowds of insulting Red Guards, trumpeting their revolutionary virtue. The mobs that roam through the streets, sticking up posters and shouting slogans,need not necessarily come from outside. They’re as often as not ordinary jolly people trying to be good citizens, at some level simply trying to do the right thing. Parading their neighbours like prisoners in the streets with dunce caps or shaven heads and subjecting them to public self-criticism meetings and all-night “struggle sessions.” Many of these targets may have had faults such as authoritarianism towards students, attitudes of superiority towards workers and peasants and so on and so forth.Like everyone they should be open to questioning. But public humiliation is not the right cure for these blemishes. And teachers may also have been targeted, not because of their faults, but because they were potentially articulate critics of the ‘Great Teacher’s’ policies.
‘It appears their fanatical inquisitioners are very shy of the very freedom of thought and of academic inquiry they accuse the university president of,’I commented. ‘I can just imagine how would this have gone down with workers’.
‘ I don’t think by any stretch of the imagination many workers would feel at ease about the po-faced preaching remedies of runny snotty nosed snotty kids,’Russel said.‘At the same time there have been positive signs.At street level one rationale of the program is rooted supposedly in the notion that ``bourgeois intellectuals'' will be re-educated through physical labour, and that young people in the urban areas will be integrated with the rural peasant population. The most obvious success has been the re-settling of medicos in the countryside.They have trained 750,000 “barefoot doctors”--thereby narrowing the gap between urban and rural medical services. Most sent to live to the countryside and learn how the peasant works and lives, discarding the vanity and sense of superiority typical of city folks and become more down to earth..’
‘That sounds reasonable’I said, ‘It will toughen them up.As long as they want to go,and both them and the peasants benefit,their children having better educational opportunities,their minds opened to a wider world beyond the village.Otherwise China’s enemies will say it’s just brainwashing.’
‘Those who believe that an army of robots is being completely guided and channeled by remote control are greatly deluded,’Russel continued. Facts demonstrate incontestably that there is a very great diversity of opinions, a very wide autonomy in action and a harvest of posters, mimeographed or printed papers. Various organizations have been created on the basis of the different ideas bubbling up.. Despite the excesses which have been committed and the Mao cult in which the whole movement has been bathed, this harvest of ideas and experiences undoubtedly constitutes an unprecedented experience for thousands of young Chinese. They can end up thinking for themselves.It has led to the rapid resurrection of a critical spirit in a vast mass movement, which cannot not help but thrust thousands of young people on the road toward consciousness regarding the contradictory aspects of Maoist ideology, towards questioning the power of the whole bureaucracy, its Maoist faction included.’
‘Steeped in such a domestic crisis,China doesn’t sound like a country single-mindedly getting on a war footing to invade us,as we are constantly being reminded.Those who seem at greatest danger are the Chinese themselves. Where does the West figure in all this?I asked.
‘In part,this tumult is a knee-jerk reaction to China’s perceived encirclement by both the US and the U.S.S.R. and threatened encroachment on its territory. Hostility to foreigners is not a Communist invention. Our peoples have too long been equally ignorant and suspicious of one another. It doesn’t take much to get the xenophobe’s bandwagon rolling”
“There’s only so much mileage in these isolationist approaches”, said David. “They’ll hopefully peter out soon. Both giants will have to chop each other down or come to terms with each other. They’re both too big for the other to ignore.”
Like David,Russel and I, Pearl wanted to see good relations between East and West.With the rollback of Communism,I dare say they’re closer, confrontational attitudes having softened dramatically,the excessess of the Cultural revolution having ensured it’s shivering polar opposite. She would have been amazed by the events that have transformed The Middle Kingdom, changing it from a backward feudal country to the industrial workshop of the world, thrusting it onto the centre stage, all within my lifetime. All fuelled by those values she wrote about – hard work, thrift and responsibility. Values which the West enshrines but fears when they propel the Chinese component of the runaway global
economic juggernaut relentlessly forward, it’s engine room firing full speed, its giant wrecking ball swinging wildly,bearing down on us, crushing competition , disembowelling society, poisoning the most intimate human encounters,blindsiding opposition, cracking,hacking and fracking,sacking and whacking,squeezing and freezing, gouging and gobbling up precious resources, slashing and burning, despoiling the good earth of it’s fertility
All The Right Moves.
“Conservatives say if you don't give the rich more money, they will lose their incentive to invest. As for the poor, they tell us they've lost all incentive because we've given them too much money.”
George Carlin
Professor Belshaw told us about
the unbridled strain of capitalism with respect to the governor of Australia Australia
Likewise David Evans from his perspective spoke admiringly of this powerful banker who loved the theatre, and gave patronage to a range of endeavours towards givingAustralia
‘Russel Ward knows him from hisCanberra
‘We had our doctorates conferred on us in the same ceremony at theAustralian
National University
‘What about his thinking’I asked?’
‘They say good things come in small packages.In his case,it’s true.Nugget values intellectual vigor highly and approaches learning as a polymath, a scholar all about knowledge of the broadest kind. He dabbles in everything.
‘He’s interested in ‘the big picture’.
‘A polymath if ever there was one,’said Dr.Ward. ‘And one with a cautionary tale for teachers.’
‘How so?’I asked.
'Like all chalkies,Nugget,David and I dreaded the visit of the school inspector.It was a stressful time.'
'What was the purpose of their coming?'
'The ones I had were fairly benign,They genuinely aimed to identify aspects of our craft requiring attention and improvement.By observing my classroom teaching they helped me diagnose any problems I had.
'They gave you glowing reports,didn’t they,David?
‘That’s true. I was deemed an outstanding teacher.Somebody up there must have liked me.’
‘I saw others as intruding policemen,’said Dr.Ward, ‘always looking for faults.A negative judgment from them, speaking of inadequacy, could occasion consternation and drain the confidence of our students and parents.It could change the course of lives.Of course we embrace entirely the need for a robust inspection and monitoring framework.’
‘If you don’t get looked over,you get overlooked,said David.’
‘True.And teachers do need to be held to account by the outcome of the inspection-but they require a regulator, not a boa constrictor. And who holds the inspectors to account? Do they have a particular hidden agenda."
‘Seen from outside,’I said, ‘it might seem that having a group of fellow professionals come round every few years to write up your performance and give it a grade, after reviewing your performance, is not such a big deal. Aren’t these men selected because of their ability to convey ideas and information most effectively.’
‘Good heavens no,Allan.There is an element of this but only too often these are men who are themselves only too happy to get out of classroom teaching.Many couldn’t do it to save their life.They may have more knowledge about behaviour and safeguarding than any subject area.Their function is to maintain conformity and uniformity in educational institutions.. The inspection is an old concept in management.’
‘It sounds just like the army.Would you elaborate on this?’
‘The basic concept is that of autocratic management aimed at catching the workers red-handed; a fault-finding attitude in management, and a one-time fact-finding activity. It can be viewed as a process of checking other people’s work to ensure that bureaucratic regulations and procedures are followed and that loyalty to the higher authorities are maintained. This view of inspection largely overlooks the professional interests and needs of the teaching personnel. ‘
‘ So how do they judge efficiency?’
‘ Inspection process conducted with this view in mind may not be effective in upgrading teaching and learning.It’s more often than not a time for putting on something of a show to impress. But it’s very effective at getting teaching personnel to toe the line.’
‘How could we improve on this?’
‘ We should move the responsibility for judging teachers and shaping improvement strategies on to the staff, students and parents who use them and work in them.
‘Even parents?’I queried.
‘Yes, Parents can bring a lot to this process, drawing both on the knowledge they have of the their children and their experience of other organisations.Involving all parties would ensure that all viewpoints are equally included in a discussion about what is good, what is less good and – once a shared understanding has been reached on those points – what would make things even better.This approach would enable people to be completely open with their views, critical, appreciative or whatever else. The possibility of contributing to positive change would provide an incentive to thinking hard.’
‘I hope such a process comes about before I graduate,’I said.
'Don’t hold your breath.Our inspectoral system is highly bureaucratic and shares with all other aspects of the education bureaucracy, a top-down, hierarchical, and authoritarian character.Regrettably it is well entrenched.
‘And what was Nugget Coombs experience with the inspectorate?’
‘As a schoolteacher in ruralWestern Australia
‘What is it about these works that raised their hackles?’
‘They deal with the general feeling of disillusionment and disgust of the period after World War One.The Great War’,he said contemptuously.
‘He was part of the Lost Generation,wasn’t he?’,I asked.
‘Yes,’he replied, ‘and he felt part of that flower of artistic youth who escaped being mowed down or gassed in World War I.A good many of them were rebuilding their lives after being pitchforked into combat and suffering the horrors of war.For them the idea that if you acted virtuously, good things would happen,went up in smoke forever.Unlike your generation they missed the civilizing influences that young men usually have between the ages of 18 and 25.’
‘Weren’t young men from the ruling class able to escape being drafted?’
‘Unlike those of today and previously,they were expected to lead. In the years immediately after this ‘ war to end all wars’, while others of the gilded youth wallowed in the decadence and superficiality of the era,the more serious felt spiritually alienated.’
‘In what way?' I asked.
“Stranded between two wars,they were characterized by lost values, lost belief in the idea of human progress. Their mood was one of emptiness, futility and despair leading to hedonism.’
He translated it as follows:
‘To The Honourable Mr.Davis,
We received your letter dated January 27,1967 on the 10th April and have read it’s contents.We are very grateful and appreciate your feelings towards our people.We wish you health and happiness.
May Allah bless you.
King Faisal,The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
‘How did you address him?’
' Your Highness’.
‘Not ‘Brother Faisal’.That’s how el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz would have during his audience.’
‘Yes,but only in replying to this form of greeting.The king in waiting would have been the one who initiated this familiar form of address.He was formally recognizing the former self named Malcolm X,his designated state guest, as a member of his brethren.
‘How did you greet him?’
‘Salaam alaykum',’I replied,'-peace be upon you'.
‘What did you say to him?
‘I thanked him for his support for the Palestinians and bringing slavery in the Kingdom to an end.’
‘How difficult was this to abolish?’
‘It was never as central to life in Arabia as it was in the American Deep South. Less than one percent of the population were slaves and their owners were compensated while at the same time gaining employees. Thus it was easier to do away with.’
‘Easier than with wage slavery.What were they used for?’
‘Almost all worked as domestic servants,rather than field hands.’
‘They were therefore what Malcolm X referred to as ‘house negroes’ rather than ‘field negroes’.’
‘What was the difference according to Malcolm?’
‘Malcom characterized the house negro as having a better life than the field negro. Hence he was more unwilling to leave the plantation.Malcolm sees him as potentially more likely to support existing power structures.’
‘Those that favour whites over blacks.He saw him as an Uncle Tom.’
‘One and the same. Malcolm X identifies with the field Negro.’
‘He did soften this attitude didn’t he.
‘Malcolm’s trip to Arabia proved life altering.He met what he said were ‘blonde-haired, blued-eyed men I could call my brothers.Like Paul Robeson in the Soviet Union,he didn’t witness racism in his host country. He returned to the United States with a new outlook on integration. This time, instead of just preaching to African-Americans, he had a message for all races.’
‘Human beings should live in harmony.They should never be fettered like horses.’
‘Yes,there’s lots of other ways,aren’t there?’ I said.
‘Faisal knows the difference more than most.He’s a rider and lover of horses,you know.
A passion he shares with our Queen,as well as a bit of son,lumiere et fumée. I saw them both via newsreel last month riding her carriage in Hyde Park. They were there to review the military pageant by the King's Troop Royal Horse Artillery,
‘You would have enjoyed that display of precision firepower,I daresay.’
‘Wild horses couldn’t have kept me away,’replied Mr.Treloar.Those immaculate ceremonial uniforms, those proud soldiers and seventy one horses pulling 13-pounder, First World War field guns.’
‘What do you imagine they were talking about?’
‘It would have about more than about horses. It may have been about how an absolute monarch,the only person who can legislate, publish laws, treaties and concessions,can reinvent himself as a constitutional figurehead.
It definitely would have been about the strategic meetings being held on this state visit.Both parties wished to avoid a repetition of the severing of diplomatic relations as occurred during the Suez crisis.. An integrated working relationship between the House of Saud and the House of Windsor was being cemented.’
‘Trowelled on, I believe.’
‘There were all kinds of weighty considerations. The King brought with him a rather glittering gift for Queen Elizabeth : a diamond necklace set in platinum with a combined weight of more than 80 carats of diamonds.’
‘On her humble flat it would help pay the rental.A kiss on the hand may be quite continental but as we know diamonds are a girl's best friend.
‘The piece is set with more than 300 diamonds, including baguettes, brilliants, and eleven pear-shaped diamonds set as pendant stones.’
‘The wearer would always be thinking about food wouldn’t they,’I said. ‘Not that these two royals would ever have any shortage .’
‘They have a common identity of concerns,’said Alan Treloar. ‘They’re worried more by national energy shortages than personal ones.Both are preoccupied thinking of light sweet crude. Their kingdoms are very vulnerable to stoppages in the continuous flow. Britain, a vulnerable ‘consuming’ nation depends on the goodwill of the ever richer Arabs . Like all industrialized capitalist nations,it sees the survival of it’s economy as dependent on being guaranteed continued access to the largest single deposit of strategic raw material in the world.
Thinking of necklaces,look on the kingdom as a vast one with pipelines strung together, the kingdom’s empty heart and bristling coastal cities sitting above the most valuable oil-bearing strata on earth.
For this reason alone Britain will continue to have close relations with this anomalous state for many years. ’
‘What has Britain got to offer the Arab sheiks?’
‘It has many commercial agreements with Saudi Arabia.Schools,hospitals,airports all have to be built.There is money to be made there. Britain even profits from protecting it’s investments.The British Empire may be all but gone, but the role of Britain in counterrevolution and counter-insurgency throughout the world is still a considerable one.’
‘Making the world safe for capitalism,’said Russel.’
‘And the Saudis.What’s in it for them?’
‘The regime depends for it’s continuance on the material needs of the advanced industrial countries.Faisal is seeking to maximise it’s position within the global market. This way it will receive greater autonomy and military and political support .’
‘This rule depends on violence,political calculation and foreign backing’,said Russel. ‘It’s security apparatus, full of police,spies and tribal paramilitaries, is efficient and ferocious against any potential opposition. There’s no legal opposition,no trade unions,no elections, no press and religious freedom,no constitution.’
‘You believe the kingdom’s government is intolerant of free speech,’I said.
‘Especially anything that challenges political authority.Strikes and work stoppages are banned.Muffled reports about arrests and torture trickle out of the closed country’s fiercely guarded borders, watched over by early-warning aircraft.Faisal imposed martial law at the height of pro-Nasserite agitation. ‘Order’ is maintained by beheadings and floggings. Women can exist in purdah, veiled and highly restricted in their activities, discouraged from even driving cars, from travelling without the say-so of a male guardian.How do you feel about the kingdom’s people now? ’
‘I’m shocked to hear all that,’I said. ‘How can the government repress it’s own people so?’
‘The regime has a great strategic advantage.It’s able to isolate dispersed population centres while moving it’s forces rapidly from place to place.It disperses and divides the armed forces themselves,constantly purging them.Meanwhile half the country,the pastoralists,sharecroppers and nomadic population are kept mystified, in ignorance and encouraged to remain trapped in their traditional universe.Who needs television?!’
‘Any ruler in this harsh unforgiving land has to have an iron fist,’said Mr.Treloar. ‘It’s a dangerous neighbourhood. Loyalty is as elusive as the shifting sands.He has be tough as a falcon holding together the alliances the family has forged between the disparate, fractious tribes’. ‘and with the Wahhabis .’
‘‘Wahhabis?’I asked.
‘This salafist sect dominates the religious establishment.It’s religious gatekeepers legitimise the ruling family’s temporal authority,and, despite the constant tensions between them,underpin it’s dynastic power. It is based on a long standing bargain with the salafiin, the conservative religious men with long beards and short thaub,the Arab dress.’
‘What do they get out of the bargain from this reflexive loyalty ?’
‘It gives themselves the opportunity to enforce their fiercely puritanical, obscurantist vision of an Islamic society.’
‘ Along with the coercive mechanisms the state can provide’,said Russel.
‘So this is a symbiotic relationship where both are mutually dependent on each other,I said. ‘Doesn’t this restrain any liberal moves however faint by the government?’
‘The official religious scholars have themselves developed a noteworthy political pragmatism.This is so even when decisions from the state conflict with it’s theologically based convictions.’
‘So from what quarters do the less quietist oppositional tendencies we hear about come from?’
‘From the younger,lower ranking radical elements.’
You pointed out to me,Russel, a generation gap means a struggle between aging conservatives and their young and restless critics.’
‘In Saudi Arabia, an opposite kind of battle is being waged.In Saudi Arabia, the idea that you have to go to the young for progress is turned on its head. It's the older generation of Saudis, including the royals, who are more friendly to progress, and to the West. Fundamentalism is a belief embraced more by the young.’
‘They are less likely to act in accordance with the wishes of the royal family?’
‘These activists as they see themselves demand an uncompromising enforcement of the salafist code of conduct as established during the eighteenth century. They incite and preach intolerance and exclusion. They declare that Islam is going wrong because the Saudi Arabian leadership has been prepared to work with the West. These literalist,imitative fundamentalists try constantly to dictate the agenda.’
‘And what is theirs?’
‘They aim to purge society in a permanent holy war.They want to get rid of what they see as it’s corrupting ungodly influences such as worshipping shrines and idols.Drinking is illegal and forbidden.They would have its customs and practices rolled back to match those of the Prophet Muhammad over a thousand years ago.’
‘To remain relevant and meaningful to latter day society what the prophet of any belief system said has to be continually reinterpreted.’
‘Yes.Uncompromising adherence to the explicit sense of a given text or doctrine whether religious or secular leads followers up the wrong path..There is a verse in the Koran that says in order to be strong in war against your enemies, you have to prepare ‘swords and horses.’If you take that literally these days,you’ll find yourself hopelssly weak against your enemies.Literalism can only represent the outside of things.We must search for the value that lies inside the words.’
‘As with any given holy text ,quotes can be seized upon, twisted and distorted to justify all manner of actions,good or bad. What the pious believer should be asking himself today is not what his or her Prophet did then,but what he would do now when confronted by the realities of modern life.’ ’
‘Take away the ‘fun’ from ‘fundamentalists’ and what are you left with?’ asked Russel. ‘Mentalists’. Many of the bearded ones’ customs and practices are very medieval.’
‘When we criticise Saudi society,’I said, ‘we should make the relevant parallels with our own and think of the strictures and structures within which we’ve lived.After all, it’s not so long ago, that the ‘weaker sex’ did not have the vote in Australia.. They were clearly second-class citizens, many would say they still are. Saudi women cannot drive, but is it not bizarre that women cannot become bishops in our churches?
Capital punishment? It was considered in western society not so long ago that it was essential. It still is considered so in many American states.’
‘As for slavery’,said Russel, ‘lets not forget that in Australia in the last century, South Sea Islanders were often ‘ blackbirded’,kidnapped and brought in as unfree,indentured labour. ‘
‘It’s not so long ago that most people here and Britain were devout and rather intolerant believers,scared and suspicious of other races and creeds,’I said. ‘Seemingly profound religious differences and open prejudice in the Shia-Sunni rift is not unique. It’s comparable to the Protestant-Catholic divide in Northern Ireland in its ancient, long-running outbursts of bitterness and intractability.’
‘And it’s not so long here since Father always knew best. Girls kept themselves ‘pure’ and ‘nice girls’ expected to be virgins till marriage.It’s not so long ago here that a girl who had sexual experience before marriage was considered defiled.Understandably Saudis do not consider it ‘progress’ for their young women to become unmarried mothers.’
‘Or for old people to be sent to old people’s homes.The Saudi reverence for age is another example of a value system at odds with the west, where thrusting youthfulness is often ranked above maturity.’
‘Consequently Saudis do not consider that Westernization moves their country forward—quite the opposite. Their society assigns the highest priority to honour, family, and a strict separation of the sexes. ‘Progress’ is not as simple as we would all wish.’
‘Yes, we say these beliefs and practices are all backward, that they’re all behind us, but they’re not so far behind us. And our books and films are still censored.
Which of our two allied and friendly countries has the right to investigate and preach to the other?’
’And lets not forget the nature of change. Wherever deeply held religious convictions of the sincerest conservatives stand in the way of an establishment that seeks to modernize,things that change at a glacial pace can suddenly change rapidly. Saudi women will certainly drive one day—and it could happen before the Anglican or Catholic Church gets women bishops. Englishmen got the right to vote in 1295 and it took more than six centuries before English women could vote as well.Lots of concessions have to be granted to enemies of change to maintain peace.’
‘ I say it’s it’s wrong to appease wowsers whenever and wherever they are,’ said Russel. ‘If allowed too much leeway,religious extremists can bit the hand that feeds them.’
‘ They could even threaten the existence of Saudi rule,’ said Mr.Treloar.’
‘This would threaten Britain, France and the US.It is they who are responsible for much of this situation, having set up a string of unrepresentative rulers whom they continue to support at the expense of any meaningful freedom and democracy’,said Russel.
‘How come the Saudi royals haven’t met the same fate as those in Egypt,Libya and Iraq?’ I asked.
‘They are far far more diverse,better organized and richer than those other deposed monarchs were.Faisal has weeded out any weaker,lazy,hedonistic elements who might shame the family code of honour.’
‘Where would we be without the code?’asked Russel, ‘honour amongst thieves.’
‘You wished Faisal peace, ’said Mr.Treloar.He didn’t have much in his own youth . Maybe that’s why some Western diplomats find him dour and cantankerous.He was a childhood soldier,starting at the age of 13 in his father's army. At the age of 18 he became a commander of in the military campaigns in the 1920s and ’30s that helped forge modern Saudi Arabia, the only country in the world whose name is that of the family who effectively own it and with which it’s citizens are labelled .’
‘The family that slays together stays together’,said Russel. ‘The fanatical holy warriors these Bedouin chieftains recruited rode, raided and hacked their way to power in a war conducted under British auspices after the collapse of Ottoman rule.’
‘This war was after the First World War’,’I asked.
‘Yes,’said Mr.Treloar, ‘though it’s back to before this that we must go to understand the relationship between the Houses of Saud and Windsor. For a decade before this global tragedy the India Office had been ignoring requests from Faisal’s father for Britain to establish friendly relations with Riyadh. But the increase in tensions that would lead to the Great War caused Delhi and London to re-examine the safety of the links between Britain and India via the Suez Canal and the likelihood that Ottoman Turkey would side with Germany in any conflict. The British Agent in Kuwait, was dispatched to enlist the help of the Saudis in eastern and central Arabia, while T. E. Lawrence was later sent to the Hashemites in the west. Thanks to the eloquent pen of Lawrence---
‘--and the subsequent help of Peter O’Toole.’
‘---the Hashemites’ ‘Arab Revolt’ has entered popular history. Less well known is the fruitful collaboration between the Saudis and a succession of British agents which led to the elimination of Turkish influence from the peninsula, both directly and via Turkey’s client dynasty, thus safeguarding the southern frontiers of what became the British mandate territories of Palestine and Transjordan. The Saudis were constructive and co-operative allies—even as British arms and money helped advance their own dynastic ambitions. When Britain signed the Treaty of Jeddah in 1926, recognizing Saudi conquest of the holy places, there was very much a sense in which Britain had served as godmother to the new kingdom.’
‘It sponsored it’s baptism of fire with superior weaponry,’said Russel.’ This enabled the Saudis to outgun the Turks.’
‘They had more than just firepower,’ said Mr.Treloar. ‘Their series of dazzling and politically skillful campaigns was partly conquest, partly consensus—the House of Saud are great consensus builders.
As they did with the British, so did they do deals with merchant families,the Shia minority and the tribes they conquered—sometimes with arms supplied through the deals they did with Great Britain. But it’s true, the self image they like to promote, based on and nurtured on this experience, is the legend of the warrior prince.’
Psychologically, this ideal of the Bedouin fighter represents to the present-day Saudi what the Western cowboy folk hero represents to an American.’
‘Unsurprisingly his talisman is not a gun but a sword’,I said.
‘That’s just what his name means.Faisal or Faysal comes from the Arabic word Fa'Sa'La. It originally means that which divides, most commonly referring to that which divides between right and wrong.Thus it has become another word for ‘sword’.’ ‘Faisal’ is a noun meaning the person who breaks apart or separates matters in a decisive fashion.’
‘Yes’, I said,grimacing, ‘and can remove different parts of the human body.’
‘In the same respect it may also mean the judge whom separates good from evil.
What impressed you about this man? Was it his piety? His discretion? His austerity? His attention to detail? His caution?’’
‘All of the above.Faisal is credited with implementing decisively a policy of modernization and reform. If his father created Saudi Arabia within its current borders, it is Faisal who has knitted it together.He is using the ‘black gold’ to turn an extremely backward,desolate desert society of marginal importance to the world economy into a modern state with a more influential position. Faisal is the perfect bridge between the old and the new because he is steeped in the traditional Bedouin world and appreciates the requirements of the modern world,in the judicious melding of past and present . He appears to be a shrewd and cautious monarch.’
‘He would have to be’,said Russel. ‘His country , dominated by opacity, suffers endemic corruption. His brother whom he replaced in a palace coup had brought discord to the government by his profligacy.He proved unable to to develop an effective bureaucracy, his continued to rely on personal advisers, and he failed to mobilize and direct for national development the massive wealth accruing to the country from oil resources.He had a massive royal residence built on the outskirts of the capital .’
‘The minute he walked in the joint you could see you he was a man of distinction.A real big spender,’said Russel.
‘Like you at least in the first category,Russel.You knew the path you took wouldn’t lead to big personal fortune.’
‘Or heaps of children.Faisal’s alcoholic brother sired 107 children. To live in a shoe would not do. He housed them extravagantly and outrageously in a series of palaces. With thousands of servants and guards he aimed to live in the style of the Sun King..’
‘Faisal’s ousting of Big Daddy meant that the family will to protect and preserve the continuance of the House of Saud would emerge to replace the individual will of an ineffective king. The Kingdom’s past, present and future prospects all revolve around the dynamics of its ruling family.’[See:Alarums and Excursions.]
‘ Blood may be thicker than water, but oil is thicker still’,said Russel.’
‘Faisal’ lives a different style’,I said . ‘He lives modestly in a modest mansion without a wall. He often drives himself to the office.He makes himself available to the public daily in the traditional majlis, followed by a meal open to anyone.Breaking bread with others, from the highest to the lowest, is important to him.‘Guess who’s coming to dinner?’asked the management of the Waldorf Astoria in New York.He had shocked them by insisting that one of his black slaves breakfast with him in the whites only Wedgewood Room.
He remembers the early days of his father’s reign when privileged classes were unknown.His father’s first palace was made of the same sun-dried mud bricks that the peasants used. Sheikhs and bedouin herdsmen called each other by their first names. The clothing of rich and poor was quite similar.He’s happiest squatting by a desert fireplace,digging barehanded into roast goat,talking to people in their own dialect.
He knows the dissatisfaction and unrest that wide differences in income can create.The existence of a privileged class can be accompanied by conspicuous consumption and produce envy, resentment and careless,senseless violent actions.’
To set a example he works in his office until midnight, scarcely taking time off.’
‘Understandably.He has to strike a skilful balance between modernisation and the conservatism of a tribal and deeply religious society,’said Mr.Treloar..’
‘‘Faisal is a man of the world,at ease in a London drawing room or a Washington conference room. He made many connections during his trips around the world as foreign minister in his father’s administration. Having been invited into the most important strategic,scientific and cultural sites in the world,he saw enough to know that Saudi Arabia could not remain isolated any longer. He aspires to create good governance composed of educated young intellectuals who have been educated outside Saudi Arabia and have no tribal affiliation, and he does not want to be dependent on the whims of the tribal leaders. Indeed, his brother’s removal from power marks a decline in the status of the traditional Saudi powers and is producing a new elite that consists more of intellectuals and senior administrative staff.
He got off on the right foot rescuing the country's finances. His brother had embarked on a lavish and ill-considered spending program .Many funds had been deployed abroad. His financial policies were bringing the state to the brink of collapse.He had trapped the state into a high spending mode from which Faisal had to extricate it.’
‘What has Faisal done in response?’
‘Even before he became king,with executive powers in foreign and internal affairs, including fiscal planning,he initiated an austerity program in 1959 that included a reduction of subsidies to the royal family, currency stabilization, and the resolution of embarrassing national debts.Once his hand was free, he set about cutting spending dramatically in an effort to rescue the state treasury from bankruptcy.A new word,shafafia or ‘transparency’ has entered the country’s political vocabulary.’
‘The demand to know where the money has gone,’said Mr.Treloar.’
‘This policy of financial prudence has become a hallmark of his era. It has earned him a reputation for thriftiness among the populace. His aims of balancing the country's budget is succeeding, helped by an increase in oil production. He is investing heavily in infrastructure and laying the foundations for a modern extensive welfare state.’
‘So you would see him as a reforming,liberalizing, and modernizing figure,’asked Mr.Treloar.’
‘The descriptions ‘liberal’ and ‘reformist’, must be seen in very relative terms in Saudi Arabia.Take economic planning for example.He has inaugurated the country's first ‘five-year plan’ for economic development.Now could this really move the country towards the Eastern bloc?’ I asked the two academics rhetorically.
‘Hardly,’said Russel. ‘Both Saudi Arabia and the United States share a mutual fear of the Soviet Union’s expanding global influence.Predicated on strategic and religious realities, this provides a protective political layer that envelopes oil and defence interests.We have to look at the kingdom within the global context of western post-colonial strategy and the political economy of oil. The Saudi ruler is both zealously anti-Zionist and anti-Communist,you know.’
‘Didn’t he go to the Soviet Union in the thirties?’
‘He wasn’t impressed.When a Soviet diplomat asked him why he shunned relations with the Soviet Union, Faisal replied tartly: “Go to Moscow and tell them to recognise God, and tomorrow I shall open an embassy in Moscow.”
‘He would have to wait til hell froze over,’said Alan Treloar.
‘We hear about changes Faisal has made in education,’said Russel. ‘What do you know about these?' ‘He recognises the value of education as the key to ending the country’s backwardness.While he recognises the value of foreign schooling,he has issued an edict that all Saudi princes have to school their children inside the country, rather than sending them abroad. This has had the effect of making it ‘fashionable’ for upper-class families to bring their sons back to study in the Kingdom.’
‘I’m told his Turkish wife was involved.’
‘He supported her in opening the first girls’ school, despite the consternation of many conservatives in the religious establishment.One city sent a delegation to him in protest.’Is there one verse in the Quran that forbids teaching women to read?’he asked them. ‘Am I forcing any of you to send your daughters to this school?’
To appease the objectors, however, he has allowed the female educational curriculum to be written and overseen by religious clerics .Faisal is confident enough to make clear that rulers rule and that the religious must go along with that.That they remain in their proper place: the junior partner, a prop to the social order, not a force to threaten it.’
‘To what extent can he lean on them?’
‘He can’t brush them aside but he has relaxed the zealous powers of the cane wielding religious police who enforce the observance of prayer and the seclusion of women.they’re on the defensive.They listen to record players.Almost everyone now listens to foreign radio stations,female announcers,can use film projectors at home and see photographs in newspapers and magazines.. Faisal is attempting to ensure that the most radical clerics do not hold society's most powerful religious posts such as that of Grand Mufti.He knows from history that once religious zealots are encouraged, they can come back to haunt a country.’
‘Like those of the Auto-da-fé.When you fuel this kind of auto ,you can end up with a massive pile up of recurring nightmares. ’
‘Some haven’t been at all happy with the introduction of television,have they?’
‘A few years ago Faisal established the country's first television station, though actual broadcasts have only begun recently. As with many of his other policies,such as his support for the pro-Israel U.S.A., the move has aroused strong objections from the religious and conservative sections of the country. He has to guard against any backlash brought about by the temptations of unimaginable riches and what are seen as foreign ways . Acting as the Custodian of Mecca and Medina, Faisal has assured the Salafiin, however, that Islamic principles of modesty are being strictly observed.He makes sure that the broadcasts contain a large amount of religious programming.’
‘Not enough for some,I’m sure. Last year, an especially zealous nephew of Faisal attacked the newly established headquarters of Saudi television but was killed by security personnel.’
‘What are Faisal’s main foreign policy themes?
‘Pan-Islamism,anti-Communism and pro-Palestinian nationalism.’
‘He’s accused by the U.S. Israel lobby of being anti-semitic.They organized rallies to jeer and heckle him in New York.’
‘How can he can he be anti-semitic? Aren’t the Jews and Arabs both considered semitic?’
‘Arabs are also a semitic people. For most of the past fourteen hundred years Arabs have not been antisemitic as the word is used in the West. Most Arabs are not Christians brought up on stories of Jewish deicide. This long-held common belief in Christianity lays the responsibility for the death of Jesus on the Jewish people as a whole.’
‘It’s always mischievous and irresponsible to lay responsibility for the death of anyone on another people as a whole.To paint a whole group with the same brush.’
‘Yes and let’s not forget Christ was condemned by the Roman governor,not by jews. It was the colonial head who denied Jesus was a God. That’s why in Islam, such stories are rejected by the Qur'an as a blasphemous absurdity.Throughout most of this time, provided they did not contest the inferior social and legal status imposed on them,jews in the arab world were provided relative security against persecution and welfare —a protection that was missing for non-Christians in most of Europe.’
‘How long did this situation go on there?’
‘Until the French Revolution.This brought about institutionalization of equality under a secular idea of citizenship .This allowed the jews to enjoy their respective religious laws and ways of life.’
‘These are the freedoms Faisal said he upheld at a luncheon tendered in his honor by the Washington press corps last year. Defending the Arab boycott of U.S. firms trading with Israel he asserted that “it has never been our aim to exterminate Israel and throw it into the sea.” He then gave his interpretation of Israel’s emergence. He said that Jews were always recognized as co-citizens of Arabs in Palestine, but “Zionist aggression occupied the country, threw out the Arab people, many became refugees. Jews from outside came into the country. Jews from outside are aliens. By aggression they have taken over the land.” The King said “the Jews” had been guilty of “violation of every human right” of the Arabs and had denied the Arabs “the right of a person to his own home.” He said at another point that Saudi Arabia had “no aggressive intentions against any country or any religion.”
‘He makes the strong case that survivors of the Holocaust should have been given the choicest land in Germany and places in Europe from where they were themselves dispossessed.He argues that recompense for a crime should be made by the criminal,not by innocent bystanders.’
‘What rights do Communists have in Saudi Arabia?’
‘They are strictly forbidden to organize and operate.Faisal is an authoritarian who suspects an unholy alliance between Zionism and Communism.’
‘That sounds hard to believe,’I said, ‘ relations between Moscow and Tel Aviv couldn’t be worse .’
‘Some people believe in all kinds of conspiracies.’
One thing’s for sure.The relationship between Saudi Arabia and the U.S. is very close. Faisal declared in 1962, ‘After Allah, we trust the United States. ’
‘According to the Quincy Pact,arrived at by Faisal’s father and Roosevelt,
the US obligates itself to protect the kingdom and the Saudi royal family in exchange for furnishing oil on privileged terms.
A tacit clause of this pact was Roosevelt’s promise not to allow the creation of an independent Jewish state in Palestine.
In the closing days of the war, Roosevelt confirmed in writing to Faisal’s father his promise to not take, as chief executive leader of the government, “any action, that might be construed as hostile to the Arab peoples.Faisal was assured the same thing by Truman’s Secretary of State,George Marshall.”
‘The establishment of the state of Israel and the dispossession of the Palestinians would have flown in the face of this.’
‘After the death of Roosevelt, Faisal felt completely betrayed because President Truman, basically for reasons of election convenience and advantage, declared his support for the partition of Palestine.In fact Truman recognized the state of Israel fifteen minutes after it’s proclamation.’
‘What did the U.N. have to say about this?’
‘On the subject of voting on the partition, the General Assembly voted twice,some say to get the desired result. Faisal publicly denounced this as manoeuvres of subornation and intimidation.He declared that for these reasons his government ‘does not recognize the resolution adopted by it’.He continued to use his influence to promote the Palestinian cause to the governing circles in the US.’
‘He did this forcefully as a counterweight to his fidelity to the US.To be seen as independent of it by Saudi Arabia’s neighbours.’
‘The U.S. has historically tried to back both Israel and the conservative arab states.’
‘A bob each way.’
‘Exactly,and this ambiguous policy has been remarkably successful.’
‘Especially for the arms dealers.’
‘At times the U.S. makes pro Arab gestures, fully aware the Arab states are too weak to challenge it’s pro-Israel tendency.The King knows not to rock this boat too much.If he were to threaten any oil squeeze against the advanced capitalist economies, he would be be reminded that to weaken the West is to strengthen Communism.He would face the the threat of the U.S. wanting to occupy Saudi oil fields.’
‘And the U.S. has to work hard to placate him.’
‘For their part the U.S. fears any coup in a domestic backlash against Faisal would deal a crippling blow to their economy.It is frightened of such a prospect. The U.S. is happy for the arms delivered to be used against militant nationalist and republican forces throughout the region as long as they’re not used against Israel,or at least sparingly.’
‘How are relations with the neighbouring more populous states? Do the bonds of background trump those of inter-regional rivalry ? The difference in living standards between The Saudis and their Arab neighbours could always tip over into an explosive regional imbalance. Things are rocky regarding Saudi-Egyptian relations,I believe. ’
‘The Muslim world is as as diverse in its political, social and religious traditions as the Western one. Trade, military advantage, and inter-ethnic rivalry play just as important a role as any idea of a unified Islam acting in concert.’
‘That which Faisal urges.’
'Yes.While the Arab world is divided into different states,there exists among all classes consciousness of a common Arab identity and a desire for unity.Hence Faisal’s collaboration with such odd bedfellows as Nasser and Yasser Arafat.’
‘Faisal is the proverbial ‘man behind the curtain,’ the guy who exerts power, wields influence, and manipulates events but seeks to remain largely anonymous.Nasser and Arafat are pursuing a more more vocal secular approach.’
‘The three are drawn together because of their mutual interest in obtaining Arab independence from non-Arab foreign intervention,’I suggested.
‘Beyond that point all similarity of objectives vanishes.The Egyptians and P.L.O. receive Soviet assistance. Moreover the kingdom faces a serious challenge from the popular, besuited Egyptian leader who deposed his own king and seems bent on dominating the Arabian peninsula. Saudi officials were aghast when Syria and Egypt merged in 1958 to form the United Arab Republic. In the on/off relationship between Riyadh and Cairo, Nasser’s reputed to have stated ‘To liberate all Jerusalem, the Arab people must first liberate Riyadh’.
‘Big Daddy is reputed as having tried to assassinate Nasser.’
‘With friends and family like these,who needs enemies? Faisal is still engaged in a proxy war with Egypt in Yemen.Just five years ago nine Saudi air force officers defected to the Nasserites,with the U.S. sending in planes to fill the gap.Faisal has exploited border skirmishes with the Egyptian military, referring to them as agents of Communist aggression.You can imagine how well this has gone down in Washington.A more virulent foreign outlook is taking place since the full scale entry of troops into Vietnam.’
‘Isn’t Nasser also fervently anti-Communist?’
‘He is but he’s fraught with dilemmas. He threw his lot in with the Soviet Union as the CIA were continually trying to undermine him. His tilt against imperialism is mostly rhetorical.His bark is worse than his bite.Nasser is trying to reach some agreement with the King.In spite of their differences the common language and heritage demand that all the Arab states engage in limited economic and political co-operation.Saudi aid can be deployed to stabilize whichever regime requires it.The Saudis bank reserves and develop services in Egypt and Lebanon.’
‘And fund the Palestinian cause, fighting the U.S.’s other close ally in the region.’
‘The Israelis beat up and kill the Palestinians and the Saudis patch them up and bury them.’
'How sincere is this expression of a shared Arab bond really?’
‘ Like all the Arab regimes,the trio you’ve mentioned invoke this mystified and classless conception of a common ‘Arabism’ to their advantage.At the Washington press corps luncheon Faisal bristled when a reporter asked whether Saudi Arabia considered Egypt or Israel a greater enemy. He replied: “I regret deeply this question. It is based on a premise very much contrary to truth.” He described Egypt as a “sister country” and the Egyptians as “our brethren.” He stressed that, despite differences between Saudi Arabians and Egyptians, “they remain our brethren.”
‘You’re suggesting that he’s manipulating the popular sense of unity in order to re-inforce his own position.’
‘ And thereby that of the Western powers.’
‘By posing as the champions of a classless Arabism,’said Russel, ‘those Arab leaders are able to deflect criticism from the oppressed within their own country.Their regimes manipulate the Palestinian question to ensure class collaboration within their own states.The Saudi position on Israel is dominated more by religious obsession about the ‘Islamic’ character of Jerusalem than by solidarity with the Palestinian people.’
‘Whose P.L.O. leadership includes members of different belief systems.’
‘ These leaders have proved incapable of assisting the Palestinian people to assert their self-determination.In this way the predominance of a national rather than a class conception contributes to the strength of imperialism throughout the area and to the disunity of the Arab world.’
I discussed the hurricane movement of the Six Day war that came the following week with Mr.Treloar.
'Relations between Israel and its neighbours’, he said , have never fully normalized following the 1948 Arab–Israeli War.All the attendant tensions have became dangerously heightened.They now have to be resolved on the battle field.
Despite the country’s alliance with America,it’s powerful foreign protector,Faisal is providing logistics and helping payroll it.’
After the short war we discussed it’s consequences.
‘A week is a long time in politics.’
‘Nasser’s defeat and a weakened Egypt has changed the political landscape.’
‘Any disputes between Arab states must now have to take a secondary position to what the Arabs call the ‘alien threat’ of Israel.It has seized and retains Jerusalem, the third holiest city of Islam.’
‘This is indeed a game changer.Any sense of completely secular Arab states may have ended. Saudi Arabia’s power in the region has been further enhanced.’
‘In what ways?’
‘It sees itself as guarantor of stability in the Middle East. Egypt desperately needs Saudi money to rebuild it’s military so must now come cap in hand to Riyadh. Faisal is now the predominant Arab leader, the moderator of Arab disputes., and one ready to use oil wealth to promote his idea of global Islamic solidarity.’
‘And also to buttress it’s political bargaining power with the recipients and the West.’
‘The US and Britain have secured a long list of major and minor contracts with the peninsular power.’
‘So what’s on the cards now?’
‘What we see happening today in the Middle East is a direct result of Western opposition to Nasser’s strategies and ideals. Saudi Arabia is set to play a more aggressive role in the Arab world. Both monarchism and Islamism will profit from the failure of the secular nationalist project.The ideological field is now wide open for proselytising competing versions of a central notion: that Muslims should not merely show solidarity with one another but go to each other’s aid when they are under attack,to capture the imagination of the Arab world.’
‘So who will define what the attacks are? Some shrill cleric with a reliance on religious references or an enlightened despot backed by his educated populace ? And what about when Muslims attack other Muslims?’ Isn’t this just as likely as nominally Christian states or their citizens attacking one another?’
‘ All citizens should show solidarity with all others irrespective of beliefs and go to each other’s aid when under attack.They have to be educated as to where any real potential attack could be coming from.’
‘What role can we expect now in the military sphere,Mr.Treloar?’
‘Faisal and the U.S. are building up Saudi Arabia into a massive military capable of not only crushing any internal threat but of intervening throughout the neighbouring states. The kingdom relied on Britain and the U.S. to set up it’s air force and navy and will continue this build up.’ . As a counterbalance to any potential regional Baathist upstarts, The U.S. provides the material guidelines and the Koran the ideological justification.’
The irony would be that it was this narrow interpretation that would scare the hell out of the House of Saud itself. It looked for years leftwards politically, towards communists, constitutionists, liberals,as the potential source of trouble. And what was clearly the coming threat to regimes in the Middle East, was that from the religious side of things. The rise of the clerical class would prove to be simultaneously a pillar of support and a potential threat. The unfortunate consequence of this arrangement would be the de facto encouragement of extreme figures at the expense of more reasoned voices.
In the Saudi Arabian tradition of violent religious extremism that resurfaces almost every generation, a portent of the future,Faisal was slain by a nephew following a family dispute over the propriety of introducing television to Riyadh.While trying to edge the Kingdom into modernization at the same time as retaining traditional values, he eventually paid with his life for his efforts.It is said by his Islamic admirers that on his death bed he asked the life of his assassin be spared.This rejection of capital punishment is in line with that of the Catholic Church and others.It is one to be held to by all.
Pan-Islamism, the core of Faisal’s foreign policy,would lie at at the core of global jihad. The idea would gain a further boost in the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan in the 1980s. But after the celebrated Soviet defeat and withdrawal in 1989, it became clear that pan-Islamism was a Pandora’s box from which unintended consequences would emerge, including Al-Qaeda and related groups.The country's roiling disaffection with the stationing of foreign troops and economic downturn would produce sixteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers, dreaming of messianic purity,proudly resisting the march of history, and sacrificing themselves and others to what they saw as a higher cause.Like soldiers of the Third Reich,who had it inscribed on their belt buckles,they too believed they had God with them. Saudis had a determining hand in the terror strikes, supplying the transmission belts to fanatical organizations.
These organizations had the blessing of the U.S.at first.Former US national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski had stood on the border with Afghanistan with religious leaders and said, ‘Go and wage the jihad.’After all,he would later add: ‘What was more important in the world view of history? The Taliban or the fall of the Soviet Empire? A few stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?’
The attacks and those that followed would have absolutely nothing to do with protecting the sanctity of Islam.As would the blind,wild lashing out by The House of Bush be nothing to do with protecting democracy and the sanctity of human life .
The Bush boys had seen what was inside the box too.
Continuing to disregard Faisal’s pleas for the Palestinian cause,the threat from Muslim ‘jihadists’ and their WMD totin’ terrerists[sic] would become for the U.S the catchall answer to demands for peace.
For Faisal’s successors, disregarding his warnings against sectarianism and racism, the “Shia threat” would become their catchall answer to demands for democratic reform and accountability, together with Uncle Sam replacing the Communist bogey with the new simple ‘Terrorist’ model.
It’s very convenient for governments. to encourage culture wars than allow critics to direct their ire toward the seat of power.
The marriage with the U.S. would prove fatally contradictory. American funding of jihadists in Afghanistan in the 80s, an alliance with the House of Saud, and visceral support for Israel at the expense of Arabs would provoke more death and destruction in the mainland United States than forty five years of cold war.
The Kingdom’s unique blending of worldly wealth and religious resources, the clash between the materialism that the east coast generates and the spiritual traditions of the holy cities in the west,would lead to a classic conflict between God and Mammon, ancient and modern. The puritan state would be strained to breaking point.
There would be no dearth of critics both within the Kingdom and across the Red Sea to point up the shortcomings of an antiquated Bedouin monarchy awash in money and self-indulgence.
I learned of Mr.Treloar’s acquaintance with Moshe Dayan and time spent in Egypt.
Dear Reader,
Is there a rhythm to the story? Does it flow
or does it plod?
Would you kindly make any comments and suggestions.For example does it stir those strong feelings of affection or sympathy brought up by Stan Hunt?
You can do this by entering ‘tools’ and clicking ‘track changes’, allowing you to show your alterations.My address is: allanwdavis@hotmail.com]
Russel had noticed the sender’s name printed on the envelope I placed beside my place at the table. ‘Has it already been opened?’he asked.
‘What do you mean?’I asked.
‘I see it’s from Aaron Copland ? May I?’ He held it up to the light. ‘Steaming open an envelope is one of the oldest tricks in the book,’he said. ‘It's really a cinch, and, if done carefully, is barely noticeable by the recipient. They go for the very end of either side of the flap, because some envelopes don't have any glue there. Watch for any wrinkling, rubbing and tearing.’
’Why would anyone tamper like that”I asked.
‘I was only half joking’,he said. ‘This wouldn’t happen to you- hopefully.But Copland’s correspondences were scrutinised by the FBI.’
‘Didn’t they have anything better to do?I asked.’Moreover it’s a felony’.
‘Too right,but they are a law to themselves.They investigated Copland In 1936 for having defended the American Communist Party.As from that moment he was blackballed. In 1953 his Abraham Lincoln Tribute was withdrawn from the Inauguration concert for President Eisenhower. He testified to the Congress that he had never been a member of the Party. McCarthy was interested in the reasons for Copland being hired to give US Embassy sponsored lectures on music in Italy and Latin America. He asked Copland “If you were a member of the Communist Party, let’s assume you were, and you were selected to lecture you would be bound to try wherever you could to sell the Communist idea, wouldn’t you”.
Copland replied “No doubt” adding “I had no fear of sitting down at a table with a known Communist because I was so sure of my position as a loyal American”.
The Senator fired back “With what known Communists have you sat down at a table”.
“Copland replied that there were the Soviet composers he had met during his international musical career. “Well, I assume they are Communists” he said. He was not asked to come back to any more public hearings.’ Transcripts of Copland’s hearing before McCarthy released fifty years afterwards confirmed what Russel had said. It was said that Aaron had parried the Senator with a compound of ‘languor’ and ‘outrage’.What us lesser mortals might call ‘language’.
Horse Sense.
I supported the encouragement of accountable government by Senator Wayne Morse and his open views on social and civil issues. He appreciated my kind comments. I agreed with him on the need for greater transparency in political horse trading. Such precaution would do away with the problem of locking the stable door after the horse had bolted. I spoke of his ideals of foresight, intellectual independence and integrity. A fiery maverick, he was known as ‘the conscience of the Senate’. Once he got on his hobbyhorse and starts talking about human rights, you can't get him to discuss anything else. A constant thorn in the backside of his collegial troglodytes, there undoubtedly would have been a sigh of relief when on one occasion he was kicked in the mouth by one of his precious horses in training. This left him in hospital seemingly out of the running with his mouth wired shut. His colleagues would have some respite from this zealot from Oregon. However he would have a note taker in his hospital room relaying messages to the Senate. Later he said it was amazing how much a man could talk with his mouth wired shut. It was this spirit and exuberance that characterized his career.
He believed that if you give people the truth, they will make the right decision: “The interests of my country are more important than the interests of my party”.
I thanked Senator Morse for having the spunk to dare snaffle McCarthyism.
He said “McCarthyism is a dangerous threat to the freedom and liberty of every American because it substitutes trial by accusation for a trial by proof”. He asked the Senate: “What is a nation if its gains security and loses its liberty?”
Senators Morse and McCarthy were slated to debate each other on the topic ‘The Fairness of Congressional Investigations’. The debate was sponsored by the American Federation of Labour. It did not take place because McCarthy backed out at the last minute. However they would square off like two prizefighters in a 45 minutes Senate debate. Senator Morse accused McCarthy of “political thuggery”. McCarthy had claimed that Morse was a “Communist sympathizer”. Morse was instrumental in pushing through the censure that would ultimately decide the fate of Senator
McCarthy. There were times when he would bend ideologically under McCarthy’s bulldog hectoring but he never broke.
One area in which Morse would not bend in his principles was the use of wiretapping as evidence to seek out suspected Communists. In a statement to the American Bar Association, he said wiretapping was a police state practice and its members should resist such totalitarian methods. He believed the wiretapping was not selective, that the privacy of those innocent of crime would be jeopardized. He said the practice was ‘a lazy policeman’s tool and that it was a Communist tool’.
Related to his stand against McCarthy was that he took against the China Lobby which resisted recognition of the newly created People’s Republic of China. He requested that this powerful lobby be investigated for reason of illegal activities. He believed there was an exorbitant use of Treasury funds for personal financing of the lobby. He feared they would suck the US into a long and costly land war with the People’s Republic.
Another of the few men and women in public life to dare confront the rabid senator from Wisconsin was J. William Fulbright, the Senator from Arkansas. I thanked him for this daring which he appreciated. And encouraged him in his many pursuits which I will mention in the coming pages..
His encounters with McCarthy were exceedingly vitriolic. McCarthy was contemptuous and insulting to him, dubbing him ‘Senator Halfbright’ or just plain ‘Halfbright’. Time and again Fulbright spoke out about the McCarthy menace. In doing so he laid himself open to its venom. He became a special target of McCarthy’s method in a hearing to determine the suitability of a distinguished law professor to be a US delegate to the UN. Fulbright said “This was the first time I realized there was just not limit to what he’d say or insinuate. As the hearings proceeded, it suddenly occurred to me that this fellow would do anything to deceive you to get his way. I was deeply rebuked, repelled, offended by his conduct in those hearings”. At one point during this sharp tangle, Fulbright pressed McCarthy for specific proof of his charges arguing ‘You shift your position every time”. McCarthy would counter later “Men of little minds are trying to make this a political issue”. Fulbright replied sarcastically “You wouldn’t try to do anything like that, would you?” The hearing was marked by shouts, the pounding of gavels and vituperative exchanges. Implying that Fulbright was playing footsies with the Communists, the McCarthyist onslaught put the screws on Fulbright and his educational exchange program. McCarthy suggested it was operated to the favour of Communists, as did Pearl Buck’s East-West association, set up to promote cross-cultural understanding.
Not only in the sanctuary of the Senate but in speeches and television programs, had Fulbright attempted to raise a general alarm about this menace with its ‘trial by headline’. He warned that if its attacks on the State Department and the schools continued, they could lead towards the very thing we are fighting – the police state”. He went on “something ominous has happened to our community. A bitterness, a suspicion, a kind of primitive ruthlessness quite alien to our traditions, has taken root and is spreading”. One of the hate letters he received as a result of his stance read: “Tie hyena Morse and jackal Lehman around your foul coyote neck and jump into the Potomac”. On the contrary the three Senators reached the critical numbers necessary to censure McCarthy leading to his political demise.
Noticeably one of the numbers missing was Congressman Kennedy who later conceded that the censure was just too difficult both politically and personally. He was loath to fall in with more full-blooded liberals in his party, such as Morse and Fulbright, seen as “fuzzy-minded” by some.
State Of Terror
Thousands of political prisoners were banished to tropical gulags like Buru where the writer Pramoedya Aranta Toer was sent. Growing up during Dutch colonial rule followed by Japanese occupation he experienced the monstrous brutality of those military who came to power after independence. He called his memoir “The Mutes Soliloquy”. This is a harrowing portrait of the squalid penal colony on the island of Buru on which Pramoedya was imprisoned for eleven years. His ‘crime’ was to have belonged to an alleged Communist literary group.
He was subjected to the most brutal conditions. The prisoners on the islands had to survive by scraping whatever they could from the land itself. They were ravaged by plague and other diseases. Labour was harsh and the rules petty. He saw his friends killed ‘just for fun’. His nightmare had begun on October 13, 1965 six weeks after the kidnapping and execution of the six Indonesian army officers. He was in his study editing a collection of short stories written by Soekarno, the first President of the Republic. A group of masked men,all steamed up, gathered outside his house. After he tried to reason with them, the police arrived and took him into custody ‘for his own safety’. The bound him, put a noose around his neck and a soldier struck him on the head with a rifle, leaving him almost clean deaf. He begged the police to save the valuable library of books on Indonesia that he had built up over the years, but they were left for the mob to burn.
There were huge problems during the Soekarno rule. There were food shortages and to assert its independence the government refused US aid. However such problems fade into insignificance when compared to those thrown up by the Suharto regime. At one point of time the populace was rationing their meager diet of rice while Suharto and cronies were living like kings. How could people live so hand-to-mouth in such a resource rich country? Indonesia would bring about environmental destruction on a massive scale by allowing wholesale removal of its forests. Moreover the unleashing of extreme nationalism and an Islamic apocalyptic, end-of-days,living with one foot in the afterlife strategic vision would affect Australia eventually with the occupation of East Timor and the tolerance given to Islamic fundamentalism . Blowback.
Nasution spoke of the role I could play in helping solve the problems faced by our two countries.
I have seen my role as an educational one. Fulfilling his wish dovetailed with my activities at my alma mater: helping Indonesian students amongst others over the linguistic and social hurdles that confronted them. They had won my taste buds but I wanted something more from them. As my trophy I wanted their hearts and minds. At peace. Consequent to this saga of atrocities I became duty bound to help understanding of how our countries, but particularly the General’s, could become embroiled in such horrific events in which millions and counting would perish. And to urge that these things never be allowed to happen again. That bayonets remain forever sheathed.That guns go silent, or beat into ploughshares.That landmines be forever banned.
Revelation.
“If people really knew [the truth], the war would
be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don’t know and they can’t know.”
David Lloyd George British prime minister to the editor of the Manchester Guardian
recoiling with revulsion at the carnage, I saw the war being prosecuted by an industry whose sole business was death . And my oh my,was this funny business booming.
Like those who ran the show,my initial understanding of the cauldron was frighteningly superficial and simplistic.I didn’t know enough. It was a doddle to invade Vietnam but what to do on day two if we got boxed in.
There were too many imponderables. They,the decision takers were making it up as they went along. We,the public, were woefully informed. I had got swept up in the momentary illusion that our involvement with such a pre-eminent power was appropriate. Like many,I had bought into a myth. For my part the more bombs they dropped on people, the lower the discomforting penny dropped for me.I experienced an epiphany, a spiritual flash,the first of many that would change the way I viewed myself. Ding dong,I was catching on, growing sceptical of tendentious official accounts and, kept up at night, uneasy about how the war was going. It was impossible to see the corner let alone around it.
The chaotic reality unfolding on the ground in Vietnam bore little resemblance to the upbeat accounts offered by geopoliticians and generals who were prosecuting the war. These life takers and heart breakers were more concerned about ink being spilled over their activities than blood.
I had had no idea the extent of the lie nor the level of deception. ‘I wasassured the decision to intervene militarily was bipartisan,’I told Russel.
‘The word bipartisan usually means some larger than usual deception is being carried out.’
I pointed out to him, ‘Have you ever realized that the term Secretary of State contains the word ‘secret’.
‘ What’s the difference between an archaeologist and the Secretary of State?’ asked Russel.
'An archaeologist uncovers the unknown. The top diplomat covers the known.’
The
Blood Boogaloo.
You better listen mr president
Oh boy don't you mess
up with my war, boyI wanna do I wanna do
Lord I wanna do the Blood Boogaloo
I'm just a Redneck son of a gun
I wanna kill me a gook before dawn.
Tim Buckley.
The chance "meeting engagements" described by Westmoreland involved upwards of 50 US troops ending up bagged and tagged. His press conference in October 1965, after the slaughter of 155 US troops at Landing Zone Albany, in the battle of Ia Drang was a devil of this wilful misrepresentation: "I consider this an unprecedented victory. At no time during the engagement were American troops forced to withdraw or move back from their positions, except for tactical manoeuvres. The enemy fled from the scene." Of course we weren’t told told the real facts ‘til later.
Facing the facts flat on,with my moral squint I read critical reports by probing,unembedded journalists on the frontlines, who prized truth more than access to the powerful,who didn’t tailor their reports. I was horrified by the coldness, the calculatedness, and in particular the language of American military men. Like ‘Stomp them to death’, the words of General William De Puy,Westmoreland’s chief of operations. It would turn out they were only falling in line with their boss . In the summer of 1966, shortly before Neil Sheehan of The New York Times left to return stateside, Westmoreland did him the farewell courtesy of a personally escorted day in the field. “At one point in the trip,” Sheehan recalls later, “I asked the general if he was worried about the large number of civilian casualties from the air strikes and the shelling. He looked at me carefully. ‘Yes, Neil, it is a problem,’ he said, ‘but it does deprive the enemy of the population, doesn’t it?”’ . If Mao had described guerrillas as fish swimming in the sea,he was going to empty the sea. His object, in his own words, was to decimate the North Vietnamese population "to the point of national disaster for generations to come.’ Westmoreland had accepted the death of a whole countryside because he despaired of any other way to ease the secretary of defense’s disquiet or to sustain the national security adviser’s imbecile optimism.
The countryside alone,it was stressed repeatedly, was where the Viet Cong had any real support and influence on a broad base in. Later the general opined that "The Oriental doesn't put the same high price on life as does a Westerner...We value life and human dignity. They don't care about life and human dignity."
‘ And I suppose he does. For all he cares, the entire country could go up in flames. War is a sordid business for sure,’ I said to Russel.
'It’s as dirty as the businesses who cash in on it,’said Russel. ‘It reflects the demands of their representatives to get them the super profits that they want but can’t get in the usual way. In the words of von Clausewitz, ‘War is a continuation of politics by other means." A function of class society,the capitalists of the stronger industrial states no longer wage war against each other as in the past but combine to exploit and control systematically the poorer countries.The poorer,the better.At their expense,today’s multi-nationals will better absorb the turbulent cycles of boom and depression generated.
‘The system is one of destructive creativity. Capital’s endless pursuit of new outlets for class-based accumulation requires for its continuation the destruction of both pre-existing natural conditions and previous social relations. Class exploitation, imperialism, war, and ecological devastation are not mere unrelated accidents of history but interrelated, intrinsic features of capitalist development. There has always been the danger, moreover, that this destructive creativity can turn into what has been called the “destructive uncontrollability” that is capital’s ultimate destiny. The destruction built into the logic of profit can take over and predominate, undermining not only the conditions of production but also those of life itself.’
Today it is clear that such destructive uncontrollability has come to characterize more and more the entire capitalist world economy,fighting to encompass the planet as a whole.’
‘When did you become aware how this destructive system is shaped?’
‘In my salad days I too was ignorant and naïve. A real schnook,I didn’t know the first thing about the relationship between politics and life. Like any well brought up conservative,I felt politics was to be severely avoided.Because I had no desire to change anything in the divinely ordered social arrangement of the world,it suited me very well to consider I had no politics.
‘Yet you had another think coming,Russel?’
‘It was an exercise as a cadet sergeant in my School Cadet Corps that sowed the seeds of my doubts. The enemy,we were told,was a party of unemployed rioters,led by Communist agitators who had marched off into the hills plundering farms and orchards. ‘Intelligence’ reports came in that,intoxicated with pillaged wine,they were heading towards Adelaide which we had to stop from being sacked. In what we were told was a simulation of actual warface we took up up defensive positions along the road, bushwhacking them, firing off hundreds of blank cartridges. That was my road to Damascus. The great lesson that came out of that day was that the ultimate enemy we were training to come up against was not the Germans, French or other bodgy foreigners we learned about in history lessons, but one in our very midst- our unemployed fellow countrymen. Why did so many their authority exceed rather than heed what we were told about Jesus Christ,the prince of peace who made wars to cease unto the ends of the earth.Who loved the poor and needy.
'I guess they needed a class system.’
‘Exactly. Something they use to discriminate against someone who looks like you and me.’
‘If they can drum up a fight against enemies as white and similar in appearance to us,how much easier is it for them crying wolf, to vilify one that looks different- a poor people with different coloured skin and an epicanthic fold.’
‘That’s when it’s easy for them to quote Matthew. "Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.’
David
versus Goliath.
I can no longer sit back and allow, communist
infiltration, communist indoctrination, communist subversion, and the
international communist conspiracy, to sap and impurify all or our precious
bodily fluids.
General Ripper, Dr.Strangelove
For many in the US military, victory was only a matter of time.They believed that this time span would be short. The Communists' death toll was very heavy, and this encouraged the delusion that the U.S. was romping home , as Westmoreland could not imagine how relatively small countries like North or South Vietnam could sustain such massive casualties.
This led to the deliberately aggressive policy policy of search and destroy,with Westmoreland seeking to draw the forces of the National Liberation Front into the open where they could be eliminated. He believed that the NLF could be defeated through saturation use of anti-personnel ordnance, high-tech mobility, and large-unit battles, air power, massive bombing, and defoliation campaigns.
Westmoreland was once asked: "What is the answer to insurgency?" He replied: "Firepower." America needed to hit North Vietnam “surely, swiftly, and powerfully...with sufficient force to hurt”, as at Khe Sanh, where B-52s dropped more than 100,000 tonnes of bombs over two months. And troops needed to be poured in. General Westmoreland's tactics were simple:ring Saigon in a series of giant impenetrable forts-a direct echo of French thinking,and take the war to the enemy in the countryside, and kill him faster than he could be replaced. Where possible, apply overwhelming, stunning force. Through the sledgehammer strategy of "Harassment and interdiction fire," anything that moved could be killed.
'A great country”, he liked to say, quoting the Duke of Wellington, “cannot wage a little war.” His idea was not to seize or hold territory but to kill enemy soldiers in their jungle redoubts. Fast machines,massive damage,quick getaway.However the resistance’s guerrilla style of warfare allowed it to dictate the strategic pace and deny the Empire it’s technological advantage. The resistance was taking the punishment, and ever and again having success in their military confrontation, but they still relentlessly pursued their political campaign from village level up. Westmoreland did not understand - nor did anyone else understand - that there was not a breaking point. Instead of breaking it’s morale, it was breaking that of the Empire.
After much reflection I concluded my call for a massive aid program to improve Vietnamese living standards was rather utopian. The Saigon regime was incapable of carrying out land reform, and with all the best will in the world,with whatever force we applied, we would always be building on sand.We were actually fighting the war to prevent Indochina from carrying out successful social and economic development. Even if we had wanted to,the Communists had control of the North and significant support in the South .Besides, the Americans,putting aid on the backburner, still felt they were militarily invincible.
'What about working through the U.N.?'
With both the USA and USSR able to veto decisions, the UN was a nullity in cases in which there was any element of superpower conflict. A 'neutral' government with NLF participation could have been only temporary or superficial.
Enough is Enough.
"Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest
enemy of truth."
Albert Einstein - in an essay written at
age 17 for his school exams.
Like most of the rest of the world I came to loathe the wholesale destruction heaped on Indochina by the prosecution of the war.I was at odds with my enlistment. It was the stabs of my conscience,not my bayonet that would now be my prod .No more soldierly silly buggers .
‘ That does it!’I said.‘I wouldn’t touch these warlords with a bargepole now,"I told Russel. ‘Not on your life.I’ve been had. I fell for their line,hook,line and sinker. They’ve led me along. Where they’re going to is the edge of darkness-but not in my name.I’m sick to death of it .’
‘Now you’re talking. It was only a question of time until your gorge would rise,’ he said. ‘You can be
forgiven for feeling betrayed. I’m going to give it to you straight.They’re pulling the wool over most peoples’ eyes’,said Russel. ‘ In war,as is often said, truth is still the first casualty, and information is as powerful as bullets. To defend their precious ‘credibility’,they’re selling a big pack of lies.As usual.They don’t see them as lies.They convince themselves they’re just stretching the truth,revising it’s parameters.’
‘Does it have to be that way?
‘Suppose you were a member of Parliament and suppose you were a liar- but I repeat
myself.’
‘So what’s true in their stories isn’t new and what’s new in their stories isn’t true.’
‘Most politicians lie between their teeth all the time, not just occasionally, but all the time.’
‘How do we know when they prevaricate so?’
‘The cynical answer is that it’s when their mouths are moving. Of course not everything these pinocchios say is a lie, but anything they say could be a lie.Then there are the few who can handle the truth.’
‘Like all good Americans, following the example of George Washington. Not only doing something senseless and destructive like chopping down a cherry tree, but admitting to it immediately.’
‘If only this romantic legend was true.Do you know why I think his father wouldn’t have punished him?’
‘ George still had the hatchet in his hand.’
‘Unfortunately in the case of these wartime atrocities it’ll take time for the truth to come to light.’
‘I feel shameful I didn’t cotton on to this much sooner,I said defensively. ‘I feel a real chump. Mind you, I meant well.I wasn’t trying to ingratiate myself with them. I felt safe to assume what they were doing was for the protection of our people and country.I believed our leaders had integrity by definition.I wasn’t applying to be part of any imperialist cheer squad. I don’t want any more affiliations with these hitmen, the blood of innocents on my hands. I don’t want any mark on my record an accomplice to crimes against humanity.’
‘Look Allan,every national grouping is capable of the most brutal acts and the most self-righteous excuses.Like any national entity, the Vietnamese themselves are no angels.They are obviously a divided people,but our barging in only inflames that.All people must have the right to rule-or misrule themselves. We’ve got a job of our own- righting the wrongs in our own country. We have to look at the moral failures of other nations not in isolation, but against our own .’
Touché.Failures I failed to see.’
‘Allan,said Russel, ‘ our ideas do not spring like Athena, fully-armed from Zeus's brow. Nothing in politics grows in a vacuum.Our masters do all in their power to ensure they’re not exposed as the liars and killers that they are.Any countervailing currents take time to flow . The older you grow the more you’ll realise you are but a child of your age.
‘I guess everybody has the right to be suckered once,’I said.’ To not see they’re entitled to an even break.’
‘As long as they don’t abuse the privilege ,Allan.Sure,while only fools go walking on thin ice, twice, everybody has the right to be a dunce, once.You're only young once. After that you have to think up some other excuse.When I was a student,I listened intently to all shades of opinion,running my own by others before casting my lot.I too was impressed by the rhetoric of certain ideologues whose views I would differ from. I once attended the inter-university debating competition in Sydney.The debater who impressed me as the cleverest- and most fanatical- was Bob Santamaria.Many since,just as fanatical though usually in different directions,were not nearly as clever,nor,it is fair to add,possessed of such a powerful mind. This silver tongued devil preached incessantly the virtues of Franco’s Falange,of the Spanish rebels,and of Franco himself.
To back up these views,he passionately expounded a whole theory of authoritarianism.Fascism in Germany,Italy or elsewhere was the gold standard of government,the most viable to which modern man could aspire,and all human history went to prove it.Art,science and learning,he argued had always flourished most under royal,imperial or dictatorial rule;the more authoritarian the better.In this respect Louis ,the Sun-King, was the nonpareil of all times,though the absolute and continuing moral authority the Pope ought to wield over all living creatures was even more important. As debaters go, never an ‘um’ or an ‘er’, Santa seemed the best alive, but I was never converted wholly to his point of view-then or ever.’
‘You never became one of Santa’s little helpers?’
‘I’d never be a subordinate claus.I endorse the general welfare clause.’
‘I’ve got a lot to learn.’
‘You haven’t had the benefit up to now of exposure to such a wide range of views.As this war unfolds further,the clearer your understanding of the issues involved will be.
And so it came to pass. The more I read about this war, the more my doubts multiplied as to its morality and its direction. I would have to live with myself over this and needed to be sure.I had to be on the right side of history. By virtue of my training and leisure, I had to man up more than ordinary citizens for the actions of the state.To strip back the coats of lies and deception. It was my special responsibility to call it like I saw it.To replace my initial nescience with wiser prescience.
I was part of the generation that I held responsible for getting our country out of that war.When asked by our children what we did about it,not to be stuck for an answer. Ours was to reason why,not to cop out, follow and fiddle blindly while Vietnam burned.My country right not wrong.
Some might invoke Horace: ‘Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori’ -It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country-but wasn’t it Horace who claimed that he saved himself in battle by throwing away his shield and fleeing.
Le Cafard.
One strong message coming out of Vietnam was that the war was taking a severe psychological toll on U.S. servicemen.They were bringing it home with them. Terms like ‘acute depressive reaction’ amongst American soldiers began appearing in reports. They were being left with invasive memories, nightmares, loss of concentration, feelings of guilt, irritability and hallucinations. Servicemen may return home as tainted intruders likely to seek continuing outlets for a pattern of violence to which they have become habituated.’
‘What’s being brought to public attention is the trauma they’ve endured as a result of their service to their country.And some don’t have to have experienced combat. They’ve contracted ‘le cafard’,said Russel, ‘as did the Frenchmen before them.’
‘Cafard’ is French for cockroach,isn’t it?’
‘It is and all,and I’ll explain why in a minute.One of it’s more malignant symptoms is a hatred of everything and everyone,with urges to kill others and oneself.With these moods the slightest irritation can set them off.’
‘Is this condition peculiar to soldiers in Vietnam?I asked.
‘The term originated from the French colonies in general. Members of the French Foreign Legion suffered extreme boredom in their stockades and took to letting fly at cockroaches (les cafards) with their rifles.’
‘So it’s about men in the army going barmy.When time crawls like a sick cockroach.Is it in all armies?’I asked.’
‘In all armies and navies since time immemorial.’
‘What brings this about and how do military personnel deal with it?’
‘It’s caused inevitably by regimentation,hardship and prolonged separation from wives and loved ones. Common soldiers since civilization began have found effective means of releasing psychological pressure.In extreme solitude the individual soldier has to deal with it in the same way as prisoners in isolation do to get through. When time slows down they have to fill it.Between madness and sanity there’s a shifting boundary and in solitude one must push away from the border of madness. One has to look for any little bit of life,admire it and study it.The ants,the cobwebs,even the rats that gather crumbs in the middle of the night.’
‘The birds of the air that perch on one’s window sill,’I said thinking of Burt Lancaster as the Birdman of Alcatraz.
‘Those too.These are insignificant things in the normal world.But each of these things is a universe.As diverting as that of our fellow humans.’
‘I remember reading ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’. To pass the time, The German soldiers in the
trenches competed amongst themselves to smash the corpse rats.To vary their diet,the rats skittered brazenly amongst them to snatch the piles of rotten,mouldy bread away.Their tiny pink feet ran between the men’s legs and through the deadly gauntlet of carefully aimed boots and stabbing bayonets.In the film ‘King and Country’,the British soldiers court martial and execute a trench rat for biting the ear of one of them. ’
‘You can see it in‘The Long and the Short and the Tall’. Remember Private Bamforth played by Laurence Harvey.He’s bedded down in the Burmese jungle with his small British sonic war patrol, sent to investigate the movements and strength of the Japanese opposition.And what do we see Private Banforth in doing in the dilapidated store-hut?’
‘He’s prancing around , dancing with his arms around his comrades, singing "Hey-jig-a-jig".All these pressures come to bear in this drama ,don’t they?’’I said. ‘Hindered by a malfunctioning radio, the young recruits,far from home, face a futile but perilous stand-off with Japanese forces.They can’t guess whether or when to move on. Sweating it out in the intense heat and humidity of the jungle, rain dripping down from the roof and steam rising up through the undergrowth,they curse those who sent them,and each other.’
‘Men invent neurotic patterns of ritualistic criticizing,if only symbolically those responsible for their boredom, depression or pointlessness’,Russel said.
‘This claustrophobic story, is shot through with all these feelings,isn’t it? The army banter is all about military incompetence and how poorly led they are, the sergeant who, despite his best efforts, is worse than useless at leading.The young privates exchanging insults, revel in the exotic natures of each others’ regional identities as though Britain contained the whole human race and the rest of the world were made up only of faceless enemy soldiers. There’s lots they don’t know about their own countrymen and women.They confront the enemy within when class tensions and personal rivalries erupt.They threaten each other.’
’And can lead them to do terrible things.’This comes with ‘Le cafard’,’said Russel,. ‘the collective name for all the inconceivable stupidities, excesses and crimes which jangled nerves can commit.’
‘All this reminds me of ‘The Bedford Incident’ which I saw recently.The skipper of this ship is all triggered up,geared to humiliate a Russian submarine in Arctic waters.Chainsmoking,his stomach tied up in knots,he’s frustrated from the endless hours of waiting,the uncertainty and doubt. Whacked up, he’s fuming,feeling ‘trussed,tired and nailed to the wall.’ because the High Command is holding him back.The situation was abnormal, inhuman and dangerous.A mistaken command led to a nuclear explosion.’
‘Le Cafard has become the ubiquitous shorthand for the blackness of the soldier’s situation,a very unnatural one.The paralysing fear and anguish in the face of death. In “cafard” murder hides, and suicide and mutiny. It means self mutilation and impromptu flight.It is the height of madness and the depth of despair. It can start with the enlisted man gloomy, sitting glumly on his bed for hours, speaking to no one, answering with gross insults, doing the queerest things. Suddenly the madness may turn into a senseless explosion or fit of fury; men suffering from a bad case of “le cafard” will run a bayonet through their comrade’s ribcage, without any reason, without any outward cause.’
‘I wonder why.Where do we find it at it’s worst?’
‘The “cafard” is at its worst the more desolated the outpost,the more extreme and unfamiliar the climate. When the sun burns down relentlessly from the cloudless, deep blue sky, the wind-whipped sand stings the face, when the steaminess of the jungle clogs the body’s pores,this is time for ‘le cafard’.
‘It sounds like ‘going ‘troppo’,’I said, ‘as my father and our men in the Pacific theatre called it.’
‘For young men ,closer to the frontlines, under tremendous stress, the fear, loneliness and firearms can be a deadly cocktail. A lot of suicides and accidental deaths in war are labelled as combat casualties,but in fact due to soldiers falling prey to ‘le cafard.’ It doesn’t help that the military is permeated with a cult of machismo that does not allow anyone to show fear or weakness. And it’s not something the army will encourage you to study up.’
‘I guess so,Russel.’
‘ I know so,Allan.I worked amongst men affected so during the War’,he replied.
‘What steps do the military take to counter this malaise?’
‘Well as you know to defuse frustrations and boost morale, they send movie and radio entertainers to perform for military audiences at bases wherever. In the jungle,in the desert,and in all weathers. They brought comfort to isolated outposts and combat zones. The British did this famously with concert units that included Vera Lynn and Peter Sellers.’
‘And the Americans with Bob Hope’,I said.
‘Exactly. help to break the monotony, ease the loneliness and give the troops in combat zones across Vietnam a couple of hours splitting their sides laughing—and a memory for a lifetime.For the few who get to his shows ,it takes their minds off their surroundings and the goings on even if only for a little while.’
‘Those who see him perform in Vietnam say his shows make them feel they are not forgotten in this increasingly unpopular war. They believe- right or wrong- that their sacrifices,in their war,are as important as the "Big One" in which their fathers fought.’
‘It must be hard to get laughs in such a setting? A lot of his jokes are pretty twee,I must admit.’
‘ All successful comedians have to dissect contemporary culture, politics and changing societal mores. Hope’s classic opening monologues of rapid-fire jokes always take jabs at the GIs and the specifics of the local situation. His country club putter patter has had to take on a sharper edge.He’s not going to get away with the same material on soldiers in Vietnam as with his usual family oriented audiences. His shtick includes a constant, sometimes bawdy banter with the other performers, taking plenty of shots at the absurdities of military life while conveying a real sense of how difficult it is for the troops to be away from home during the holidays.He’s also making recreational drug use in America and among troops in Vietnam his comedic target.Oh thud and blunder! He’s started appearing onstage in military uniform shirts and jackets outlandishly decorated with patches, stripes, stars and insignias.’
‘A few Christmases ago his troupe flew next to Cam Ranh Bay, where Bob scolded the troops: "I don't know what you guys did to get here, but let that be a lesson to you!" Baking in the hot sun, the troops roared in agreement.The tenor of his Christmas tour last year reflects changing attitudes in the United States regarding the course of the war, and Hope's flippancy didn't shy away from it. He reassured the troops that "the country is behind you 50 percent." He then added, "I'm very happy to be here; I'm leaving tomorrow!"
Now Russel, tell me about your own work with servicemen going troppo.’
'That’s another story,Allan.I’ll tell you about that on another occasion.’
The Dinner Party and the Revolution.
“Whey Out.What a choice!” I marveled as David and I scanned the dishes sitting on the hotplates, poised to serve ourselves from the vast selection of foods laid out on the sideboard. This was international students night and the main drawcard was the smorgasboard of varied dishes that one could discover.This way of serving worked well as there weren’t enough chairs for everyone. My gastric juices flowing full pelt, I homed in on my favourites, the range of tasty Chinese appetisers.
“Yum,” I said with anticipation.
“Yum Cha” added David,rounding out their name.
“I’ll have a bash at this,” I said heaping some bean curd with cabbage onto my plate.
“Little Miss Muffet, served from the buffet,” punned David, rhyming ”buffet” with” muffet” – as I had done myself on a childhood train trip, not yet ‘au fait’ with the worldly-wise way.
“Eating her curds and whey,” He went on.
“No whey José”, I struck back, “just the lumpy stuff. Whether its cottage cheese or soyabeans, it’s the curdled solid where the value lies.”
‘Hanging’s too good for a man who makes puns,’said David. ‘He should be drawn and quoted.’
I then treated David to my variation of the Miss Muffet rhyme:
“Little Miss Pearl, a slip of a girl,
Eating her curds and kraut.
Along came a Boxer who sat down beside her
And frightened her all about”
“My goodness” exclaimed David. “What inspired you to that?”
“My reading of ‘The Good Earth’ whose author ate thus as a child. Who was given the screaming willies by the Boxers. Who witnessed blood curdling events. The author was Sai Zhen Zhou.”
“Sai Zhen Who?’’ queried David,” don’t you mean Pearl Buck?’
“ The one and the same. Sai Zhen Zhou is the Chinese persona of Pearl Buck. A highly cultured rare pearl in my literary oyster. She wrote “The Good Earth” while thinking in Chinese, translating it as she went into clear, strong English. Wen Chung must have smiled encouragement upon her. Profusely. Prolific writings I can do no more that sweep through. These I imagine must be up your street what with your interest in cultural interplay. Not to mention your desire to foster greater mutual understanding between Australia and Asia. If our friends from the north and their hosts experience cultural shock in the Australian context, spare a thought for fair wee blue-eyed Pearl threading her way through a sea of oriental faces. Great day in the morning,can you imagine the start this girl with her Valkyrean looks and straw-colored hair brought to these when she revealed her fluent Chinese, her first language.
Ditto the reaction of the Englishman in her novel ‘The Promise’ when he encounters a local girl and his words fail him. “One doesn’t expect a Chinese – to…”
“- be wholly human” she adds, finishing the sentence for him.
‘Hardly a Christian approach,’said David.
‘Pearl’s father had similar expectations.He was a missionary.’
One of those blue eyed bible thumpers who couldn’t stand the commercial pace back home.’
‘He was from a slave owning American family, steeped in the idea that racial hierarchy is natural. In her biography of her parents she speaks of his lack of warmth and ‘holier-than-thou’ attitude towards the Chinese. Needless to say this would have rubbed off on them, he being one of the limited Westerners they would ever come into contact with.’
As were the venture capitalists making sorties outside their coastal strongholds – “No dogs or Chinese allowed” – to smell out new sources of profit,’said David. ‘Likewise the occupation armies stationed there to enforce these interests through their gunboat diplomacy. Speaking softly, carrying a big stick. The White man’s burden as interpreted by the President Theodore Roosevelt calling the Chinese “an immoral, degraded and worthless race”.
'Not unlike how some haughty Chinese viewed Caucasians’I said. ‘As a child Pearl was taunted as a ‘foreign devil’. Robbed of the upper hand of history ,resentful nationalists, feeling powerless could only lash out wildly at the white ‘civilisers’.The barbarians at the gate to the centre of the known world’.
‘What conclusion did Pearl draw from this unfortunate coming together of different cultures?asked David.
‘Pearl realized the importance of people from different cultures reacting with one another in a constructive way, leaving all enriched, not at the expense of the other. She looked for good in people and found the qualities that she rated highly – kindness, dignity, compassion, courage, wisdom and love in the most lowly. She aimed to reciprocate these through her words and actions. Seeking to prove to her readers that universality of man and woman can exist if people want it, she concluded our common humanity.’
“What did she base her stories on Allan? What is their setting?” He asked,pausing to sip his jasmine tea.
“She relied on her life experiences as the basis for her authentic stories,” I said. “She was a keen eyewitness to the making of the modern Chinese nation. She has taken me beyond those journalistic accounts I am familiar with, primarily concerned with China’s political fate. Having grown up and lived in impoverished rural communities she set her stirring stories against the backdrop of the turmoil and revolution that have rocked this century in China. She populated them with peasants, bandits, warlords, slaves, concubines, women beset by bound feet, floods, famine, pestilence, occupiers, and looting.People dropping like flies. Biblical in proportions”
“Meaty stuff for such a babe in the woods,” commented David “What were some of the events she and her characters had to contend with?”
“The saddest thing she came across during her childhood was the bodies of babies left abandoned on hillsides. She took it on herself to bury them and to carry a big stick herself, one especially sharpened. She wielded it to drive off the dogs feeding off the young corpses. The point she made was that the Chinese were being overwhelmed by the endless calamitous events visited upon them. Her famous character O-Lan resorted to strangling her fourth child. Otherwise she would have died from starvation. It wasn’t them that were cruel or degraded but the times they were living in. They needed food and family planning.”
'How did she fare during the momentous events that shook China’s industrial and political catch up?’
“She got way-laid more than once on China’s turbulent road to modernity and freedom from foreign interference. Caught up in the internal divisions and periodic out breaks of anti-foreigner violence in 1900 she had to be evacuated to Shanghai during the Boxer rebellion.”
“Better there than Peking”, commented David. The cinematic scenes of the 55 days spent there by Westerners under siege were still fresh in our minds.’
‘Her father never went out without a stick to beat the dogs loosed on him by the Chinese wherever he went.’
“I must point out that sooling Westerners into leaving was akin to the anti- Chinese violence on the Australian gold fields.The Chinese were feared to be getting more than their fair share. There were rowdy demonstrations against Chinese labor feared to be driving living standards down. But don’t let me digress, Allan. Please carry on,” he said.
“She and her family had to flee again during the blood-soaked civil wars of the twenties and thirties. She experienced the violence known as the Nanking incident. In a bamboozling battle involving elements of Chiang Kai Shek’s nationalist troops, Communist forces and associated Warlords, several westerners were murdered. Pearl’s family escaped by a hair’s breadth, spending a terrified day in hiding after which they were rescued by an American gun boat.
“That rings a bell,” said David. “If she were there today she’d once more be fearful for her safety. From the frenzied chaos of the great cultural revolution going on right now.’
‘From what I’ve heard of it I’m better off being here tonight.’I said, ‘advancing softly, gradually, carefully, considerately, respectfully, politely, plainly and modestly.At a dinner party,not Mao’s revolution’,I said rejigging the elements of Mao’s dictum .
“ Do you see a common theme running through Pearl’s books?” asked David.
“I’d say they deal with personal suffering in a world racked by social upheaval and how one copes with it.”
“A universal theme if there ever is one,” David commented pithily. “Do you enjoy reading this literary leading light?” he asked.
“On the whole, very much so,” I replied. “She really takes us somewhere. You can truly feel what it is like to be a poor, Chinese farmer. Her books pull you their very world so that all else disappears. Indeed I have written to her telling her to that effect. I told her what I find particularly appealing about her works is the balance she achieves writing about heavy violent behaviour by humans on one hand – our unfortunate reality – and their light sensitive touch on the other.”
“This concept of balance of opposites is central to Chinese philosophy” said David.
“So I gather,” I replied, adding some cashews and sliced water chestnuts to my plate to balance textually the softness of the beancurd, and drizzling it with piquant soy sauce to balance flavour-wise its blandness.
“The idea is that everything is made up of opposites which are inextricably intertwined.’
“Try, try, try to separate them,
Its an illusion”, I sang sotto voce, sampling “Love and Marriage”, the hit from Tin Pan Alley.
“This I tell you brother, You can’t have one without the other” came back David, getting into the swing of things, proud to be as quick to quote Ol’ Blue Eyes as he did Chaucer.
“You say you’ve conveyed your feelings to Pearl?” David asked.
“I have, David, and await her reply with baited breath. I’ve put a lot of thought into my comments and would love her to acknowledge this.”
The Response
It would take some time before I could breathe more easily and relay Pearl’s warm response.
'What’s the latest bulletin?’asked David.
“Pearl thanked me for the kind things I said about her books and was happy that I enjoyed them.
“Half your luck.What did you say to her, Allan?”
“I thanked her for the penetrating perception she provided of China and her particular sensitivity to many aspects of life there which Chinese writers have taken for granted. I thanked her for changing the distorted image of it in the public mind – one of dark mystery and unspeakable vice – and for cutting across stereotypes at a time when these were – and still are – so entrenched. I pointed out to her that there was an influential current of thought in the student body here at U.N.E. which sees even educated Chinese – including our students from the Chinese diaspora – as sneaky, crafty and at best inscrutable. I assure my peers there is no mystery in the Chinese way of thinking if you take the time to talk to them. I told Pearl how moved I was by her intricate and truly epic portrayal of peasant life in a land still out of bounds to most of us.
Moved by those of her books which contained narrative and descriptive passages of considerable drama. Composed of innumerable intimate commonplace details, they make up a storehouse of knowledge about Chinese traditions and customs. I cited her scrutinizing description of the groom, Wang Lung’s rigmarole on the morning of his wedding – plaiting a tassled black cord into his pigtail, taking care not to waste any precious dried grass, leaves, and stalks as he kindles his fire.
I drew her attention to how she had covered much of the same ground with her near-photographic depictive precision as had Cecil Beaton with his lens. Their graphic representations of Chinese life complement each other so well.
Pearl’s minute observations breathed life and movement into the characters and scenes Cecil captured on his camera during the Second World War.She had an abundant ability to enter imaginatively into other people’s lives. The daily struggles , the ebbs and flows, the relationships, human needs and human nature all summed up in her novels. Aware of David’s interest in the visual arts, I later showed him my collection of superb photographs of China, in which Cecil produced a vivid picture of Nationalist China in its last years. Poring over this invaluable record David shared my sense of awe, that which I had expressed to Cecil as well as to Pearl. His evocative portraits of the Chinese heartland captured images of a period long gone.
‘How about that?’,David said admiringly,’He’s left us a view of the past that seems so lost- yet so immediate.’
The scenes he took reveal the essence of China at work, the beauty and grace of the buildings and landscapes, the appalling bare-foot poverty, the hardship and the doughty fight against the Japanese invaders. In the propaganda campaign against the invasion, the subject matter of Cecil and Pearl strategically overlapped.
I complimented her on the vast array of unforgettable characters she had introduced me to, characters she had represented with empathy, compassion, honesty and forthrightness. In particular I shared the feelings of the strong women in her pages, often reflecting her own character – stoic, energetic, independent-minded sisters I was stunned by the scene in “The Good Earth” in which a peasant gives birth over a bucket… then goes straight back to hoeing the fields. I was moved to pity for her and horror at her plight. At that of another in “Mother” who endures untold tragedies – being deserted, rearing a blind child, becoming sterile, but never accepting defeat. Of real flesh and blood, she expresses clamant sexual needs and longings. I was eager to learn more about the connubially unhappy Chinese woman who falls in love with a western priest. Relationships between men and women across ethnic and class lines particularly fascinated Pearl. I felt the ignominy of corpulent unlovely O-Lan, devoted wife to Wang Lung, traded-in for a newer sleeker model after she had served her purpose. Such lack of appreciation. I was full of admiration for the heroic women in her stories of war and resistance. I was amazed by the elderly Mrs Wang in “The Old Demon” who saved her village by opening a dyke gate and drowning the entire advancing Japanese along with herself. Ditto the hero in “Dragon Seed” who manages to poison a gathering of Japanese officers. And the female head of a band of guerillas in “Golden Flower” who harasses the Japanese in a long series of audacious raids. As did Vietnamese women warriors to the south, as they do today against Saigon’s forces. Women valued by their male comrades for their military skills rather than for their appearance.
“Do her characters ring true for you? Are they realistic or are they cardboard cut-outs?” David asked. ‘Do they really speak to you? Can you relate to them?”
“ They are real for sure.What I find appealing about them is that I can identify with them so closely.They resonate within me as I discovered commonalities I scarce thought possible.They are not the caricatures we’ve received via Hollywood of depraved, imbecilic opium smokers with long fingernails and chopstick-size mustaches. You forget quickly that they’re foreign. Their joys, sorrows, problems and disillusionments transcend cultural barriers. You live their lives as they see them and feel them. They are specifically Chinese living at a certain time and in a certain place. But the more you get to know them, the more you recognize them as others you know right here. They are so alive that I see them as people around me. Her farmers are representative of farmers everywhere – their thought processes, their habits, their industriousness, their frugality, their god-fearing ways, and their attachment to a particular patch is no different to those of the farmers you and I know so well. Like Dad and Dave, Wang Lung, the farmer is out of his element in the fast-paced, big bad city. In reduced circumstances all we humans react to life events in much the same way.”
‘So you enjoy reading her writings on China?’
‘So much so that after reading one I want to go back and read it again.’
“Did you single out any particular book as having made the greatest impression on you?”
“Indubitably her masterpiece “The Good Earth”. I read it in one sitting.’
Putting me to the test, he asked exacting questions that emerged from my reading of the text.
“What is its story lines and themes?”
‘This poignant story is about the changing circumstances of Wang Lung whose undying love of the land sustains him through years of hard times. Its subject is the compelling intimacies of life,it’s cyclical nature, the new coming to take the place of the old, the passions and desires that motivate a human being, of good and evil, and the desire to survive and thrive against great odds. This saga traces Wang’s rise from the abject poverty of his early years to later when accumulates great property and power. Along the way he comes up against some hard facts of life. He observes the extravagant consumption of the indecently rich, contemptuous of the needs of the starvelings, drawing the ire of protesting revolutionaries while armies shanghai civilians,forcing them to carry their materiel and enter the fray.’
‘He takes refuge in his family,I suppose.’
‘The hardest facts to swallow involve his own well to do family. He discovers that rolling up wealth can bring unforeseen vices and woes in its train – blind jealousy, cupidity, selfishness, complacency and profligacy to name a few. Having fallen on hard times his malignant uncle tries to gull him, offering him silver for his possessions at considerably less their value. His eyes are on Wang’s parcel of land. Coming from a stranger this would have been understandable but from a close relative unpardonable. When Wang achieves prosperity himself, his eldest two sons will engage in dispute, the third running away from home. The two eldest assure Wang they will retain the farm upon his demise but we know their real intentions.
“Blood may be thicker than water” commented David, “but also stickier.Money changes people and relationships. Tainted by lucre, the free flow of family love can get really clogged.It can happen in the best of families. Financial transactions involving family members are fraught with danger. It's a classic recipe for trouble. A breakdown in trust can rent the family asunder. Does this surprise you?”
“Wang’s immediate family was not so different to my father’s, David” I replied. “He and his siblings squabbled about their father’s estate, picking over his properties, him not yet cold, over his freshly dug grave, with accusations of humbug and mismanagement.’
‘Love flies out the door when money comes innuendo.’
‘This let to permanent estrangement between my father and his brother. I daresay this would never happen in our family. We could never put our foot wrong again like this. Moreover, my father’s business has gone to the wall what with the self-service supermarket revolution and his being rendered crippled. So I don’t envision any great bone of contention like this ever arising. We respect him too much not to honour his wishes.”
“I’m glad to hear that Allan. Just bear in mind that family members can have such high expectation of each other and correspondingly such great disappointment Greater than in other people. In families things are never as simple as what you’d expect.'
“Right you are, David. In my estimate this deceptively simple parable is all about complexity – the complexities of marriage, parenthood, joy and human frailty. What I could not have known while giving such utterance was that this would be a leitmotiv I too would pursue one day. Looking back on my own saga, in my own book.”
“What else did you tell her?” asked David.
“I congratulated her for broadening the reach of literature, making asian voices heard for the first time in western literature. For highlighting the role of women. In China’s patriarchal culture, wives were forbidden to speak unless spoken to. Her principal subjects – women and China – have too long been peripheral.
I thanked her for not shying away from matters considered taboo in my own schooling – matters concerning bodily functions, particularly sex that she approached, like the Chinese with a healthy candour.Her novel’s unvarnished talk of these matters disturbed some delicate sensibilities. One Presbyterian pastor said it should have been titled “The Dirty Mud.”
I thanked her for raising questions such as abortion and family planning, unsettling as these may have been for the official custodians of the moral status quo.
I saluted her for helping prepare us in the thirties to consider the Chinese as allies in the coming war with Japan and for supporting their struggle both in her public rhetoric and in books. For drawing attention to failures in this respect so that we can learn from them. In “The Promise” she touched on the incompetence of the British and their lack of concern for their Chinese allies. Basing her story on historical fact, she recounts how retreating British troops crossed a bridge and scuppered it, leaving the Chinese behind to be massacred. She had warned Roosevelt that Churchill’s insistence on preserving an empire in the East would hamper the war effort.
I thanked her for using her personal influence to prepare us to institute normal relations with the People’s Republic of China, a stance that like her earlier expression of Sino-Western solidarity, would have important strategic implications.”
“You are aware Allan, that not everyone has such kind things to say about Pearl. She has fallen out of critical favour for different reasons. Some turned up their noses at her when she received the Nobel prize, claiming her work fell short of the stature and complexity worth of such recognition. Admittedly the quality of her work is patchy which is what you’d expect from someone who writes so abundantly. But we have to look at her overall contribution. Hers is an extremely valuable body of work that merits closer examination if only because of her wide popularity” he said.
“You’ve put your finger on it, David. I put it to Pearl that some high-brows who sniffle at her work do so from an attitude of sour grapes, that they may be envious of her success. That Chinese intellectuals never embraced “The Good Earth,” resentful perhaps that an American was exploring aspects of Chinese life they’d neglected. That the literary judgement of American intellectuals is clouded by the tight political climate still in force in which it is difficult to mention China in a positive light. In which paltry, hostile innuendo has been dished on her in the West. In which it was difficult for mainland Chinese to mention the West in a positive light. In which Pearl gained the obloquy of the Party for her petty bourgeois background and subjects, for being a reactionary proponent of American cultural imperialism, for exposing too much of China's darker aspects and denigrating the New China and putting down the fieldworkers. Under Mao Tse Tung her work is banned.”
‘This all sounds very vulgar,infantile and dogmatic’I commented. ‘They would have bristled at her depicting the practices of feudal society.I guess the thoughts of Wen Chang , Chu-I and other Confucian sages are out of favour,’I said.
‘It’s all about the thoughts of The Great Helmsman,the wellspring of all wisdom’,David said bitingly. ‘The Godhead who is worshipped accordingly.’
The East Is Red.
We continued this discussion soon after one morning at breakfast. The cook had referred to me the latest breakfast addition-stewed pears.There had been a glut of the crop and stewing them was the best solution.
‘As for a persons background being an obstacle to a country’s progress,come off the grass. All industrial and commercial concerns have been nationalized, thus making good on the revolution's economic promise . Why all this infantile hysteria?’ I asked.
‘Why don’t we put this question to Dr.Ward,’he said,nodding his head towards him ‘Are you free,Russel?’
‘You know I’m always free for you,David.’
Dr.Ward motioned to me that I should join him too.Tearing open his packet of Weet Bix,he gathered his thoughts and gave his interpretation of this monumental motion of the masses.
‘I used to write captions for the series of cards you find in these cereal boxes,’he said. Enticing more childish demands for these cards which put the price up as well as the roughage. The series was titled ‘Wonders of the Pacific’.
‘You presumably wrote one titled ‘The East Is Red’: A quarter of the worlds population away from capitalist control being led by the peasantry rather than the expected proletariat’,I joshed.
‘I don’t think so’,Allan,he said. ‘Look at the manufacturer’s name,’he said,holding up the the packet.The Sanitarium Health Food Company.The holy corporation whose fundamentalist owners still hold that God’s seven day labour of creation ended at 9 o’clock on the dot in the morning one day in the year 4004.Need I say more?'
‘Just about childish demands in China,’I said.
‘Allan, After the initial victory of the people's revolutionary forces the Party was faced with a serious question: what can be done to keep on the "socialist road"? What measures can be taken to restrict the class differences inherited from the old society, fend off imperialist hostility and intervention, and prevent a new capitalist class from developing within socialist society itself? Socialist revolution is much more complex and scabrous than most revolutionaries have hitherto supposed.The seizure of power is only the first step in a protracted revolutionary process.’
’What’s with this process right now’I asked.
‘The various factions of the Communist Party are locked into a power struggle on how to resolve this. You have to bear in mind that the Maoist leadership does not permit any direct information to filter out about it’s real motives and the opinions of its various adversaries. The cultural revolution underway at present is an inward looking ultra-leftist campaign,an eruption of elementary forces.’
'Who does it target?’
‘It’s directed specifically against the ‘Four Olds’: old ideas, old culture, old customs and old habits. Feeling China bogged down by the ideological weight of it’s past, Mao launched it to revitalise what he sees as revolutionary zeal and ideological purity at a time of great social tensions. You’ve seen pictures of those long open mass panoplies of loyalty where he calls on those waving the Little Red Book and chanting hoarse slogans to take on the toughness necessary for action’.
‘ Bladders of steel’, for starters’,I suggested. ‘Tie a knot in it when caught short.’
‘The view of Mao’s and his supporters is that, in a socialist society, new generations have to experience the process of revolution themselves, to think through for themselves what kind of society they want, who opposes that vision, and how to struggle against those forces.’
'All genuine knowledge originates in direct experience’
‘That’s where he brings in the metaphor of a pear,isn’t it,’I said,raising a spoonful of the stewed variety to my mouth. ‘If you want to know the taste of a pear,you must change the pear by eating it yourself.'
'They look very appetizing,’Russel said.How do they taste?’
‘Even better’,I said.They’ve got honey and cinnamon.You wouldn’t know that just looking at them of course.Stewing them is an excellent option for overripe pears, as the method works well with their texture.’
'So by mobilising the idealistic youth against a powerfully entrenched bureaucracy,’Russel continued, ‘he is able to appeal over the heads of these cadres to the wide masses. To mobilize this youth all that was needed was to close down the schools.’
‘And keep the bureaucracy stewing in what he considered a country over ripe for continued revolution.What about the workers?’I asked.
‘Mobilizing the workers on the same scale and for the same period would have meant disorganizing and even halting industrial production. Being less politicalized than the vanguard workers, particularly those who were members of the Communist Party, these young camp followers are easier to indoctrinate in a narrow factional way.They accept more readily certain accusations against long-standing leaders of the party and the state than would be the case with the workers, who still retain memories of the history of the revolution.
‘So it’s not only their bodies that are softer’,I commented.
‘This may be true but together they can share and act on fierce feelings of resentment. It’s hardly difficult to incite a feeling of revolt against the bureaucrats in this youth.It’s demagogy corresponds to their needs. For the mass of the youth, a professional career seems blocked, the number of positions in the entire state sector being limited.
‘Is it good or bad?I asked.
‘It’s considered destructive by some and as constructive by others, depending on their understanding of the current problems confronting the Chinese revolution.Without a doubt things have gotten out of hand.China seems a society where disruption seems to exist for its own sake. There have been terrible excesses.Some have destroyed valuable works of the feudal past-books,temples,antiques ’.
‘Bulls in the china shop,I suggested.’
‘One of the most mouthed slogans features the phrase “nothing can stand without destruction” ,
encouraging destruction of old, feudal things.
‘I’d like your two bob’s worth on this,Russel? ‘I said.
It’s a variant of ‘You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs,’said Russel.Whether the eggs are cooked or otherwise,it doesn’t matter.Do you see your way clear to making this goog stand upright?” he asked, handing me a boiled one.
After grappling with it for several minutes, I still drew a blank, so giving in,I said,‘ Your point well taken.What’s the solution?’
“Elementary my dear Watson,” said Russel,grinning, as he forcefully smashed the egg down into the table.“Chairman Mao has said, ‘nothing can stand without destruction,’” said this seditious sage, “look, isn’t the egg standing upright now?”
So it was. No flies on him, he had made his point about this tomfoolery. Many a true word is spoken in jest.
‘ As things stand,in this free for all anyone can be targeted to meet the quota, excoriated as ideologically shonky,’he went on, ‘arraigned for being ‘running dogs’, ‘capitalist roaders’, ‘rightist devils’ and enemies of the people’.This has even included prominent Party leaders such as Deng Xiaoping. There’s a story circulating about his rapidly changing fortunes.Three men are in jail comparing their reasons for being incarcerated. The first says: ‘I'm in here for being a supporter of Deng Xiaoping.’
The second replies, ‘That's funny, I’m in here for attacking Deng Xiaoping!’
The two turned to ask the third, ‘What are you in for?’ Shaking his head sadly, he replied ‘I AM Deng Xiaoping.’
‘If this can happen to leaders with such prestige as Deng,what hope is there for ordinary people?’
‘Such class ‘labelling’ even involves pre-school children.Some teachers and officials have had their homes muscled in on, been dragged into the streets before ad hoc crowds of insulting Red Guards, trumpeting their revolutionary virtue. The mobs that roam through the streets, sticking up posters and shouting slogans,need not necessarily come from outside. They’re as often as not ordinary jolly people trying to be good citizens, at some level simply trying to do the right thing. Parading their neighbours like prisoners in the streets with dunce caps or shaven heads and subjecting them to public self-criticism meetings and all-night “struggle sessions.” Many of these targets may have had faults such as authoritarianism towards students, attitudes of superiority towards workers and peasants and so on and so forth.Like everyone they should be open to questioning. But public humiliation is not the right cure for these blemishes. And teachers may also have been targeted, not because of their faults, but because they were potentially articulate critics of the ‘Great Teacher’s’ policies.
‘It appears their fanatical inquisitioners are very shy of the very freedom of thought and of academic inquiry they accuse the university president of,’I commented. ‘I can just imagine how would this have gone down with workers’.
‘ I don’t think by any stretch of the imagination many workers would feel at ease about the po-faced preaching remedies of runny snotty nosed snotty kids,’Russel said.‘At the same time there have been positive signs.At street level one rationale of the program is rooted supposedly in the notion that ``bourgeois intellectuals'' will be re-educated through physical labour, and that young people in the urban areas will be integrated with the rural peasant population. The most obvious success has been the re-settling of medicos in the countryside.They have trained 750,000 “barefoot doctors”--thereby narrowing the gap between urban and rural medical services. Most sent to live to the countryside and learn how the peasant works and lives, discarding the vanity and sense of superiority typical of city folks and become more down to earth..’
‘That sounds reasonable’I said, ‘It will toughen them up.As long as they want to go,and both them and the peasants benefit,their children having better educational opportunities,their minds opened to a wider world beyond the village.Otherwise China’s enemies will say it’s just brainwashing.’
‘Those who believe that an army of robots is being completely guided and channeled by remote control are greatly deluded,’Russel continued. Facts demonstrate incontestably that there is a very great diversity of opinions, a very wide autonomy in action and a harvest of posters, mimeographed or printed papers. Various organizations have been created on the basis of the different ideas bubbling up.. Despite the excesses which have been committed and the Mao cult in which the whole movement has been bathed, this harvest of ideas and experiences undoubtedly constitutes an unprecedented experience for thousands of young Chinese. They can end up thinking for themselves.It has led to the rapid resurrection of a critical spirit in a vast mass movement, which cannot not help but thrust thousands of young people on the road toward consciousness regarding the contradictory aspects of Maoist ideology, towards questioning the power of the whole bureaucracy, its Maoist faction included.’
‘Steeped in such a domestic crisis,China doesn’t sound like a country single-mindedly getting on a war footing to invade us,as we are constantly being reminded.Those who seem at greatest danger are the Chinese themselves. Where does the West figure in all this?I asked.
‘In part,this tumult is a knee-jerk reaction to China’s perceived encirclement by both the US and the U.S.S.R. and threatened encroachment on its territory. Hostility to foreigners is not a Communist invention. Our peoples have too long been equally ignorant and suspicious of one another. It doesn’t take much to get the xenophobe’s bandwagon rolling”
“There’s only so much mileage in these isolationist approaches”, said David. “They’ll hopefully peter out soon. Both giants will have to chop each other down or come to terms with each other. They’re both too big for the other to ignore.”
Like David,Russel and I, Pearl wanted to see good relations between East and West.With the rollback of Communism,I dare say they’re closer, confrontational attitudes having softened dramatically,the excessess of the Cultural revolution having ensured it’s shivering polar opposite. She would have been amazed by the events that have transformed The Middle Kingdom, changing it from a backward feudal country to the industrial workshop of the world, thrusting it onto the centre stage, all within my lifetime. All fuelled by those values she wrote about – hard work, thrift and responsibility. Values which the West enshrines but fears when they propel the Chinese component of the runaway global
economic juggernaut relentlessly forward, it’s engine room firing full speed, its giant wrecking ball swinging wildly,bearing down on us, crushing competition , disembowelling society, poisoning the most intimate human encounters,blindsiding opposition, cracking,hacking and fracking,sacking and whacking,squeezing and freezing, gouging and gobbling up precious resources, slashing and burning, despoiling the good earth of it’s fertility
All The Right Moves.
Poetic Justice.
When statesmen gravely say, “We
must be realistic,”
The chances are they’re weak and therefore pacifistic:
But when they speak of principles—look out—perhaps
Their generals are already poring over maps.
The chances are they’re weak and therefore pacifistic:
But when they speak of principles—look out—perhaps
Their generals are already poring over maps.
“Conservatives say if you don't give the rich more money, they will lose their incentive to invest. As for the poor, they tell us they've lost all incentive because we've given them too much money.”
George Carlin
My Economics Professor,Jim
Belshaw challenged the efficacy of minimal charitable aid favoured by classical
economists. Whether we are considering aid to unemployed workers and bankrupt
businessmen in times of economic
downturn, or to those in poor third world countries,it is best that our
government support their further training to become sustainable .’ He explained that the ability to work is
of greater benefit than a one-off handout through an old proverb: ‘Buy a man a
fish and he will eat for a day. If you teach him to catch a fish you do him a
good turn.Does anyone here have a differing view of the outcome.’
‘Teach him how to fish, and he
will sit in a boat and drink beer all day,’was one classical variation.’
Likewise David Evans from his perspective spoke admiringly of this powerful banker who loved the theatre, and gave patronage to a range of endeavours towards giving
‘Russel Ward knows him from his
‘We had our doctorates conferred on us in the same ceremony at the
‘What about his thinking’I asked?’
‘They say good things come in small packages.In his case,it’s true.Nugget values intellectual vigor highly and approaches learning as a polymath, a scholar all about knowledge of the broadest kind. He dabbles in everything.
‘He’s interested in ‘the big picture’.
‘A polymath if ever there was one,’said Dr.Ward. ‘And one with a cautionary tale for teachers.’
‘How so?’I asked.
'Like all chalkies,Nugget,David and I dreaded the visit of the school inspector.It was a stressful time.'
'What was the purpose of their coming?'
'They came to
assess our professional competence for promotion on merit and to give
professional guidance.’
‘How did you
find them,David?’ 'The ones I had were fairly benign,They genuinely aimed to identify aspects of our craft requiring attention and improvement.By observing my classroom teaching they helped me diagnose any problems I had.
'They gave you glowing reports,didn’t they,David?
‘That’s true. I was deemed an outstanding teacher.Somebody up there must have liked me.’
‘I saw others as intruding policemen,’said Dr.Ward, ‘always looking for faults.A negative judgment from them, speaking of inadequacy, could occasion consternation and drain the confidence of our students and parents.It could change the course of lives.Of course we embrace entirely the need for a robust inspection and monitoring framework.’
‘If you don’t get looked over,you get overlooked,said David.’
‘True.And teachers do need to be held to account by the outcome of the inspection-but they require a regulator, not a boa constrictor. And who holds the inspectors to account? Do they have a particular hidden agenda."
‘Seen from outside,’I said, ‘it might seem that having a group of fellow professionals come round every few years to write up your performance and give it a grade, after reviewing your performance, is not such a big deal. Aren’t these men selected because of their ability to convey ideas and information most effectively.’
‘Good heavens no,Allan.There is an element of this but only too often these are men who are themselves only too happy to get out of classroom teaching.Many couldn’t do it to save their life.They may have more knowledge about behaviour and safeguarding than any subject area.Their function is to maintain conformity and uniformity in educational institutions.. The inspection is an old concept in management.’
‘It sounds just like the army.Would you elaborate on this?’
‘The basic concept is that of autocratic management aimed at catching the workers red-handed; a fault-finding attitude in management, and a one-time fact-finding activity. It can be viewed as a process of checking other people’s work to ensure that bureaucratic regulations and procedures are followed and that loyalty to the higher authorities are maintained. This view of inspection largely overlooks the professional interests and needs of the teaching personnel. ‘
‘ So how do they judge efficiency?’
‘ Inspection process conducted with this view in mind may not be effective in upgrading teaching and learning.It’s more often than not a time for putting on something of a show to impress. But it’s very effective at getting teaching personnel to toe the line.’
‘How could we improve on this?’
‘ We should move the responsibility for judging teachers and shaping improvement strategies on to the staff, students and parents who use them and work in them.
‘Even parents?’I queried.
‘Yes, Parents can bring a lot to this process, drawing both on the knowledge they have of the their children and their experience of other organisations.Involving all parties would ensure that all viewpoints are equally included in a discussion about what is good, what is less good and – once a shared understanding has been reached on those points – what would make things even better.This approach would enable people to be completely open with their views, critical, appreciative or whatever else. The possibility of contributing to positive change would provide an incentive to thinking hard.’
‘I hope such a process comes about before I graduate,’I said.
'Don’t hold your breath.Our inspectoral system is highly bureaucratic and shares with all other aspects of the education bureaucracy, a top-down, hierarchical, and authoritarian character.Regrettably it is well entrenched.
‘And what was Nugget Coombs experience with the inspectorate?’
‘As a schoolteacher in rural
‘What is it about these works that raised their hackles?’
‘They deal with the general feeling of disillusionment and disgust of the period after World War One.The Great War’,he said contemptuously.
‘He was part of the Lost Generation,wasn’t he?’,I asked.
‘Yes,’he replied, ‘and he felt part of that flower of artistic youth who escaped being mowed down or gassed in World War I.A good many of them were rebuilding their lives after being pitchforked into combat and suffering the horrors of war.For them the idea that if you acted virtuously, good things would happen,went up in smoke forever.Unlike your generation they missed the civilizing influences that young men usually have between the ages of 18 and 25.’
‘Weren’t young men from the ruling class able to escape being drafted?’
‘Unlike those of today and previously,they were expected to lead. In the years immediately after this ‘ war to end all wars’, while others of the gilded youth wallowed in the decadence and superficiality of the era,the more serious felt spiritually alienated.’
‘In what way?' I asked.
“Stranded between two wars,they were characterized by lost values, lost belief in the idea of human progress. Their mood was one of emptiness, futility and despair leading to hedonism.’
‘ This is the aimlessness described by F. Scott Fitzgerald in ‘This Side of Paradise’,said David. He writes of a generation that found "all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken."
‘Coming into the war late,’ I said,they surely weren’t as devastated in the same numbers as the English and Europeans.Couldn’t they have just come back, buy some land,settle down in a quiet little town and forget about everything.’
‘The Americans in this group found their country a great place to go into some area of business but one they considered hopelessly provincial and emotionally barren.
They all expressed a highly vocal rebellion against established social, sexual,
and aesthetic conventions and a vigorous attempt to establish new values.‘How did they go
about this?’
'Reticent about moving into a settled peacetime life, some were determined to raise a hue and cry.Intent on making a new art,they flocked to Greenwich Village,Chicago , and San
Francisco
‘It sounds like that’s happening all over again.What about the rest?’
‘ Others packed up their bags and went to cosmopolitan Europe,more open to less socially restrictive lifestyles and more experimental literature.While most relocated to Paris as expatriates,Eliot took up permanent domicile in London.’
‘Did they work together in any collective way in their self-imposed exile from the American mainstream? How was their work affected?’’
‘This group of American literary notables often had social connections with one another, even meeting to critique one another's work, building a new literature, impressive in the glittering 1920s and the years that followed. Romantic clichés were abandoned for extreme realism or for complex symbolism and created myth. Language grew so frank that there were bitter quarrels over censorship. The influences of new psychology and of Marxian social theory were also very strong. Out of this highly active boiling of new ideas and new forms came writers of recognizable stature in the world, among them Ernest Hemingway, doing away with the florid prose of the 19th century Victorian era , replacing it with a lean, clear one based on action, and in poetry T.S.Eliot, sharing a distaste for grandiose patriotic war manifestos.'
'Of course,’said Dr.Ward, ‘Nugget’s inspectors, wanting to hear about the love of a sunburnt country,a land of sweeping plains didn’t go for this..To say nothing of Nugget’s inclusion of the trio of political poets and prophets inspired by the artistic principles of Eliot :W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender and C.Day Lewis who emerged out of theOxford Britain
‘As in the case of Pearl Buck,’I said.
‘The inspectors must have seen red when they saw the names, Spender and Day-Lewis, card-carrying members of the Communist Party. Like Nugget they had counted Karl Marx in among their influences. Spender and Auden had been involved in reportage and drumroll for the war against Franco. Spender had written a eulogy to the 1934 socialist uprising in Vienna and an anti-fascist drama “Trial of a Judge”.
On top of that, Spender and Auden were seen as ‘iffy’ because of their flaunting of the straitlaced sexual conventions they were expected to follow. Auden’s percolating homosexual tendencies bubbled up when he was a pupil. Allusions to this homoeroticism do occur through his writings. The inspectors must have feared that these poems would sway young impressionable minds, ignite an outbreak of bloody rebellion and perverse licentiousness … “
“… leading to a juvenile Red Gomorrah”. I commented, presaging elements of Lindsay Anderson’s scenario “If”.
“To what extent people’s behaviour – particularly that of the impressionable youth – can be swayed by their reading is a perennial issue in education” Dr.Ward replied. “Literature resonates with the experiences of each individual differently and brings out certain tendencies in some while leaving others unaffected. It depends on whae is predisposed towards. Young Auden’s inclinations – being innate – were most likely brought on early as much by the repressiveness of the boys’ public school he attended as by any book he got his hands on. The school encouraged informing and discouraged any discussion of personal development other than the straight and narrow. His first love grew in an environment of furtive loneliness.
The same goes for the political consciousness raised by these poets. Nugget’s students may have become more critical and argumentative in his hands but hardly likely to become violent. In point of fact, allowing them discussion of the widest range of ideas is the safest approach for any democracy wanting to win the unflagging fealty of its citizens. Driving literature considered subversive underground only reinforces any critical message it may have. All truth will out given time’,he said,excusing himself to get a cup of tea.
“Wasn’t it highly unlikely that such privileged young men from the ruling class elite joined the Communist Party, an organization avowedly claiming to smash class rule or became fellow travellers?” I asked of David..
“Once again Russel, would be better able to answer that question. He has a Masters Degree in Modern English Poetry.His thesis dealt with Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and W.H Auden and their followers. He’s a mine of information about Communism.
Back in his seat,this is the account Russel gave of the politicisation of these poetic prodigies.
“ Socialism taps at all doors, Allan. Let me point out that a key element of the vanguard of social and political change is usually to be found in the cradle of the ruling elite, those who fear change the most. The future of a country depends on the development of the movement of students.In the case of these young intellectuals between the wars,their poetry grew out of the nature of the contemporary world and reacted upon and influenced the ideas and passions of their readers.
‘You’d imagine they were as far from deprivation as anyone could get,’ I said. ‘In a desert of misery, Oxbridge was an oasis of civilized comfort. They were guaranteed the keys to the kingdom.There was no visible cause for them to turn against society.’
‘ These young English minds, as brilliant as their pedigrees, fired by youthful idealism, saw clearly that, as in the Great War, every man jack except those who could hide one way or the other would be drawn in. They saw no alternative to taking the stand they did.
You have to be aware of the climate of the time, Allan.This was a period of expanding fears and ever more urgent political and social crises. The pace of the time itself, the sense of time passing and an end approaching gave a special quality to the Thirties. The public world pressed insistently on the private world. Britain, like the rest of Europe was in a parlous state following the war. The Depression brought widespread unemployment and hardship. Fascism was on the march. Hitler had been appointed Chancellor. Many saw fascism, including the homegrown strain, as a sword of Damocles overhanging the liberal democracies of Europe. We watched in horror as the Spanish overture gave way to the much larger conflict into which the whole world would be dragged. To many students at Oxbridge – privileged though they were – this was deeply troubling and unacceptable. It forced thoughtful people to think intensely national and international politics just as the war in Vietnam is doing a generation later. Witnessing the democracies stand by passively and do nothing while the Spanish Republic was destroyed by Hitler and Mussolini, they expected them to be too invertebrate to confront them. They-and myself- saw the Soviet Union – the only example of a socialist state in the world – as the one powerful enough to smite this menace.
‘So it wasn’t at all surprising that you,with some deep feelings of guilt, questioned the justification for such a state of affairs.’
‘ On the contrary, it would have been surprising had any sensitive and informed young man coolly accepted his position as though by divine right. The Communists did not require secret recruiting sergeants; the economics of the time did the job quite well enough”.
“What were the ideas these poets took up in this process, Dr Ward?” I asked.
“Before we go on, just call me Russel,” he said.
‘Russel it is,’I replied.
“Clearly situated on the Left, like many intellectuals of their generation,’said Russel.gathering his thoughts, ‘poets like Auden openly espoused the ideas of Marxism – with its clinical, astringent rundown of the class system – which had gained popularity in educated circles”.
“What happened to them, Russel?” I asked.
“They became disillusioned with doctrinaire Communism with its zigzag turns, u-turn manoeuvres, skulduggery and shifting alliances to gain control, people never knowing what it was going to come up with next. One minute it was all for a popular workers and farmers revolutionary government in Spain and the next it was arming forces to stop this and gain control, aiming to present a moderate face to the liberal democracies. The clincher was the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact between Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia which many on the left saw as a betrayal.From Stalin’s perspective, the lack of resolve of the parliamentary democracies to confront Hitler left him little choice.
Spender and Day-Lewis resigned from the party. Spender, refuting his past, called it ‘The God that Failed’. For others after the Second World War the final straw was the repression of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising and the ruthless tactics employed by Soviet intelligence agents. A continuous line of idealists soured to politics”.
“So what was the fate of the Auden generation?” I asked.“Did they continue to pose a threat?”
“ Come to think of it,they were more pink than deep red. They jumped ship quickly rather than staying in the party and opposing Stalinism. Heading into the maelstrom of war, the alliance of the Soviet Union and the parliamentary democracies tended to blur – even if only for the war’s duration – their major differences and facilitated the poets’ return to the fold. Highly articulate, well-connected, they knew the right thing to say and had entrees into the highest cliques. The old boys’ club would bend over backwards to co-opt them smoothly. Sounding like roosters taking credit for the dawn, they put this down to their own forgiving reasonableness and reforming character. They institutionalised the rebellious tendencies of these ‘enfant-terribles’,giving them a set place in their scheme of things,rendering them harmless. They forgave their youthful indiscretions, placed fig leaves on them, seeing the error of their ways as something committed in the heat of the moment. Like Nugget, having committed to the allied war effort, these poets would reach the highest level of their career and become liberalising pillars of the establishment.
”Bliss was it to be in that dawn alive;
But to be young was very heaven!’,
I quoted,the poem fresh in my mind.
“ As for any pillar talk,I’m now more like a Pillar of Hercules”continued this historical oracle. “A port of entry guiding my students into the realm of the unknown.Mind you I’ve done all right for myself” he went on cautiously, as if he were rather embarrassed by his status. “You might call it poetic justice. I’ve worked hard to get here and copped my share of flak on the way. All par for the course.”
‘I’ll only take to bed what the parson allows.’
‘I didn’t think you were religious,Russel.’Which parson is that?’
‘The one brought to mind by Nicholas Parsons.’
‘The English entertainment personality,liked by so many women ?’
‘Right.Mine is the parson who likes knickerless women.’
‘Mine is the parson who brought a pair to the parish Christmas party.’
‘What has that got to do with Christmas?’ asked the bishop?
"They're Carol's.’
‘I’m sorry,am I disturbing your conversation?’I said. ‘I hope I’m not acting quietus interruptus.’
Professor Piper said to Russel, ‘Half a mo,I’m just going to get a few bacon and egg sandwiches.You can catch up with this young man.’
‘Now Hercules be thy speed,Herbert.We don’t want them cold.’
‘Herbert and I go back a long way’,Russel said when the Prof had gone, ‘back to our varsity days in Adelaide.’ You would have followed Australian Rules football then,I guess.’
‘Rugby union was introduced to Herbert and I at university. I drank pints with him at his dad’s pub after the rucks , mauls and lineouts. ‘Swallowed your whistle,Ref ?’he interrupted to shout at what appeared the referee’s failure to call a clear violation of the rules.
‘Despite ten years of compulsory football practice,I was hopelessly bad at what you New South Welshmen call ‘aerial ping pong’-Australian Rules football.I had no ball sense and no turn for speed-but rugby was quite another thing. Sure,it was handy to run like landy,’he said, referring to the Olympic runner, ‘but given enough brute strength,ignorance and willingness to do draughthorse work,one could do a useful job in the forward pack without ever necessarily even seeing the ball during the whole game.That’s why I enjoyed it.’
‘It sounds like working in the N.S.W.Education Department’,I said.
‘Where teamwork,numbers and rough stuff are mixed, said Russel, ‘a lazy person can easily go unnoticed.’
By then,Professor Piper had come back and hearing the tailend of our conversation,said ‘Half a mo,surely rowing was easily the most enjoyable aspect of your undergraduate life.’
‘It’s the best team sport ever devised,albeit as you know,Herbert, a snobbish one.Rowers don’t possess the nimbleness or quickness of the ball players hand,one that deceives the eye.But they do learn to control and co-ordinate the functioning of every muscle in their bodies with great precision.’
‘Steady from stroke to bow.’
‘What is more,they must make every movement of every muscle at the same instant as every other crew member,no more,no less. In every other game,a team member may excel by executing certain movements more brilliantly than others.In rowing any movement which differs by a hair’s breadth from that of others in the crew marks its perpertrator,not as a star performer but as a clown.There can never any such thing as a brilliant oarsman,better in some ways than his crew mates.There are only crews,units which may approach excellence precisely as each in proportion as each individual eliminates differences to become an integral part of a powerful,perfectly synchonised machine.All of which takes a great deal of time,sweat and sometimes a little blood on blistered bums. Moving as a single machine the eye of the beholder is never deceived by eight blades striking the water as one.Either they do or they don’t.They also must acquire the stamina to go on hammering themselves mile after mile,forcing their minds and bodies to keep functioning up to and beyond the point of exhaustion.’
At which point Professor Piper announced ‘Half a mo,I’ve had a long week and I’m a bit done in too.I’ll be off now.Catch you later, Allan.Enjoy the rest of the game.’
After he departed,I said to Russel,’ From what you say rowing should be promoted universally to train all the youth,not just those with the old school tie, to co-operate, work together and be seen as doing so’.
‘That’s an interesting thought to entertain,Allan, ‘he said, finishing his sandwich, and, taking a flask of whisky from his pocket, taking a short draught. ‘It would require a forward thinking government to subsidise it though.Would you like a swig,’he said,offering me his flask.’This drop’s thirty years old.’
‘Old enough to go out by itself. Incidentally,Russel,why doesn’t Professor Piper say ‘Half a moment’? Why does such a highly literary mind as him abbreviate it and come out with such slang as ‘Half a mo?’
‘ Half a Mo’s a nickname for me,’he laughed, ‘to do with my erstwhile abbreviated moustache.Let me explain. I grew it as a fresher,possibly in a vain attempt to make myself look older,if not necessarily wiser than I was. When chosen to row three in the first eight,I was the only member of the team not cleanshaven.
Basing themselves on the well known fact that those who served in His Majesty’s ships had either to grow full beards or none at all,the rest of the crew conspired to regard my moustache as a provocative breach of rowing tradition. Just as there is honour among thieves,there is a certain levelling egalitarianism among snobs.Converging on me suddenly after practice one evening,they held me down and shaved off the right side only,confident that the resulting lop-sided cut of my jib would speedily force me to remove the other.Honour demanded however that I remain a figure of fun for the month or two it took for my facial hair to grow back into balance- and then that I retain ever after such a hard won,if intrinsically absurd,decoration.To this passion for levelling or conformity may be traced the continued existence of the moustache for the last decades.
‘I’m interested in the so called ‘Angry Young Men’”,I replied.
‘Ah, the catchphrase applied by the popular press to that literary rat pack from unpromising places and unglamorous backgrounds.What did they do?’
‘They crashed the stuffy Establishment party in one generation, harried the citadels of culture, and brought their idioms, themes, and passions to the centre of British life.They undermined the warm, cosy and bumbling stereotype of British life that had been projected in the 50’s comedies.’
‘What was it about the state of affairs that fed their anger and frustration?’
‘These were times when Britain being finally exposed to the very real limits of its power, the political elite was more concerned with international crises such as Suez, or with their own internal debates such as the one taking place in the Labour Party over the future of Clause Four of its constitution.Even Tony Benn gave little hint of any interest in everyday working-class issues. As for the Conservative Government of the day, the Prime Minister, Harold MacMillan was famously telling Britons that 'You've never had it so good'.Many young people could discern no brave causes.’
‘What do you see as their achievement?’
‘They transformed the British heritage ,working with the materials of their own backgrounds, the class system, tradition, and artistic convention to make new art.Working class origins and identity no longer needed to be cleaned up.They could be seen as meritorious in their own right.’
‘‘This is nothing new,you know. These writers took their place in a long line of writers who thrived in grit: Daniel Defoe, Charles Dickens, Bernard Shaw, D. H. Lawrence.Do you have any favourites amongst them?’
‘Above all others I’m partial to Alan Sillitoe, the grittiest latecomer .Keep in mind you need grit to make a pearl.I found his prizewinning stories, definitive of their genre, hard to put down’.
‘Why is that?’David enquired.
“ Like Pearl Buck’s, Alan’s stories are grounded in a particular place and time.Set in the industrial heartland of England they reflect the disintegrating social fabric of postwar England. The comfortable complacency and social harmony of the early nineteen-fifties had been exposed as an illusion.’
‘Have you made any comment to him?’
‘Alan appreciated my greeting him.
‘ Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and the ‘The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner,’I confirmed, ‘ the rebels portrayed by Albert Finney and Tom Courteney respectively. The former film is important for escaping the cloying banalities of Ealing studios , the simplistic celebration of the Second World War and the reassuring conceits and certainties that followed.’
‘Talk about the characters in these stories, Allan.’
‘The main characters in his early novels are usually poor people, rebellious individuals, young men from rows of brick houses and grubby homes,deprived of economic and social opportunities.
Alan describes Saturday night for this rapscallion as ‘the best and bingiest glad-time of the week, one of the fifty two holidays in the slow turning big wheel of the year, a violent preamble to a violent Sabbath’. Inevitably that roving glad-eyed rooster is faced with the end of this misspent youthful philandering.Wild oats sown in wasted daze could bring an unwelcome crop-being tied tied down with squalling brats as his missus dropped another.The three-timing Arthur looks doomed to knuckle under and for all his bravado he sees no other life but the humdrum one he was born into.Getting conjugal with a complacent ‘nice’girl from his own neighbourhood only sealed his fate.
‘Arthur doesn’t sound like the kind of guy you’d care to cross’said David,’Flinty and self-possessed. Does he have any redeeming features?’ he asked .
‘His saving grace is his honesty’,I replied,’it helps you overlook his off-putting traits.He flaunts his motto:’I’m out for a good time.All the rest is propaganda!’While life has dealt him a lousy hand and his horizons are limited,he’s determined to make the most of what lies within them.Smarter than he looks,he knows what he wants and is sharp enough to get it.He has worked out on point the right degree of give and take he needs to make in order to live the kind of life he wants to live.He drinks hard,plays hard but works hard. He seldom feels sorry for himself and has a wise eye for the world. At one point, looking about him, he comments: ‘Nobody’s satisfied with what they’ve got, if you ask me.’
‘What about his other stories?’asked David.
‘In the title story of ‘The Loneliness of the Distant Runner’, the narrator is a young reform school inmate This boy who gets his back up finds a kind of freedom in the isolation of distance running. The written sentences, rhythmic and breathless, read like miles and miles of evenly-paced running, taking you along with him. When the Governor backs him in a cross-country race we are party to the internal dialogue on his reasons for running and his ideas of what victory really entails. The borstal boy shows his appreciation for his gift being patronized.When the time for the race arrives,he declines the offered chance to abscond on his dawn solo runs and exacts the far subtler payback.He deliberately loses in order to spite and take down his guardians, to show his defiance of authority.’ ‘Some critics found found this authenticity too confronting,I’m told.’ ‘Sillitoe has often shown authority figures as inherently ignorant and ready to be manipulated by the lower classes. In making the film version, Tony Richardson drew upon the emerging youth culture as in’Saturday Night…’ in which Sillitoe's use of vernacular was toned down and the successful abortion was changed so as to come up dry. One script reader found the screenplay rather risky.Let me read to you what he had to say’I said picking up the report from The Sydney Morning Herald. “But this story is very blatant
"Hooray to Proudy, Hooray at last! Hooray to Proudy, He's a horses arse!" Such rituals could go on well after the law of diminishing marginal utility had set in.
The test was ‘you’re not drunk if you can lie on the floor without hanging on’.
‘As for the more anti- social proletarian elements,’said David,continuing, ‘we have to see things through their eyes and understand them. Louts and criminals come from all layers of society. It is less forgivable when they come from the ranks of the privileged’.
Not surprisingly my preoccupying interest in the dismal science became that of understanding the factors required for a stable equitable economy in which the welfare of all citizens is paramount, structured to satisfy human needs rather than to produce profits.
'Reticent about moving into a settled peacetime life, some were determined to raise a hue and cry.Intent on making a new art,they flocked to Greenwich Village,
‘It sounds like that’s happening all over again.What about the rest?’
‘ Others packed up their bags and went to cosmopolitan Europe,more open to less socially restrictive lifestyles and more experimental literature.While most relocated to Paris as expatriates,Eliot took up permanent domicile in London.’
‘Did they work together in any collective way in their self-imposed exile from the American mainstream? How was their work affected?’’
‘This group of American literary notables often had social connections with one another, even meeting to critique one another's work, building a new literature, impressive in the glittering 1920s and the years that followed. Romantic clichés were abandoned for extreme realism or for complex symbolism and created myth. Language grew so frank that there were bitter quarrels over censorship. The influences of new psychology and of Marxian social theory were also very strong. Out of this highly active boiling of new ideas and new forms came writers of recognizable stature in the world, among them Ernest Hemingway, doing away with the florid prose of the 19th century Victorian era , replacing it with a lean, clear one based on action, and in poetry T.S.Eliot, sharing a distaste for grandiose patriotic war manifestos.'
'Of course,’said Dr.Ward, ‘Nugget’s inspectors, wanting to hear about the love of a sunburnt country,a land of sweeping plains didn’t go for this..To say nothing of Nugget’s inclusion of the trio of political poets and prophets inspired by the artistic principles of Eliot :W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender and C.Day Lewis who emerged out of the
‘As in the case of Pearl Buck,’I said.
‘The inspectors must have seen red when they saw the names, Spender and Day-Lewis, card-carrying members of the Communist Party. Like Nugget they had counted Karl Marx in among their influences. Spender and Auden had been involved in reportage and drumroll for the war against Franco. Spender had written a eulogy to the 1934 socialist uprising in Vienna and an anti-fascist drama “Trial of a Judge”.
On top of that, Spender and Auden were seen as ‘iffy’ because of their flaunting of the straitlaced sexual conventions they were expected to follow. Auden’s percolating homosexual tendencies bubbled up when he was a pupil. Allusions to this homoeroticism do occur through his writings. The inspectors must have feared that these poems would sway young impressionable minds, ignite an outbreak of bloody rebellion and perverse licentiousness … “
“… leading to a juvenile Red Gomorrah”. I commented, presaging elements of Lindsay Anderson’s scenario “If”.
“To what extent people’s behaviour – particularly that of the impressionable youth – can be swayed by their reading is a perennial issue in education” Dr.Ward replied. “Literature resonates with the experiences of each individual differently and brings out certain tendencies in some while leaving others unaffected. It depends on whae is predisposed towards. Young Auden’s inclinations – being innate – were most likely brought on early as much by the repressiveness of the boys’ public school he attended as by any book he got his hands on. The school encouraged informing and discouraged any discussion of personal development other than the straight and narrow. His first love grew in an environment of furtive loneliness.
The same goes for the political consciousness raised by these poets. Nugget’s students may have become more critical and argumentative in his hands but hardly likely to become violent. In point of fact, allowing them discussion of the widest range of ideas is the safest approach for any democracy wanting to win the unflagging fealty of its citizens. Driving literature considered subversive underground only reinforces any critical message it may have. All truth will out given time’,he said,excusing himself to get a cup of tea.
“Wasn’t it highly unlikely that such privileged young men from the ruling class elite joined the Communist Party, an organization avowedly claiming to smash class rule or became fellow travellers?” I asked of David..
“Once again Russel, would be better able to answer that question. He has a Masters Degree in Modern English Poetry.His thesis dealt with Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and W.H Auden and their followers. He’s a mine of information about Communism.
Back in his seat,this is the account Russel gave of the politicisation of these poetic prodigies.
“ Socialism taps at all doors, Allan. Let me point out that a key element of the vanguard of social and political change is usually to be found in the cradle of the ruling elite, those who fear change the most. The future of a country depends on the development of the movement of students.In the case of these young intellectuals between the wars,their poetry grew out of the nature of the contemporary world and reacted upon and influenced the ideas and passions of their readers.
‘You’d imagine they were as far from deprivation as anyone could get,’ I said. ‘In a desert of misery, Oxbridge was an oasis of civilized comfort. They were guaranteed the keys to the kingdom.There was no visible cause for them to turn against society.’
‘ These young English minds, as brilliant as their pedigrees, fired by youthful idealism, saw clearly that, as in the Great War, every man jack except those who could hide one way or the other would be drawn in. They saw no alternative to taking the stand they did.
You have to be aware of the climate of the time, Allan.This was a period of expanding fears and ever more urgent political and social crises. The pace of the time itself, the sense of time passing and an end approaching gave a special quality to the Thirties. The public world pressed insistently on the private world. Britain, like the rest of Europe was in a parlous state following the war. The Depression brought widespread unemployment and hardship. Fascism was on the march. Hitler had been appointed Chancellor. Many saw fascism, including the homegrown strain, as a sword of Damocles overhanging the liberal democracies of Europe. We watched in horror as the Spanish overture gave way to the much larger conflict into which the whole world would be dragged. To many students at Oxbridge – privileged though they were – this was deeply troubling and unacceptable. It forced thoughtful people to think intensely national and international politics just as the war in Vietnam is doing a generation later. Witnessing the democracies stand by passively and do nothing while the Spanish Republic was destroyed by Hitler and Mussolini, they expected them to be too invertebrate to confront them. They-and myself- saw the Soviet Union – the only example of a socialist state in the world – as the one powerful enough to smite this menace.
‘So it wasn’t at all surprising that you,with some deep feelings of guilt, questioned the justification for such a state of affairs.’
‘ On the contrary, it would have been surprising had any sensitive and informed young man coolly accepted his position as though by divine right. The Communists did not require secret recruiting sergeants; the economics of the time did the job quite well enough”.
“What were the ideas these poets took up in this process, Dr Ward?” I asked.
“Before we go on, just call me Russel,” he said.
‘Russel it is,’I replied.
“Clearly situated on the Left, like many intellectuals of their generation,’said Russel.gathering his thoughts, ‘poets like Auden openly espoused the ideas of Marxism – with its clinical, astringent rundown of the class system – which had gained popularity in educated circles”.
“What happened to them, Russel?” I asked.
“They became disillusioned with doctrinaire Communism with its zigzag turns, u-turn manoeuvres, skulduggery and shifting alliances to gain control, people never knowing what it was going to come up with next. One minute it was all for a popular workers and farmers revolutionary government in Spain and the next it was arming forces to stop this and gain control, aiming to present a moderate face to the liberal democracies. The clincher was the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact between Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia which many on the left saw as a betrayal.From Stalin’s perspective, the lack of resolve of the parliamentary democracies to confront Hitler left him little choice.
Spender and Day-Lewis resigned from the party. Spender, refuting his past, called it ‘The God that Failed’. For others after the Second World War the final straw was the repression of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising and the ruthless tactics employed by Soviet intelligence agents. A continuous line of idealists soured to politics”.
“So what was the fate of the Auden generation?” I asked.“Did they continue to pose a threat?”
“ Come to think of it,they were more pink than deep red. They jumped ship quickly rather than staying in the party and opposing Stalinism. Heading into the maelstrom of war, the alliance of the Soviet Union and the parliamentary democracies tended to blur – even if only for the war’s duration – their major differences and facilitated the poets’ return to the fold. Highly articulate, well-connected, they knew the right thing to say and had entrees into the highest cliques. The old boys’ club would bend over backwards to co-opt them smoothly. Sounding like roosters taking credit for the dawn, they put this down to their own forgiving reasonableness and reforming character. They institutionalised the rebellious tendencies of these ‘enfant-terribles’,giving them a set place in their scheme of things,rendering them harmless. They forgave their youthful indiscretions, placed fig leaves on them, seeing the error of their ways as something committed in the heat of the moment. Like Nugget, having committed to the allied war effort, these poets would reach the highest level of their career and become liberalising pillars of the establishment.
Pillar
Talk.
“What about you,
Russel? You were part of that
generation. Are you a pillar of the establishment?” I asked this selfstyled
radical who would join me
increasingly with David in our
collegiate canteen to strike sparks off
each other.
‘It was
tremendously exciting for me as a young man passionately reading literature at
that time to come across these challenging minds.I knew just how young
Wordsworth felt growing up across the Channel in the early days of the French
Revolution.”Bliss was it to be in that dawn alive;
But to be young was very heaven!’,
I quoted,the poem fresh in my mind.
“ As for any pillar talk,I’m now more like a Pillar of Hercules”continued this historical oracle. “A port of entry guiding my students into the realm of the unknown.Mind you I’ve done all right for myself” he went on cautiously, as if he were rather embarrassed by his status. “You might call it poetic justice. I’ve worked hard to get here and copped my share of flak on the way. All par for the course.”
The Rules of the Game.
As of then
Russel generously shared his knowledge of the world with me. I would often drop into his quarters unannounced just to chat about the wide
range of subjects on my mind.He stimulated me and other young scholars
to explore beyond accepted bounds,to question accepted interpretations,and to
experiment.
One Saturday
afternoon, ,I met up with him in the company of my English professor Herbert
Piper, watching Wright College butt other
rugby heads. As I wandered up,I overheard the Prof saying to
him, ‘Harold Macmillan won’t go anywhere without one of his novels.I like a
little Trollope in bed before I go to sleep.’‘I’ll only take to bed what the parson allows.’
‘I didn’t think you were religious,Russel.’Which parson is that?’
‘The one brought to mind by Nicholas Parsons.’
‘The English entertainment personality,liked by so many women ?’
‘Right.Mine is the parson who likes knickerless women.’
‘Mine is the parson who brought a pair to the parish Christmas party.’
‘What has that got to do with Christmas?’ asked the bishop?
"They're Carol's.’
‘I’m sorry,am I disturbing your conversation?’I said. ‘I hope I’m not acting quietus interruptus.’
Professor Piper said to Russel, ‘Half a mo,I’m just going to get a few bacon and egg sandwiches.You can catch up with this young man.’
‘Now Hercules be thy speed,Herbert.We don’t want them cold.’
‘Herbert and I go back a long way’,Russel said when the Prof had gone, ‘back to our varsity days in Adelaide.’ You would have followed Australian Rules football then,I guess.’
‘Rugby union was introduced to Herbert and I at university. I drank pints with him at his dad’s pub after the rucks , mauls and lineouts. ‘Swallowed your whistle,Ref ?’he interrupted to shout at what appeared the referee’s failure to call a clear violation of the rules.
‘Despite ten years of compulsory football practice,I was hopelessly bad at what you New South Welshmen call ‘aerial ping pong’-Australian Rules football.I had no ball sense and no turn for speed-but rugby was quite another thing. Sure,it was handy to run like landy,’he said, referring to the Olympic runner, ‘but given enough brute strength,ignorance and willingness to do draughthorse work,one could do a useful job in the forward pack without ever necessarily even seeing the ball during the whole game.That’s why I enjoyed it.’
‘It sounds like working in the N.S.W.Education Department’,I said.
‘Where teamwork,numbers and rough stuff are mixed, said Russel, ‘a lazy person can easily go unnoticed.’
By then,Professor Piper had come back and hearing the tailend of our conversation,said ‘Half a mo,surely rowing was easily the most enjoyable aspect of your undergraduate life.’
‘It’s the best team sport ever devised,albeit as you know,Herbert, a snobbish one.Rowers don’t possess the nimbleness or quickness of the ball players hand,one that deceives the eye.But they do learn to control and co-ordinate the functioning of every muscle in their bodies with great precision.’
‘Steady from stroke to bow.’
‘What is more,they must make every movement of every muscle at the same instant as every other crew member,no more,no less. In every other game,a team member may excel by executing certain movements more brilliantly than others.In rowing any movement which differs by a hair’s breadth from that of others in the crew marks its perpertrator,not as a star performer but as a clown.There can never any such thing as a brilliant oarsman,better in some ways than his crew mates.There are only crews,units which may approach excellence precisely as each in proportion as each individual eliminates differences to become an integral part of a powerful,perfectly synchonised machine.All of which takes a great deal of time,sweat and sometimes a little blood on blistered bums. Moving as a single machine the eye of the beholder is never deceived by eight blades striking the water as one.Either they do or they don’t.They also must acquire the stamina to go on hammering themselves mile after mile,forcing their minds and bodies to keep functioning up to and beyond the point of exhaustion.’
At which point Professor Piper announced ‘Half a mo,I’ve had a long week and I’m a bit done in too.I’ll be off now.Catch you later, Allan.Enjoy the rest of the game.’
After he departed,I said to Russel,’ From what you say rowing should be promoted universally to train all the youth,not just those with the old school tie, to co-operate, work together and be seen as doing so’.
‘That’s an interesting thought to entertain,Allan, ‘he said, finishing his sandwich, and, taking a flask of whisky from his pocket, taking a short draught. ‘It would require a forward thinking government to subsidise it though.Would you like a swig,’he said,offering me his flask.’This drop’s thirty years old.’
‘Old enough to go out by itself. Incidentally,Russel,why doesn’t Professor Piper say ‘Half a moment’? Why does such a highly literary mind as him abbreviate it and come out with such slang as ‘Half a mo?’
‘ Half a Mo’s a nickname for me,’he laughed, ‘to do with my erstwhile abbreviated moustache.Let me explain. I grew it as a fresher,possibly in a vain attempt to make myself look older,if not necessarily wiser than I was. When chosen to row three in the first eight,I was the only member of the team not cleanshaven.
Basing themselves on the well known fact that those who served in His Majesty’s ships had either to grow full beards or none at all,the rest of the crew conspired to regard my moustache as a provocative breach of rowing tradition. Just as there is honour among thieves,there is a certain levelling egalitarianism among snobs.Converging on me suddenly after practice one evening,they held me down and shaved off the right side only,confident that the resulting lop-sided cut of my jib would speedily force me to remove the other.Honour demanded however that I remain a figure of fun for the month or two it took for my facial hair to grow back into balance- and then that I retain ever after such a hard won,if intrinsically absurd,decoration.To this passion for levelling or conformity may be traced the continued existence of the moustache for the last decades.
Take a
Proper Gander.
‘I’m fascinated
by how so much "cultural
influence" can be allocated to such a small number of individuals to earn
them the reductive catch-all title of The ‘Such And Such’Generation or ‘Such
and Such’ Group. How they can come to
represent an entire period in time’,I told David.
He replied’Each
generation discovers itself and finds
its own expression through the promethean output of it’s most talented members. ‘Do you have any
particular one in mind?’’,he asked. ‘Is it today’s ‘Love Generation’ with long
haired hippy girls and guys in velvet
pants with spangles and flowered shirts walking around carefree, eating macrobiotic
food, hugging trees.’ ‘I’m interested in the so called ‘Angry Young Men’”,I replied.
‘Ah, the catchphrase applied by the popular press to that literary rat pack from unpromising places and unglamorous backgrounds.What did they do?’
‘They crashed the stuffy Establishment party in one generation, harried the citadels of culture, and brought their idioms, themes, and passions to the centre of British life.They undermined the warm, cosy and bumbling stereotype of British life that had been projected in the 50’s comedies.’
‘What was it about the state of affairs that fed their anger and frustration?’
‘These were times when Britain being finally exposed to the very real limits of its power, the political elite was more concerned with international crises such as Suez, or with their own internal debates such as the one taking place in the Labour Party over the future of Clause Four of its constitution.Even Tony Benn gave little hint of any interest in everyday working-class issues. As for the Conservative Government of the day, the Prime Minister, Harold MacMillan was famously telling Britons that 'You've never had it so good'.Many young people could discern no brave causes.’
‘What do you see as their achievement?’
‘They transformed the British heritage ,working with the materials of their own backgrounds, the class system, tradition, and artistic convention to make new art.Working class origins and identity no longer needed to be cleaned up.They could be seen as meritorious in their own right.’
‘‘This is nothing new,you know. These writers took their place in a long line of writers who thrived in grit: Daniel Defoe, Charles Dickens, Bernard Shaw, D. H. Lawrence.Do you have any favourites amongst them?’
‘Above all others I’m partial to Alan Sillitoe, the grittiest latecomer .Keep in mind you need grit to make a pearl.I found his prizewinning stories, definitive of their genre, hard to put down’.
‘Why is that?’David enquired.
“ Like Pearl Buck’s, Alan’s stories are grounded in a particular place and time.Set in the industrial heartland of England they reflect the disintegrating social fabric of postwar England. The comfortable complacency and social harmony of the early nineteen-fifties had been exposed as an illusion.’
‘Have you made any comment to him?’
‘Alan appreciated my greeting him.
I told him he had injected fresh vigour into
post-war literature with brash realistic portrayals of masculinity and defiant
working class anti-heroes heretofore largely ignored in recent literature;with
stories riveting for their striking
realism and raciness. I congratulated
him for helping make their faithful
adaptation into some gems of films.”
‘Frontrunners of the new wave in British
cinema I believe,’commented David. ‘ Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and the ‘The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner,’I confirmed, ‘ the rebels portrayed by Albert Finney and Tom Courteney respectively. The former film is important for escaping the cloying banalities of Ealing studios , the simplistic celebration of the Second World War and the reassuring conceits and certainties that followed.’
‘Talk about the characters in these stories, Allan.’
‘The main characters in his early novels are usually poor people, rebellious individuals, young men from rows of brick houses and grubby homes,deprived of economic and social opportunities.
They generally are opposed to the
established social order but are yet affected by consumerism and hedonism. ‘Saturday Night’,a seminal novel of the
period, conveys the attitudes and situation of a young factory worker, Arthur
Seaton,charting a year in the life of this
rude, abrasive and amoral young labourer who lives for the weekends,
slugging down beer and looking for a bit of slap and tickle.This was the time
of the week he thinks about taking a
wife.The only question is, ‘From whom?’
His foreman says
he must be a Communist,which Arthur accepts without knowing much about .Or
caring about . Alan describes Saturday night for this rapscallion as ‘the best and bingiest glad-time of the week, one of the fifty two holidays in the slow turning big wheel of the year, a violent preamble to a violent Sabbath’. Inevitably that roving glad-eyed rooster is faced with the end of this misspent youthful philandering.Wild oats sown in wasted daze could bring an unwelcome crop-being tied tied down with squalling brats as his missus dropped another.The three-timing Arthur looks doomed to knuckle under and for all his bravado he sees no other life but the humdrum one he was born into.Getting conjugal with a complacent ‘nice’girl from his own neighbourhood only sealed his fate.
‘Arthur doesn’t sound like the kind of guy you’d care to cross’said David,’Flinty and self-possessed. Does he have any redeeming features?’ he asked .
‘His saving grace is his honesty’,I replied,’it helps you overlook his off-putting traits.He flaunts his motto:’I’m out for a good time.All the rest is propaganda!’While life has dealt him a lousy hand and his horizons are limited,he’s determined to make the most of what lies within them.Smarter than he looks,he knows what he wants and is sharp enough to get it.He has worked out on point the right degree of give and take he needs to make in order to live the kind of life he wants to live.He drinks hard,plays hard but works hard. He seldom feels sorry for himself and has a wise eye for the world. At one point, looking about him, he comments: ‘Nobody’s satisfied with what they’ve got, if you ask me.’
‘What about his other stories?’asked David.
‘In the title story of ‘The Loneliness of the Distant Runner’, the narrator is a young reform school inmate This boy who gets his back up finds a kind of freedom in the isolation of distance running. The written sentences, rhythmic and breathless, read like miles and miles of evenly-paced running, taking you along with him. When the Governor backs him in a cross-country race we are party to the internal dialogue on his reasons for running and his ideas of what victory really entails. The borstal boy shows his appreciation for his gift being patronized.When the time for the race arrives,he declines the offered chance to abscond on his dawn solo runs and exacts the far subtler payback.He deliberately loses in order to spite and take down his guardians, to show his defiance of authority.’ ‘Some critics found found this authenticity too confronting,I’m told.’ ‘Sillitoe has often shown authority figures as inherently ignorant and ready to be manipulated by the lower classes. In making the film version, Tony Richardson drew upon the emerging youth culture as in’Saturday Night…’ in which Sillitoe's use of vernacular was toned down and the successful abortion was changed so as to come up dry. One script reader found the screenplay rather risky.Let me read to you what he had to say’I said picking up the report from The Sydney Morning Herald. “But this story is very blatant
"Hooray to Proudy, Hooray at last! Hooray to Proudy, He's a horses arse!" Such rituals could go on well after the law of diminishing marginal utility had set in.
The test was ‘you’re not drunk if you can lie on the floor without hanging on’.
‘As for the more anti- social proletarian elements,’said David,continuing, ‘we have to see things through their eyes and understand them. Louts and criminals come from all layers of society. It is less forgivable when they come from the ranks of the privileged’.
The Dismal Science.
Not surprisingly my preoccupying interest in the dismal science became that of understanding the factors required for a stable equitable economy in which the welfare of all citizens is paramount, structured to satisfy human needs rather than to produce profits.
I learned how fluctuations in prices can lead to instability and uncertainty.My study revealed that the best time to buy anything is last year.
The prevailing idea in my economic studies was that developed by John Maynard Keynes. His approach to economic policy making was to increase demand for goods and services by government spending and other means. The aim was to guard against the recurrence of the kind of economic depression that had paralysed the world between the wars. There was a feeling that the past had to be acknowledged and a determination that such unemployment and poverty not be repeated.
A Nugget of Wisdom.
I became particularly interested in the way in which the monetary system affected this.I studied more about Dr.Harold Coombs.He thanked me for my kind re marks to him when I was studying Money-the lifeblood of the capitalist system.
''I am by nature an interferer,'' he once said, ''and I would like to do something about things if I can. There is too much poverty, too much intolerance, too much hatred.''
During World War II he was director of rationing: the man who cut off the nation’s shirt tails to save cloth. He believed that rationing should be based on equity and solicitude for each and every individual. He promoted rationing as being concerned with “fair shares”.
Dr Coombs or ‘Nugget’ as he was affectionately nicknamed was appointed to a new post of Director-General of postwar reconstruction - charged with promoting ideas designed to make Australia after the war something to live for and fight for. One important task was to successfully restore time expired veterans to civilian life. Appointed as head of the central bank by Ben Chifley, his objectives included controlling creation of credit so that those whose needs and deserts were greatest were those who benefited most, and second controlling credit so that it enhanced the efficiency of the system. During his tenure as central bank governor, from 1948 to 1968, he tended to favour less intervention and greater Government discipline over spending. ’
In banking legislation he made good at writing a charter charging the bank specifically with the task of promoting stability of the currency, full employment and the economic prosperity and welfare of the people.
In later life Nugget would despair at the tunnel vision of the modern economist and the lack of idealism in public life, bemoaning the reason of a new, uncaring intelligentsia. The battle of ideas, he said, was being won by an uncaring corporate society without a sense of community obligation.
An astute statesman Macmillan cultivated a public image that was reassuring, imperturbable,sensible, urbane, slightly aloof and always in control. In the immediate aftermath of the racist violence that had erupted in Nottingham and Notting Hill Gate in the 1950’s, he had shown determination in being seen not to give way to racist demands.
He primed the pump so to avoid unemployment. As minister of housing and local government (1951-54) he triumphantly made good on a Conservative pledge to build 300,000 new houses a year. I told him this was the right direction and he appreciated this.
Mrs Thatcher, who headed in the opposite direction with savage cutbacks would refer to Mr Macmillan belittlingly as a ‘closet socialist’.As for Mr. Benn,across the floor in the Parliament,she would view him as well and truly out of it.
Formerly 2nd Viscount Stansgate ,who had worn top hat and tails as a public schoolboy,he was as recognisably English as a character out of Anthony Trollope or even PG Wodehouse. He fought a vigorous and eventually successful campaign for the right to renounce his peerage and the usual box of tricks.All in order to be eligible to eligible for a seat in the House of Commons. He had successfully contested an election but couldn’t occupy it because of his title. Ironically, his victorious Conservative opponent was himself the heir to a peerage, held by his cousin. Benn said the situation could be most easily resolved if he murdered his opponent’s cousin.
The Clerks in the House of Lords told him they were very insulted that anybody did not want to be a peer. He said: ‘If I had arrived with a string around my trousers and a choker scarf and said I was a dustman but thought I had a strong claim to be the Earl of Dundee, I think they would have treated me with more respect!’
The press called him “the reluctant peer”. Benn said that was wrong. He took some blood out in a vial and said he did not have blue blood at all, and that he was not a “reluctant peer” but a “persistent commoner”.
The result of his campaign was not foreseen. The law of unintended consequences had kicked in.He paved the way for the Tory grandee, the 14th Earl of Home, who also renounced his peerage. Charging through the opening,the earl would automatically secure the prime ministership.Home at last!
Mr. Benn was in the forefront of the technological revolution of the 1960s.When I read his article [‘The Guardian’ February 1964] in the university library,I had to refrain from shouting ‘Eureka! He’s got it.The Red Sea has parted. This politician understands it.’ In ‘The Guardian’ February 1964, he denounced the culture of amateurism and an overly narrow specialization at the same time: ‘Both narrow their vision when it should be broadened’.Of the two he saw the cult of specialization as probably becoming the most dangerous: ‘To take a narrow view of human beings is both destructive of the human personality and also unscientific.The interaction of one factor on another cannot be considered by the specialist alone.The urban explosion is a perfect example of the failure to relate industrial development,housing development,road construction and office building,one to another.’
He saw that it ‘may create it’s own mythology of expertise designed to freeze out those whom it’s elite do not think qualified to comment.Yet it may well be that the most valuable member in society is the innovator who,though not necessarily the best in his field,has so successfully retained his capacity for general thinking that he can make the really important breakthroughs and make the relevant connections.Anything which makes it harder to locate the innovator or makes it harder for him to play his vital role will be a loss for the whole community.’
As a generalist high school teacher working in the N.S.W. Department of Education with it’s baleful record of delivering literacy skills and protecting children’s welfare, my ability to convey such skills and concern over children in my charge at risk was totally disregarded by it. Mr.Benn contrasted the revolution he had in mind, based on education and research with human goals, with the traditional one where firstly barricades are built. ‘Ours must begin with the destruction of the barriers that now divide us from one another.The paradox of modern society is that we can only reap the harvest of specialization when we have developed the courage to specialize professionally.’
I gave my encouragement to this boyish enthusiast in his public office.Having increased the functions of the Post Office, The dashing ‘young Lochinvar’ was promoted inside the cabinet in charge of a new ministry that he believed could ‘really change the face of Britain and its prospects for survival.’ It was Mr. Benn who was given a large part in implementing Harold Wilson’s “white heat of technology” agenda.In 1963, Prime Minister Wilson had delivered a speech to the Labour Party saying that for Britain to prosper it must be forged in the “white heat” of a science and technology revolution. He committed to setting up a Ministry of Technology to lead this with Benn as Minister. The Queen told him: ‘You'll miss your stamps.’
Mr.Benn gave voice to a formidable minority in the Labour party wanting to reverse the long deviation from its socialist agenda and to transform the political, economic and social systems through a comprehensive program of nationalization,including financial institutions,welfare provision and unilateral nuclear disarmament.He believed a state possessing such weapons and the means to guard them has insulated a whole part of itself from democratic control.
I encouraged him to help bring about not just this but also the easing of divorce
and discussions over raising the school-leaving age as the progressive capstones
of the Wilson administration.I told him, ‘Your blood’s worth bottling’.
I passed on a
joke to him: ‘And what rank does your uniform signify?’asked the old lady of
the officer. ‘I am a naval surgeon,madam,’he replied.
The lady exclaimed in wonderment, ‘Goodness how you doctors specialize these days!’
‘Wedgie’ got back to me promptly.
Both new fossils
were associated with stone chopping tools.
Soon they would fall upon the Homo erectus cranium that is about a
million years ago.
Dr.Leakey’s fossil discoveries proved mankind's roots were African, not Asian, as had previously been supposed.
He told me of an exciting discovery he made – a lump of lava which was used by Kenyapithecus wickerei to break open bones in Upper Miorene times. It was associated with bones exhibiting depressed fractures and some skulls broken open to obtain access to the brain. These discoveries date back to about ten or twelve million years ago.
Louis was a pioneer into the study of primates – the highest order of mammals – including man, monkeys and apes. He told me of the continuing success of social scientists Dian Fossey and Jane Goodall who he had encouraged to study gorillas and chimpanzees respectively. He believed that these studies would increase understanding of embryonic humans. Dian’s book, Gorillas in the Mist chronicles her observations of three generations of the rare mountain gorilla in East Central Africa. She urged the preservation of this endangered species until her murder.
After Louis’ death Mary and their son Richard continued field work in East Africa discovering earlier fossils dating from as many as three million years ago.
As Prime Minister between 1957 and 1963 he proved to be an extremely able diplomat gaining respect in Russia. He helped considerably to lower the temperature of the rhetoric at the summit conference with Russia and U-2 incident in 1960 in which an American aircraft was shot down over Russia.
I thanked Mr Macmillan for the stand he took on these issues and wished him the best.
He had had an operation on his prostrate gland. He said that my ‘very kind letter’ had given him ‘great pleasure’.
I encouraged Home, to continue Britain’s role as ‘honest broker’ between the US and the USSR, for which he thanked me.
A letter of last resort is one sent to British nuclear naval vessels in case of nuclear attack setting out how to respond.My letter was one of first resort,urging disarmament so that that the others never have to be sent.I encouraged Home to look at the moves and counter moves of the Kremlin in a long perspective and to consider the nature of its ambitions as being very different to those of Nazi Germany.We had to look at it’s intentions rather just it’s capabilities. I didn’t believe the Soviet Union would take the first step in launching a nuclear shootout. It had too much to lose and nothing to gain. Things were more likely to come to a head with its Chinese Communist rival than with the West.It’s involvement in the Missile Crisis was a reluctant one.This view would be confirmed years later by its agonizing over military intervention in Afghanistan.It’s behaviour was cautious, defensive and fatalistic, whereas Hitler’s push for a military conquest of the world had its logic in Germany’s need to catch up once and for all in the great race for empire building.
Douglas Home had witnessed first hand Hitler’s subterfuge during the Munich negotiations when he accompanied Neville Chamberlain as his personal secretary.Made against Home’s advice, Chamberlain’s comment on their return that ‘there will be peace in our times’ was one of the most indelible moments of the century. This failure to stave off World War II would be cited by militarists in their infinite wisdom to provide justification for a pre-emptive strike on any totalitarian state in disfavour, such as the USSR or better still, a weaker one such as Iraq post Gulf War.As Iraq went up like the fourth of July, the long, slow slide into barbarism of the western world has quickened.
Gordon Cooper and Charles ‘Pete’ Conrad Junior greatly appreciated the vigil I maintained during their Gemini 5 flight.
Pete Conrad would go on to command the Apollo 12 mission that made the second manned landing on the moon. On November 19, 1969 Conrad and Alan Bean landed in their lunar module, Intrepid, and stayed for 31 hours.
It feels just like it was yesterday following these missions: sitting on the carpet before the terrestrial television set, legs crossed, glued to the flickering black-and-white images, following every detail: the launch, the injection into the lunar trajectory, the descent to the moon's dusty surface-- the men in bulky white spacesuits lowering their feet to a new terra firma. I knew that I had seen something few humans in all history would ever directly experience--the first footprint on a world beyond our own.Then the slow-motion dance- hopping up and down on the lunar surface, skipping, and even driving across the terrain of our nearest neighbour in the sky.Alas I didn’t get to see Pete dance. Since the television camera gave out, there's virtually no footage of Conrad and Bean on the moon.
Otherwise it was a dream mission. ‘Pete Conrad Has a Fun Trip to the Moon read the headline." No astronaut enjoyed his flight to the moon as much as Pete did.He was almost like a child on Christmas Day, and his companions had a pretty good time too.
A Letter from the Desert Kingdom.
The term classicist applied to Alan Treloar is far too narrow. As Master of Wright College, he had an astonishing gift for languages and a profound understanding of the way they function and develop.He would admit, when pressed, to direct knowledge of about 80. He had a formidable command of many, such as Sanskrit, Russian, Chinese, Arabic and Hittite.
His first linguistic interests were in French at six and Latin at 10. He soon took up ancient Greek as well and was learning Japanese by correspondence while at school.He made a huge impression on me - partly because of his kind, reserved nature.He could be observed showing interest in everything anyone said and always with a smile playing on his lips as if he was truly content.Why wouldn’t he have been?
Listening to him speak about the origins, links, unusual features and other details of so many languages - especially those with origins in the Middle East - was fascinating.In the Common Room company of Russel Ward, I called upon him to translate a letter I had received in Arabic.
A Nugget of Wisdom.
I became particularly interested in the way in which the monetary system affected this.I studied more about Dr.Harold Coombs.He thanked me for my kind re marks to him when I was studying Money-the lifeblood of the capitalist system.
His signature was on all of our bank
notes. I thanked him for his
compassionate approach to people.
A self styled activist and interferer, he saw
it as the public servant’s line of duty to protect and develop the interests of
society as well as those of the state which employed him and her. His social conscience and commitment were
stirred during his years of study in London.
He was appalled by conditions created by the Depression in what
purported to be a modern industrialized society. He embraced Keynes
interventionist, deficit-spending ideas. As a student,he used to dine with
Keynes. ''I am by nature an interferer,'' he once said, ''and I would like to do something about things if I can. There is too much poverty, too much intolerance, too much hatred.''
During World War II he was director of rationing: the man who cut off the nation’s shirt tails to save cloth. He believed that rationing should be based on equity and solicitude for each and every individual. He promoted rationing as being concerned with “fair shares”.
Dr Coombs or ‘Nugget’ as he was affectionately nicknamed was appointed to a new post of Director-General of postwar reconstruction - charged with promoting ideas designed to make Australia after the war something to live for and fight for. One important task was to successfully restore time expired veterans to civilian life. Appointed as head of the central bank by Ben Chifley, his objectives included controlling creation of credit so that those whose needs and deserts were greatest were those who benefited most, and second controlling credit so that it enhanced the efficiency of the system. During his tenure as central bank governor, from 1948 to 1968, he tended to favour less intervention and greater Government discipline over spending. ’
In banking legislation he made good at writing a charter charging the bank specifically with the task of promoting stability of the currency, full employment and the economic prosperity and welfare of the people.
In later life Nugget would despair at the tunnel vision of the modern economist and the lack of idealism in public life, bemoaning the reason of a new, uncaring intelligentsia. The battle of ideas, he said, was being won by an uncaring corporate society without a sense of community obligation.
“By intelligentsia,’ he told a seminar on
ethics, ‘I mean not those people who have inherited power because of nobility,
but those who by good fortune have had access to time to think or to read or to
argue; those who have had the benefit of what we used to call small liberal
education; those who have inherited the same kinds of obligations as the lords
of the manor inherited – the sense that we, too, have an obligation personally
to care for others. One of the
distressing things to me about what has happened towards the end of my life is…
the fact that decisions are made without the kind of study which it is the
function of the intelligentsia to provide, that decisions are made without
allowing that kind of debate in an independent context.
It distresses me to see how far the
corporate society, in addition to taking over the economic culture of the
management of resources, seems to have taken over the intelligentsia. … Regrettably, the intelligentsia is becoming
increasingly the instrument of the corporate society”.
Supermac.
First
hand experience of the horrors of the Depression had led even the conservative
Harold Macmillan to advocate Keynesian policies then unpopular in his party. He
went to the country successfully in
1959 with the slogan, ‘We are all
workers now.’
A cut above the
rest,with sincere notions of noblesse oblige, this member of a patrician family
worked at winning over the Conservative Party to accepting the welfare state. Limiting
funds for pensions,family allowances and the national health service would have
of course hurt even his party’s middle class
rank and file.It could be patronising if not punitive. His constituency, Stockton-on-Tees was one
of many depressed areas where widespread unemployment and hopeless street
corner groups of unwanted men haunted Britain for years between the world
wars. This human waste made a mockery of
the ‘land fit for heroes’ that had been promised to soldiers returning from the
1914-18 world war.An astute statesman Macmillan cultivated a public image that was reassuring, imperturbable,sensible, urbane, slightly aloof and always in control. In the immediate aftermath of the racist violence that had erupted in Nottingham and Notting Hill Gate in the 1950’s, he had shown determination in being seen not to give way to racist demands.
He primed the pump so to avoid unemployment. As minister of housing and local government (1951-54) he triumphantly made good on a Conservative pledge to build 300,000 new houses a year. I told him this was the right direction and he appreciated this.
Mrs Thatcher, who headed in the opposite direction with savage cutbacks would refer to Mr Macmillan belittlingly as a ‘closet socialist’.As for Mr. Benn,across the floor in the Parliament,she would view him as well and truly out of it.
Off
with Her Head!
Having been a
childhood philatelist,I noticed that on the letter from the double barrelled Mr.Anthony Wedgewood Benn,as he was formerly
known, the Queen’s portrait on the
stamp had beenscaled down to a pintsized profile in silhouette. The cameo in the corner. A republican, he wanted
to permit the introduction of "non-traditional" designs - of
landscapes, portraits of composers and so on. He
persuaded the Queen to overrule officials who deemed Robert Burns unfit to
appear on a stamp.
As Postmaster General,scaling up the functions of the Post Office, he had proposed issuing stamps without the Sovereign's head. He knelt on the floor and spread stamp designs before her very eyes , but this time it met with her private opposition . He went on to say : ‘If the Queen can reject the advice of a minister on a little thing like a postage stamp, what would happen if she rejected the advice of the prime minister on a major matter? If the Crown personally can reject advice, then, of course, the whole democratic facade turns out to be false.’
This protest epitomised what Benn stood for
throughout his political life: the massive patronage afforded to a prime
minister through the Crown. As Postmaster General,scaling up the functions of the Post Office, he had proposed issuing stamps without the Sovereign's head. He knelt on the floor and spread stamp designs before her very eyes , but this time it met with her private opposition . He went on to say : ‘If the Queen can reject the advice of a minister on a little thing like a postage stamp, what would happen if she rejected the advice of the prime minister on a major matter? If the Crown personally can reject advice, then, of course, the whole democratic facade turns out to be false.’
Formerly 2nd Viscount Stansgate ,who had worn top hat and tails as a public schoolboy,he was as recognisably English as a character out of Anthony Trollope or even PG Wodehouse. He fought a vigorous and eventually successful campaign for the right to renounce his peerage and the usual box of tricks.All in order to be eligible to eligible for a seat in the House of Commons. He had successfully contested an election but couldn’t occupy it because of his title. Ironically, his victorious Conservative opponent was himself the heir to a peerage, held by his cousin. Benn said the situation could be most easily resolved if he murdered his opponent’s cousin.
The Clerks in the House of Lords told him they were very insulted that anybody did not want to be a peer. He said: ‘If I had arrived with a string around my trousers and a choker scarf and said I was a dustman but thought I had a strong claim to be the Earl of Dundee, I think they would have treated me with more respect!’
The press called him “the reluctant peer”. Benn said that was wrong. He took some blood out in a vial and said he did not have blue blood at all, and that he was not a “reluctant peer” but a “persistent commoner”.
The result of his campaign was not foreseen. The law of unintended consequences had kicked in.He paved the way for the Tory grandee, the 14th Earl of Home, who also renounced his peerage. Charging through the opening,the earl would automatically secure the prime ministership.Home at last!
Mr. Benn was in the forefront of the technological revolution of the 1960s.When I read his article [‘The Guardian’ February 1964] in the university library,I had to refrain from shouting ‘Eureka! He’s got it.The Red Sea has parted. This politician understands it.’ In ‘The Guardian’ February 1964, he denounced the culture of amateurism and an overly narrow specialization at the same time: ‘Both narrow their vision when it should be broadened’.Of the two he saw the cult of specialization as probably becoming the most dangerous: ‘To take a narrow view of human beings is both destructive of the human personality and also unscientific.The interaction of one factor on another cannot be considered by the specialist alone.The urban explosion is a perfect example of the failure to relate industrial development,housing development,road construction and office building,one to another.’
He saw that it ‘may create it’s own mythology of expertise designed to freeze out those whom it’s elite do not think qualified to comment.Yet it may well be that the most valuable member in society is the innovator who,though not necessarily the best in his field,has so successfully retained his capacity for general thinking that he can make the really important breakthroughs and make the relevant connections.Anything which makes it harder to locate the innovator or makes it harder for him to play his vital role will be a loss for the whole community.’
As a generalist high school teacher working in the N.S.W. Department of Education with it’s baleful record of delivering literacy skills and protecting children’s welfare, my ability to convey such skills and concern over children in my charge at risk was totally disregarded by it. Mr.Benn contrasted the revolution he had in mind, based on education and research with human goals, with the traditional one where firstly barricades are built. ‘Ours must begin with the destruction of the barriers that now divide us from one another.The paradox of modern society is that we can only reap the harvest of specialization when we have developed the courage to specialize professionally.’
I gave my encouragement to this boyish enthusiast in his public office.Having increased the functions of the Post Office, The dashing ‘young Lochinvar’ was promoted inside the cabinet in charge of a new ministry that he believed could ‘really change the face of Britain and its prospects for survival.’ It was Mr. Benn who was given a large part in implementing Harold Wilson’s “white heat of technology” agenda.In 1963, Prime Minister Wilson had delivered a speech to the Labour Party saying that for Britain to prosper it must be forged in the “white heat” of a science and technology revolution. He committed to setting up a Ministry of Technology to lead this with Benn as Minister. The Queen told him: ‘You'll miss your stamps.’
Mr.Benn gave voice to a formidable minority in the Labour party wanting to reverse the long deviation from its socialist agenda and to transform the political, economic and social systems through a comprehensive program of nationalization,including financial institutions,welfare provision and unilateral nuclear disarmament.He believed a state possessing such weapons and the means to guard them has insulated a whole part of itself from democratic control.
In February 1958, the month of CND’s foundation, Mr.Benn resigned his
position as one of Labour’s front bench spokesmen on Defence, stating that he could
not, “under any circumstances, support a policy which contemplated the use of
atomic weapons in war”.
I encouraged Mr. Benn in this and to help bring about a Race Relations Act. He had given crucial support to the
successful Bristol Bus Boycott.This protest at the Bristol Omnibus company's
refusal to employ a black driver would be instrumental in creating the1968 Act
.The lady exclaimed in wonderment, ‘Goodness how you doctors specialize these days!’
‘Wedgie’ got back to me promptly.
Great Leaps- Backwards
and Forwards.
One of the most authoritive
texts on Keynes was written by Alvin Hansen from Harvard University. He urged greater government spending for
schools, hospitals, roads, housing, slum clearance and power development. His
policies were adopted in the US Employment Act of 1946.While I getting
my head around these fiscal ideas,
Professor Hansen told me that his work ‘Business Cycles’ had been
translated into Russian.
I found this interesting as with all their stopgap measures to solving problems, the Russians through the planned economy had largely been able to avoid the chaotic fluctuations of the market economy. They would well done have studied such ups and downs to understand their fate – their cast-iron stagnant economy going west cold turkey , joining the triumphalist world capitalist economy as a basket case, on one big ‘downer’.Unable to lick us , their leaders joined us,hoping to be pulled along in the slipstream.Moving to the capitalist right at the speed of light.Rejecting state interventionism, off to the I.M.F. with their begging bowl. Sharing our ‘hit and miss’ cult of the individual, private property, and casino capitalism on steroids. Following the ‘shock therapy’ prescribed by the neo-liberal witch doctors, millions would hit the wall,missing their jobs and their homes, their savings and their common wealth gutted. Those who objected enough could be imprisoned so that prices could be free.Precious little would trickle down.
I found this interesting as with all their stopgap measures to solving problems, the Russians through the planned economy had largely been able to avoid the chaotic fluctuations of the market economy. They would well done have studied such ups and downs to understand their fate – their cast-iron stagnant economy going west cold turkey , joining the triumphalist world capitalist economy as a basket case, on one big ‘downer’.Unable to lick us , their leaders joined us,hoping to be pulled along in the slipstream.Moving to the capitalist right at the speed of light.Rejecting state interventionism, off to the I.M.F. with their begging bowl. Sharing our ‘hit and miss’ cult of the individual, private property, and casino capitalism on steroids. Following the ‘shock therapy’ prescribed by the neo-liberal witch doctors, millions would hit the wall,missing their jobs and their homes, their savings and their common wealth gutted. Those who objected enough could be imprisoned so that prices could be free.Precious little would trickle down.
It all gushed up.The ownership
of public capital was expropriated by kingpin capitalists and other high
rollers believing tomorrow belongs to them, getting rich on public share
sell-offs and massive bonuses for cost-cutting.As for many former soviet citizens , including war
veterans and babushkas,they would see their
quality of life deteriorate.Like in Britain and the U.S., only worse, massive public disinvestments rendered
school accommodation unusable, hospital buildings with walls falling down and
public transportation downright dangerous to use.Workers were left
straggling, thrown onto growing industrial scrapheaps.
Desperate people bartering their
battered housewares in the street to scrape by .Retreating to homes where the
electricity flickers on and off and the telephone often goes dead in the middle
of a call. Women transported into virtual slavery by prostitution rings
involved in human trafficking. Oh bondage up yours!
Little wonder
some would voice nostalgia for the good
old days of Stalin when things worked properly.When a cult came with
poisonality.
Out of Africa.
Taking time out
from digging Louis Leakey wrote to me on Christmas Day 1968 to wish me a
joyous holiday season and to clue me in of developments in his life and
work. He had had an operation on his
hip and was getting around walking on two sticks.
The Leakey
family of archaeologists, anthropologists and paleontologists made many
contributions to the study of human origins and evolution. Louis and his wife Mary, who had attended
Mortimer Wheeler’s lectures at London University, conducted excavations at
various fossil sites in East Africa.
From 1931 to 1959 they worked at Olduvai Gorge reconstructing a long
sequence of Stone Age cultures dating from approximately two million to 100,000
years ago. They documented the early
history of stone technology from simple stone – chopping tools and flakes to
relatively sophisticated multipurpose hand axes. Louis experimented with techniques of
knapping stone tools and attempted to understand how prehistoric hunter-gathers
gained their food.
In 1959 the
Leakeys discovered the skull of Australopithecus boisei, a species of the
pre-human genus Australopithecus. It
was dated at about 1.75 million years of age.
They also discovered at a deeper level some pre-human remains
representing an older less robust species – Homo habilis – which is possibly
ancestral to modern humans such as George Wolfe.Dr.Leakey’s fossil discoveries proved mankind's roots were African, not Asian, as had previously been supposed.
He told me of an exciting discovery he made – a lump of lava which was used by Kenyapithecus wickerei to break open bones in Upper Miorene times. It was associated with bones exhibiting depressed fractures and some skulls broken open to obtain access to the brain. These discoveries date back to about ten or twelve million years ago.
Louis was a pioneer into the study of primates – the highest order of mammals – including man, monkeys and apes. He told me of the continuing success of social scientists Dian Fossey and Jane Goodall who he had encouraged to study gorillas and chimpanzees respectively. He believed that these studies would increase understanding of embryonic humans. Dian’s book, Gorillas in the Mist chronicles her observations of three generations of the rare mountain gorilla in East Central Africa. She urged the preservation of this endangered species until her murder.
After Louis’ death Mary and their son Richard continued field work in East Africa discovering earlier fossils dating from as many as three million years ago.
A Matter of
Principle
In studying
international relations I reflected on the nature of appeasement, the Cold War,
and decolonisation. I considered the
experience of Harold Macmillan whose repugnance to war had been shaped by his
baptism of fire in the trenches. His involvement
in much of Britain’s decision making would reflect this. As a progressive back bench member of the
House of Commons in 1930’s, he criticized Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain
and the Munich Settlement in 1938. He
was one of the small group of Conservatives prepared to face political suicide
for chivvying their government’s foreign policy, in particular the quiescent
acceptance of the Francoist forces in Spain and Mussolini’s invasion of
Ethiopia – an issue on which Macmillan resigned from the parliamentary
party. When sanctions against Italy
were abandoned in 1936 he was one of only two conservatives to vote with the
Labour opposition against the Government, supporting the motion ‘that His
Majesty’s Government by their lack of a resolute and straight forward foreign
policy, have lowered the prestige of the country, weakened the League of
Nations, imperiled peace, and thereby forfeited the confidence of this House’.As Prime Minister between 1957 and 1963 he proved to be an extremely able diplomat gaining respect in Russia. He helped considerably to lower the temperature of the rhetoric at the summit conference with Russia and U-2 incident in 1960 in which an American aircraft was shot down over Russia.
Suez
And Beyond.
‘To my mind
Britain, is exactly like the hypocritical school-master who says
"this is going to hurt me more than it does you" and finds out to his
horror that he is telling the truth.’
Peter Ustinov on the plan to attack
Egypt.
Mr Macmillan
encouraged the move to independence among the former colonies in Africa in
response to the rise of nationalist fervour..Of course the imperial powers had to let the colonies
go, in case they drove them into the Soviet camp..I thanked him for his
prudence in backing Britain out of the joint military operation with the French
to regain control of the Suez Canal which the popular Nasser had nationalized.Under
Nasserist rule,there was an expansion of the state sector which provided
employment-large armies, expansive bureaucracies and nationalized industries . The decision over the Canal had led to the charge
of the right brigade that his was a policy of cutting and running.It was the
Americans then,fearful of alienating
Arab opinion, who were urging restraint and negotiations with the U.N. Posturing
as friends of Arab nationalism,they tried to gain credit by disowning their
belligerent junior allies.The crisis allowed them the opportunity to cosy up
closer to Saudi Arabia.The British
cabinet conceded in private that Nasser’s action was technically legal –
especially as he claimed he would reimburse the shareholders and Canal traffic flowed smoothly under Egyptian
ownership. I reminded Macmillan that the plan of invasion was contrary to the
ideals that Britain said it was fighting for during the War-the rule of law and
national self-determination.It was a violation of the U.N.Charter and all that
Britain claimed to stand for. Of course the Arab on the street and the new
Commonwealth members understood that employing an Israeli strike force allowed
a cover for the British and French ‘good guys’
to intervene as ‘peacemakers’ and force some sort of international
control. The attack led to France and Britain being condemned at the United
Nations, the Commonwealth cleaving along racial lines,and the Western alliance
almost ripped apart. It was realization
of all the opposition to this gunboat diplomacy
as much as noble considerations that led to the plug being pulled.
As for Indo-China Macmillan was determined
that Britain should not get involved in any military commitment to restore
hegemony by a Western power in that area.Tackling their colonial upstarts head
on militarily was something the Americans,in their sporadic unpredictable
anti-imperialist outbursts had
prudentially warned them and the French against,and now they themselves were
heading for the same trap. When Kennedy
asked for British help there, Macmillan wisely wasn’t having any of it.I thanked Mr Macmillan for the stand he took on these issues and wished him the best.
He had had an operation on his prostrate gland. He said that my ‘very kind letter’ had given him ‘great pleasure’.
Matchpoint.
‘Grouse’,I said,writing to Macmillan’s
anointed successor as Prime Minister, Alec Douglas Home. I meant ‘grouse’ in
the Australian sense of ‘excellent’.For this grandee,to the manor born, the
grouse he stalked on the moors of his native Scotland were such . Of the game this toothy somewhat mousy, serious outdoorsman hunted in the fields and babbling brooks of the
lowlands,this was the one he most
admired most: "... the mountain and moorland scenery in which the grouse
lives is beautiful, romantic and often spectacular, while the challenge
presented to the shooter is incomparable." I wrote to him about the even more incomparable challenge presented
to the shooter.Facing off much bigger game.I complimented him on working towards the signing of the Partial
Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in Moscow in 1963.
The treaty banned nuclear tests in the atmosphere, underwater or in
space. Its success was limited by the reluctance
of France and China to come on board.
Powerful men in
both capitalist-particularly the American- and Communist camps, poised as superpowers unprecedented in world
history, believed that nuclear war, was inevitable.Stretching and
flexing, each had the capability to
do massive devastation or even totally annihilate the other, with the power to
wield such forces and to do so quickly in the hands of a few leaders.
The only question was who would push the
button and strike first .I encouraged Home, to continue Britain’s role as ‘honest broker’ between the US and the USSR, for which he thanked me.
With nothing to
lose he could seek to reduce the
decibel level on the part of the superpowers, reduce the risks without
upsetting the balance of power.
In encouraging
him to take an independent stance for Great Britain in his preparation for
reprising his role as Foreign Secretary, I made reference to matchsticks. Douglas Home had said in an interview that
he liked to use a box of matches to help him in his economic calculations. I put it to him that the matchsticks could
be arranged in two piles to represent nuclear warheads of both the Soviet bloc
and those of the NATO. I pointed out
that unlike in a game when one side needs only more points to win the contest,
in a nuclear face-off, one more warhead didn’t ensure victory. Simple calculations would bear out what he
obviously knew - that both had the capacity to wipe each other out many times
over.A letter of last resort is one sent to British nuclear naval vessels in case of nuclear attack setting out how to respond.My letter was one of first resort,urging disarmament so that that the others never have to be sent.I encouraged Home to look at the moves and counter moves of the Kremlin in a long perspective and to consider the nature of its ambitions as being very different to those of Nazi Germany.We had to look at it’s intentions rather just it’s capabilities. I didn’t believe the Soviet Union would take the first step in launching a nuclear shootout. It had too much to lose and nothing to gain. Things were more likely to come to a head with its Chinese Communist rival than with the West.It’s involvement in the Missile Crisis was a reluctant one.This view would be confirmed years later by its agonizing over military intervention in Afghanistan.It’s behaviour was cautious, defensive and fatalistic, whereas Hitler’s push for a military conquest of the world had its logic in Germany’s need to catch up once and for all in the great race for empire building.
Douglas Home had witnessed first hand Hitler’s subterfuge during the Munich negotiations when he accompanied Neville Chamberlain as his personal secretary.Made against Home’s advice, Chamberlain’s comment on their return that ‘there will be peace in our times’ was one of the most indelible moments of the century. This failure to stave off World War II would be cited by militarists in their infinite wisdom to provide justification for a pre-emptive strike on any totalitarian state in disfavour, such as the USSR or better still, a weaker one such as Iraq post Gulf War.As Iraq went up like the fourth of July, the long, slow slide into barbarism of the western world has quickened.
Over the Moon.
I was awed and amazed by those
pioneering ace high expeditions being undertaken into space by astronauts and
cosmonauts. This ‘final frontier’ beckoned
to the explorer in me and was a launching pad for my interest in
cosmology.Space was on the front pageof the papers and I relished reading about
it. My childhood stories were coming true.Gordon Cooper and Charles ‘Pete’ Conrad Junior greatly appreciated the vigil I maintained during their Gemini 5 flight.
They orbited the
earth 120 times over eight days in August 1965. Gemini 5 was the first spacecraft with fuel
cells, devices that produced electricity from the chemical reaction between a
fuel and oxygen. The flight gave high
hopes, proving that men could live in a weightless state for the length of a
trip to the moon.
Gordon Cooper
was the first person to make two orbital space flights. On May 15-16, he circled the earth 22 times
in the Mercury program spacecraft, Faith 7.
During this flight, he released a 10 pound flashing beacon to test how
far away he could see it. He estimated
that he could see the light as far away as 17 miles. This experiment provided information for
astronauts whose spacecraft carried out rendezvous in space.Pete Conrad would go on to command the Apollo 12 mission that made the second manned landing on the moon. On November 19, 1969 Conrad and Alan Bean landed in their lunar module, Intrepid, and stayed for 31 hours.
It feels just like it was yesterday following these missions: sitting on the carpet before the terrestrial television set, legs crossed, glued to the flickering black-and-white images, following every detail: the launch, the injection into the lunar trajectory, the descent to the moon's dusty surface-- the men in bulky white spacesuits lowering their feet to a new terra firma. I knew that I had seen something few humans in all history would ever directly experience--the first footprint on a world beyond our own.Then the slow-motion dance- hopping up and down on the lunar surface, skipping, and even driving across the terrain of our nearest neighbour in the sky.Alas I didn’t get to see Pete dance. Since the television camera gave out, there's virtually no footage of Conrad and Bean on the moon.
Otherwise it was a dream mission. ‘Pete Conrad Has a Fun Trip to the Moon read the headline." No astronaut enjoyed his flight to the moon as much as Pete did.He was almost like a child on Christmas Day, and his companions had a pretty good time too.
And productive too.Conrad
and Bean set up scientific instruments and collected rock and soil
samples. They also removed parts from
Surveyor III, an unmanned spacecraft that had landed on the moon in April 1967.
A Letter from the Desert Kingdom.
The term classicist applied to Alan Treloar is far too narrow. As Master of Wright College, he had an astonishing gift for languages and a profound understanding of the way they function and develop.He would admit, when pressed, to direct knowledge of about 80. He had a formidable command of many, such as Sanskrit, Russian, Chinese, Arabic and Hittite.
His first linguistic interests were in French at six and Latin at 10. He soon took up ancient Greek as well and was learning Japanese by correspondence while at school.He made a huge impression on me - partly because of his kind, reserved nature.He could be observed showing interest in everything anyone said and always with a smile playing on his lips as if he was truly content.Why wouldn’t he have been?
Listening to him speak about the origins, links, unusual features and other details of so many languages - especially those with origins in the Middle East - was fascinating.In the Common Room company of Russel Ward, I called upon him to translate a letter I had received in Arabic.
He translated it as follows:
‘To The Honourable Mr.Davis,
We received your letter dated January 27,1967 on the 10th April and have read it’s contents.We are very grateful and appreciate your feelings towards our people.We wish you health and happiness.
May Allah bless you.
King Faisal,The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
‘How did you address him?’
' Your Highness’.
‘Not ‘Brother Faisal’.That’s how el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz would have during his audience.’
‘Yes,but only in replying to this form of greeting.The king in waiting would have been the one who initiated this familiar form of address.He was formally recognizing the former self named Malcolm X,his designated state guest, as a member of his brethren.
‘How did you greet him?’
‘Salaam alaykum',’I replied,'-peace be upon you'.
‘What did you say to him?
‘I thanked him for his support for the Palestinians and bringing slavery in the Kingdom to an end.’
‘How difficult was this to abolish?’
‘It was never as central to life in Arabia as it was in the American Deep South. Less than one percent of the population were slaves and their owners were compensated while at the same time gaining employees. Thus it was easier to do away with.’
‘Easier than with wage slavery.What were they used for?’
‘Almost all worked as domestic servants,rather than field hands.’
‘They were therefore what Malcolm X referred to as ‘house negroes’ rather than ‘field negroes’.’
‘What was the difference according to Malcolm?’
‘Malcom characterized the house negro as having a better life than the field negro. Hence he was more unwilling to leave the plantation.Malcolm sees him as potentially more likely to support existing power structures.’
‘Those that favour whites over blacks.He saw him as an Uncle Tom.’
‘One and the same. Malcolm X identifies with the field Negro.’
‘He did soften this attitude didn’t he.
‘Malcolm’s trip to Arabia proved life altering.He met what he said were ‘blonde-haired, blued-eyed men I could call my brothers.Like Paul Robeson in the Soviet Union,he didn’t witness racism in his host country. He returned to the United States with a new outlook on integration. This time, instead of just preaching to African-Americans, he had a message for all races.’
‘Human beings should live in harmony.They should never be fettered like horses.’
‘Yes,there’s lots of other ways,aren’t there?’ I said.
‘Faisal knows the difference more than most.He’s a rider and lover of horses,you know.
A passion he shares with our Queen,as well as a bit of son,lumiere et fumée. I saw them both via newsreel last month riding her carriage in Hyde Park. They were there to review the military pageant by the King's Troop Royal Horse Artillery,
‘You would have enjoyed that display of precision firepower,I daresay.’
‘Wild horses couldn’t have kept me away,’replied Mr.Treloar.Those immaculate ceremonial uniforms, those proud soldiers and seventy one horses pulling 13-pounder, First World War field guns.’
‘What do you imagine they were talking about?’
‘It would have about more than about horses. It may have been about how an absolute monarch,the only person who can legislate, publish laws, treaties and concessions,can reinvent himself as a constitutional figurehead.
It definitely would have been about the strategic meetings being held on this state visit.Both parties wished to avoid a repetition of the severing of diplomatic relations as occurred during the Suez crisis.. An integrated working relationship between the House of Saud and the House of Windsor was being cemented.’
‘Trowelled on, I believe.’
‘There were all kinds of weighty considerations. The King brought with him a rather glittering gift for Queen Elizabeth : a diamond necklace set in platinum with a combined weight of more than 80 carats of diamonds.’
‘On her humble flat it would help pay the rental.A kiss on the hand may be quite continental but as we know diamonds are a girl's best friend.
‘The piece is set with more than 300 diamonds, including baguettes, brilliants, and eleven pear-shaped diamonds set as pendant stones.’
‘The wearer would always be thinking about food wouldn’t they,’I said. ‘Not that these two royals would ever have any shortage .’
‘They have a common identity of concerns,’said Alan Treloar. ‘They’re worried more by national energy shortages than personal ones.Both are preoccupied thinking of light sweet crude. Their kingdoms are very vulnerable to stoppages in the continuous flow. Britain, a vulnerable ‘consuming’ nation depends on the goodwill of the ever richer Arabs . Like all industrialized capitalist nations,it sees the survival of it’s economy as dependent on being guaranteed continued access to the largest single deposit of strategic raw material in the world.
Thinking of necklaces,look on the kingdom as a vast one with pipelines strung together, the kingdom’s empty heart and bristling coastal cities sitting above the most valuable oil-bearing strata on earth.
For this reason alone Britain will continue to have close relations with this anomalous state for many years. ’
‘What has Britain got to offer the Arab sheiks?’
‘It has many commercial agreements with Saudi Arabia.Schools,hospitals,airports all have to be built.There is money to be made there. Britain even profits from protecting it’s investments.The British Empire may be all but gone, but the role of Britain in counterrevolution and counter-insurgency throughout the world is still a considerable one.’
‘Making the world safe for capitalism,’said Russel.’
‘And the Saudis.What’s in it for them?’
‘The regime depends for it’s continuance on the material needs of the advanced industrial countries.Faisal is seeking to maximise it’s position within the global market. This way it will receive greater autonomy and military and political support .’
‘This rule depends on violence,political calculation and foreign backing’,said Russel. ‘It’s security apparatus, full of police,spies and tribal paramilitaries, is efficient and ferocious against any potential opposition. There’s no legal opposition,no trade unions,no elections, no press and religious freedom,no constitution.’
‘You believe the kingdom’s government is intolerant of free speech,’I said.
‘Especially anything that challenges political authority.Strikes and work stoppages are banned.Muffled reports about arrests and torture trickle out of the closed country’s fiercely guarded borders, watched over by early-warning aircraft.Faisal imposed martial law at the height of pro-Nasserite agitation. ‘Order’ is maintained by beheadings and floggings. Women can exist in purdah, veiled and highly restricted in their activities, discouraged from even driving cars, from travelling without the say-so of a male guardian.How do you feel about the kingdom’s people now? ’
‘I’m shocked to hear all that,’I said. ‘How can the government repress it’s own people so?’
‘The regime has a great strategic advantage.It’s able to isolate dispersed population centres while moving it’s forces rapidly from place to place.It disperses and divides the armed forces themselves,constantly purging them.Meanwhile half the country,the pastoralists,sharecroppers and nomadic population are kept mystified, in ignorance and encouraged to remain trapped in their traditional universe.Who needs television?!’
‘Any ruler in this harsh unforgiving land has to have an iron fist,’said Mr.Treloar. ‘It’s a dangerous neighbourhood. Loyalty is as elusive as the shifting sands.He has be tough as a falcon holding together the alliances the family has forged between the disparate, fractious tribes’. ‘and with the Wahhabis .’
‘‘Wahhabis?’I asked.
‘This salafist sect dominates the religious establishment.It’s religious gatekeepers legitimise the ruling family’s temporal authority,and, despite the constant tensions between them,underpin it’s dynastic power. It is based on a long standing bargain with the salafiin, the conservative religious men with long beards and short thaub,the Arab dress.’
‘What do they get out of the bargain from this reflexive loyalty ?’
‘It gives themselves the opportunity to enforce their fiercely puritanical, obscurantist vision of an Islamic society.’
‘ Along with the coercive mechanisms the state can provide’,said Russel.
‘So this is a symbiotic relationship where both are mutually dependent on each other,I said. ‘Doesn’t this restrain any liberal moves however faint by the government?’
‘The official religious scholars have themselves developed a noteworthy political pragmatism.This is so even when decisions from the state conflict with it’s theologically based convictions.’
‘So from what quarters do the less quietist oppositional tendencies we hear about come from?’
‘From the younger,lower ranking radical elements.’
You pointed out to me,Russel, a generation gap means a struggle between aging conservatives and their young and restless critics.’
‘In Saudi Arabia, an opposite kind of battle is being waged.In Saudi Arabia, the idea that you have to go to the young for progress is turned on its head. It's the older generation of Saudis, including the royals, who are more friendly to progress, and to the West. Fundamentalism is a belief embraced more by the young.’
‘They are less likely to act in accordance with the wishes of the royal family?’
‘These activists as they see themselves demand an uncompromising enforcement of the salafist code of conduct as established during the eighteenth century. They incite and preach intolerance and exclusion. They declare that Islam is going wrong because the Saudi Arabian leadership has been prepared to work with the West. These literalist,imitative fundamentalists try constantly to dictate the agenda.’
‘And what is theirs?’
‘They aim to purge society in a permanent holy war.They want to get rid of what they see as it’s corrupting ungodly influences such as worshipping shrines and idols.Drinking is illegal and forbidden.They would have its customs and practices rolled back to match those of the Prophet Muhammad over a thousand years ago.’
‘To remain relevant and meaningful to latter day society what the prophet of any belief system said has to be continually reinterpreted.’
‘Yes.Uncompromising adherence to the explicit sense of a given text or doctrine whether religious or secular leads followers up the wrong path..There is a verse in the Koran that says in order to be strong in war against your enemies, you have to prepare ‘swords and horses.’If you take that literally these days,you’ll find yourself hopelssly weak against your enemies.Literalism can only represent the outside of things.We must search for the value that lies inside the words.’
‘As with any given holy text ,quotes can be seized upon, twisted and distorted to justify all manner of actions,good or bad. What the pious believer should be asking himself today is not what his or her Prophet did then,but what he would do now when confronted by the realities of modern life.’ ’
‘Take away the ‘fun’ from ‘fundamentalists’ and what are you left with?’ asked Russel. ‘Mentalists’. Many of the bearded ones’ customs and practices are very medieval.’
‘When we criticise Saudi society,’I said, ‘we should make the relevant parallels with our own and think of the strictures and structures within which we’ve lived.After all, it’s not so long ago, that the ‘weaker sex’ did not have the vote in Australia.. They were clearly second-class citizens, many would say they still are. Saudi women cannot drive, but is it not bizarre that women cannot become bishops in our churches?
Capital punishment? It was considered in western society not so long ago that it was essential. It still is considered so in many American states.’
‘As for slavery’,said Russel, ‘lets not forget that in Australia in the last century, South Sea Islanders were often ‘ blackbirded’,kidnapped and brought in as unfree,indentured labour. ‘
‘It’s not so long ago that most people here and Britain were devout and rather intolerant believers,scared and suspicious of other races and creeds,’I said. ‘Seemingly profound religious differences and open prejudice in the Shia-Sunni rift is not unique. It’s comparable to the Protestant-Catholic divide in Northern Ireland in its ancient, long-running outbursts of bitterness and intractability.’
‘And it’s not so long here since Father always knew best. Girls kept themselves ‘pure’ and ‘nice girls’ expected to be virgins till marriage.It’s not so long ago here that a girl who had sexual experience before marriage was considered defiled.Understandably Saudis do not consider it ‘progress’ for their young women to become unmarried mothers.’
‘Or for old people to be sent to old people’s homes.The Saudi reverence for age is another example of a value system at odds with the west, where thrusting youthfulness is often ranked above maturity.’
‘Consequently Saudis do not consider that Westernization moves their country forward—quite the opposite. Their society assigns the highest priority to honour, family, and a strict separation of the sexes. ‘Progress’ is not as simple as we would all wish.’
‘Yes, we say these beliefs and practices are all backward, that they’re all behind us, but they’re not so far behind us. And our books and films are still censored.
Which of our two allied and friendly countries has the right to investigate and preach to the other?’
’And lets not forget the nature of change. Wherever deeply held religious convictions of the sincerest conservatives stand in the way of an establishment that seeks to modernize,things that change at a glacial pace can suddenly change rapidly. Saudi women will certainly drive one day—and it could happen before the Anglican or Catholic Church gets women bishops. Englishmen got the right to vote in 1295 and it took more than six centuries before English women could vote as well.Lots of concessions have to be granted to enemies of change to maintain peace.’
‘ I say it’s it’s wrong to appease wowsers whenever and wherever they are,’ said Russel. ‘If allowed too much leeway,religious extremists can bit the hand that feeds them.’
‘ They could even threaten the existence of Saudi rule,’ said Mr.Treloar.’
‘This would threaten Britain, France and the US.It is they who are responsible for much of this situation, having set up a string of unrepresentative rulers whom they continue to support at the expense of any meaningful freedom and democracy’,said Russel.
‘How come the Saudi royals haven’t met the same fate as those in Egypt,Libya and Iraq?’ I asked.
‘They are far far more diverse,better organized and richer than those other deposed monarchs were.Faisal has weeded out any weaker,lazy,hedonistic elements who might shame the family code of honour.’
‘Where would we be without the code?’asked Russel, ‘honour amongst thieves.’
‘You wished Faisal peace, ’said Mr.Treloar.He didn’t have much in his own youth . Maybe that’s why some Western diplomats find him dour and cantankerous.He was a childhood soldier,starting at the age of 13 in his father's army. At the age of 18 he became a commander of in the military campaigns in the 1920s and ’30s that helped forge modern Saudi Arabia, the only country in the world whose name is that of the family who effectively own it and with which it’s citizens are labelled .’
‘The family that slays together stays together’,said Russel. ‘The fanatical holy warriors these Bedouin chieftains recruited rode, raided and hacked their way to power in a war conducted under British auspices after the collapse of Ottoman rule.’
‘This war was after the First World War’,’I asked.
‘Yes,’said Mr.Treloar, ‘though it’s back to before this that we must go to understand the relationship between the Houses of Saud and Windsor. For a decade before this global tragedy the India Office had been ignoring requests from Faisal’s father for Britain to establish friendly relations with Riyadh. But the increase in tensions that would lead to the Great War caused Delhi and London to re-examine the safety of the links between Britain and India via the Suez Canal and the likelihood that Ottoman Turkey would side with Germany in any conflict. The British Agent in Kuwait, was dispatched to enlist the help of the Saudis in eastern and central Arabia, while T. E. Lawrence was later sent to the Hashemites in the west. Thanks to the eloquent pen of Lawrence---
‘--and the subsequent help of Peter O’Toole.’
‘---the Hashemites’ ‘Arab Revolt’ has entered popular history. Less well known is the fruitful collaboration between the Saudis and a succession of British agents which led to the elimination of Turkish influence from the peninsula, both directly and via Turkey’s client dynasty, thus safeguarding the southern frontiers of what became the British mandate territories of Palestine and Transjordan. The Saudis were constructive and co-operative allies—even as British arms and money helped advance their own dynastic ambitions. When Britain signed the Treaty of Jeddah in 1926, recognizing Saudi conquest of the holy places, there was very much a sense in which Britain had served as godmother to the new kingdom.’
‘It sponsored it’s baptism of fire with superior weaponry,’said Russel.’ This enabled the Saudis to outgun the Turks.’
‘They had more than just firepower,’ said Mr.Treloar. ‘Their series of dazzling and politically skillful campaigns was partly conquest, partly consensus—the House of Saud are great consensus builders.
As they did with the British, so did they do deals with merchant families,the Shia minority and the tribes they conquered—sometimes with arms supplied through the deals they did with Great Britain. But it’s true, the self image they like to promote, based on and nurtured on this experience, is the legend of the warrior prince.’
Psychologically, this ideal of the Bedouin fighter represents to the present-day Saudi what the Western cowboy folk hero represents to an American.’
‘Unsurprisingly his talisman is not a gun but a sword’,I said.
‘That’s just what his name means.Faisal or Faysal comes from the Arabic word Fa'Sa'La. It originally means that which divides, most commonly referring to that which divides between right and wrong.Thus it has become another word for ‘sword’.’ ‘Faisal’ is a noun meaning the person who breaks apart or separates matters in a decisive fashion.’
‘Yes’, I said,grimacing, ‘and can remove different parts of the human body.’
‘In the same respect it may also mean the judge whom separates good from evil.
What impressed you about this man? Was it his piety? His discretion? His austerity? His attention to detail? His caution?’’
‘All of the above.Faisal is credited with implementing decisively a policy of modernization and reform. If his father created Saudi Arabia within its current borders, it is Faisal who has knitted it together.He is using the ‘black gold’ to turn an extremely backward,desolate desert society of marginal importance to the world economy into a modern state with a more influential position. Faisal is the perfect bridge between the old and the new because he is steeped in the traditional Bedouin world and appreciates the requirements of the modern world,in the judicious melding of past and present . He appears to be a shrewd and cautious monarch.’
‘He would have to be’,said Russel. ‘His country , dominated by opacity, suffers endemic corruption. His brother whom he replaced in a palace coup had brought discord to the government by his profligacy.He proved unable to to develop an effective bureaucracy, his continued to rely on personal advisers, and he failed to mobilize and direct for national development the massive wealth accruing to the country from oil resources.He had a massive royal residence built on the outskirts of the capital .’
‘The minute he walked in the joint you could see you he was a man of distinction.A real big spender,’said Russel.
‘Like you at least in the first category,Russel.You knew the path you took wouldn’t lead to big personal fortune.’
‘Or heaps of children.Faisal’s alcoholic brother sired 107 children. To live in a shoe would not do. He housed them extravagantly and outrageously in a series of palaces. With thousands of servants and guards he aimed to live in the style of the Sun King..’
‘Faisal’s ousting of Big Daddy meant that the family will to protect and preserve the continuance of the House of Saud would emerge to replace the individual will of an ineffective king. The Kingdom’s past, present and future prospects all revolve around the dynamics of its ruling family.’[See:Alarums and Excursions.]
‘ Blood may be thicker than water, but oil is thicker still’,said Russel.’
‘Faisal’ lives a different style’,I said . ‘He lives modestly in a modest mansion without a wall. He often drives himself to the office.He makes himself available to the public daily in the traditional majlis, followed by a meal open to anyone.Breaking bread with others, from the highest to the lowest, is important to him.‘Guess who’s coming to dinner?’asked the management of the Waldorf Astoria in New York.He had shocked them by insisting that one of his black slaves breakfast with him in the whites only Wedgewood Room.
He remembers the early days of his father’s reign when privileged classes were unknown.His father’s first palace was made of the same sun-dried mud bricks that the peasants used. Sheikhs and bedouin herdsmen called each other by their first names. The clothing of rich and poor was quite similar.He’s happiest squatting by a desert fireplace,digging barehanded into roast goat,talking to people in their own dialect.
He knows the dissatisfaction and unrest that wide differences in income can create.The existence of a privileged class can be accompanied by conspicuous consumption and produce envy, resentment and careless,senseless violent actions.’
To set a example he works in his office until midnight, scarcely taking time off.’
‘Understandably.He has to strike a skilful balance between modernisation and the conservatism of a tribal and deeply religious society,’said Mr.Treloar..’
‘‘Faisal is a man of the world,at ease in a London drawing room or a Washington conference room. He made many connections during his trips around the world as foreign minister in his father’s administration. Having been invited into the most important strategic,scientific and cultural sites in the world,he saw enough to know that Saudi Arabia could not remain isolated any longer. He aspires to create good governance composed of educated young intellectuals who have been educated outside Saudi Arabia and have no tribal affiliation, and he does not want to be dependent on the whims of the tribal leaders. Indeed, his brother’s removal from power marks a decline in the status of the traditional Saudi powers and is producing a new elite that consists more of intellectuals and senior administrative staff.
He got off on the right foot rescuing the country's finances. His brother had embarked on a lavish and ill-considered spending program .Many funds had been deployed abroad. His financial policies were bringing the state to the brink of collapse.He had trapped the state into a high spending mode from which Faisal had to extricate it.’
‘What has Faisal done in response?’
‘Even before he became king,with executive powers in foreign and internal affairs, including fiscal planning,he initiated an austerity program in 1959 that included a reduction of subsidies to the royal family, currency stabilization, and the resolution of embarrassing national debts.Once his hand was free, he set about cutting spending dramatically in an effort to rescue the state treasury from bankruptcy.A new word,shafafia or ‘transparency’ has entered the country’s political vocabulary.’
‘The demand to know where the money has gone,’said Mr.Treloar.’
‘This policy of financial prudence has become a hallmark of his era. It has earned him a reputation for thriftiness among the populace. His aims of balancing the country's budget is succeeding, helped by an increase in oil production. He is investing heavily in infrastructure and laying the foundations for a modern extensive welfare state.’
‘So you would see him as a reforming,liberalizing, and modernizing figure,’asked Mr.Treloar.’
‘The descriptions ‘liberal’ and ‘reformist’, must be seen in very relative terms in Saudi Arabia.Take economic planning for example.He has inaugurated the country's first ‘five-year plan’ for economic development.Now could this really move the country towards the Eastern bloc?’ I asked the two academics rhetorically.
‘Hardly,’said Russel. ‘Both Saudi Arabia and the United States share a mutual fear of the Soviet Union’s expanding global influence.Predicated on strategic and religious realities, this provides a protective political layer that envelopes oil and defence interests.We have to look at the kingdom within the global context of western post-colonial strategy and the political economy of oil. The Saudi ruler is both zealously anti-Zionist and anti-Communist,you know.’
‘Didn’t he go to the Soviet Union in the thirties?’
‘He wasn’t impressed.When a Soviet diplomat asked him why he shunned relations with the Soviet Union, Faisal replied tartly: “Go to Moscow and tell them to recognise God, and tomorrow I shall open an embassy in Moscow.”
‘He would have to wait til hell froze over,’said Alan Treloar.
‘We hear about changes Faisal has made in education,’said Russel. ‘What do you know about these?' ‘He recognises the value of education as the key to ending the country’s backwardness.While he recognises the value of foreign schooling,he has issued an edict that all Saudi princes have to school their children inside the country, rather than sending them abroad. This has had the effect of making it ‘fashionable’ for upper-class families to bring their sons back to study in the Kingdom.’
‘I’m told his Turkish wife was involved.’
‘He supported her in opening the first girls’ school, despite the consternation of many conservatives in the religious establishment.One city sent a delegation to him in protest.’Is there one verse in the Quran that forbids teaching women to read?’he asked them. ‘Am I forcing any of you to send your daughters to this school?’
To appease the objectors, however, he has allowed the female educational curriculum to be written and overseen by religious clerics .Faisal is confident enough to make clear that rulers rule and that the religious must go along with that.That they remain in their proper place: the junior partner, a prop to the social order, not a force to threaten it.’
‘To what extent can he lean on them?’
‘He can’t brush them aside but he has relaxed the zealous powers of the cane wielding religious police who enforce the observance of prayer and the seclusion of women.they’re on the defensive.They listen to record players.Almost everyone now listens to foreign radio stations,female announcers,can use film projectors at home and see photographs in newspapers and magazines.. Faisal is attempting to ensure that the most radical clerics do not hold society's most powerful religious posts such as that of Grand Mufti.He knows from history that once religious zealots are encouraged, they can come back to haunt a country.’
‘Like those of the Auto-da-fé.When you fuel this kind of auto ,you can end up with a massive pile up of recurring nightmares. ’
‘Some haven’t been at all happy with the introduction of television,have they?’
‘A few years ago Faisal established the country's first television station, though actual broadcasts have only begun recently. As with many of his other policies,such as his support for the pro-Israel U.S.A., the move has aroused strong objections from the religious and conservative sections of the country. He has to guard against any backlash brought about by the temptations of unimaginable riches and what are seen as foreign ways . Acting as the Custodian of Mecca and Medina, Faisal has assured the Salafiin, however, that Islamic principles of modesty are being strictly observed.He makes sure that the broadcasts contain a large amount of religious programming.’
‘Not enough for some,I’m sure. Last year, an especially zealous nephew of Faisal attacked the newly established headquarters of Saudi television but was killed by security personnel.’
‘What are Faisal’s main foreign policy themes?
‘Pan-Islamism,anti-Communism and pro-Palestinian nationalism.’
‘He’s accused by the U.S. Israel lobby of being anti-semitic.They organized rallies to jeer and heckle him in New York.’
‘How can he can he be anti-semitic? Aren’t the Jews and Arabs both considered semitic?’
‘Arabs are also a semitic people. For most of the past fourteen hundred years Arabs have not been antisemitic as the word is used in the West. Most Arabs are not Christians brought up on stories of Jewish deicide. This long-held common belief in Christianity lays the responsibility for the death of Jesus on the Jewish people as a whole.’
‘It’s always mischievous and irresponsible to lay responsibility for the death of anyone on another people as a whole.To paint a whole group with the same brush.’
‘Yes and let’s not forget Christ was condemned by the Roman governor,not by jews. It was the colonial head who denied Jesus was a God. That’s why in Islam, such stories are rejected by the Qur'an as a blasphemous absurdity.Throughout most of this time, provided they did not contest the inferior social and legal status imposed on them,jews in the arab world were provided relative security against persecution and welfare —a protection that was missing for non-Christians in most of Europe.’
‘How long did this situation go on there?’
‘Until the French Revolution.This brought about institutionalization of equality under a secular idea of citizenship .This allowed the jews to enjoy their respective religious laws and ways of life.’
‘These are the freedoms Faisal said he upheld at a luncheon tendered in his honor by the Washington press corps last year. Defending the Arab boycott of U.S. firms trading with Israel he asserted that “it has never been our aim to exterminate Israel and throw it into the sea.” He then gave his interpretation of Israel’s emergence. He said that Jews were always recognized as co-citizens of Arabs in Palestine, but “Zionist aggression occupied the country, threw out the Arab people, many became refugees. Jews from outside came into the country. Jews from outside are aliens. By aggression they have taken over the land.” The King said “the Jews” had been guilty of “violation of every human right” of the Arabs and had denied the Arabs “the right of a person to his own home.” He said at another point that Saudi Arabia had “no aggressive intentions against any country or any religion.”
‘He makes the strong case that survivors of the Holocaust should have been given the choicest land in Germany and places in Europe from where they were themselves dispossessed.He argues that recompense for a crime should be made by the criminal,not by innocent bystanders.’
‘What rights do Communists have in Saudi Arabia?’
‘They are strictly forbidden to organize and operate.Faisal is an authoritarian who suspects an unholy alliance between Zionism and Communism.’
‘That sounds hard to believe,’I said, ‘ relations between Moscow and Tel Aviv couldn’t be worse .’
‘Some people believe in all kinds of conspiracies.’
One thing’s for sure.The relationship between Saudi Arabia and the U.S. is very close. Faisal declared in 1962, ‘After Allah, we trust the United States. ’
‘According to the Quincy Pact,arrived at by Faisal’s father and Roosevelt,
the US obligates itself to protect the kingdom and the Saudi royal family in exchange for furnishing oil on privileged terms.
A tacit clause of this pact was Roosevelt’s promise not to allow the creation of an independent Jewish state in Palestine.
In the closing days of the war, Roosevelt confirmed in writing to Faisal’s father his promise to not take, as chief executive leader of the government, “any action, that might be construed as hostile to the Arab peoples.Faisal was assured the same thing by Truman’s Secretary of State,George Marshall.”
‘The establishment of the state of Israel and the dispossession of the Palestinians would have flown in the face of this.’
‘After the death of Roosevelt, Faisal felt completely betrayed because President Truman, basically for reasons of election convenience and advantage, declared his support for the partition of Palestine.In fact Truman recognized the state of Israel fifteen minutes after it’s proclamation.’
‘What did the U.N. have to say about this?’
‘On the subject of voting on the partition, the General Assembly voted twice,some say to get the desired result. Faisal publicly denounced this as manoeuvres of subornation and intimidation.He declared that for these reasons his government ‘does not recognize the resolution adopted by it’.He continued to use his influence to promote the Palestinian cause to the governing circles in the US.’
‘He did this forcefully as a counterweight to his fidelity to the US.To be seen as independent of it by Saudi Arabia’s neighbours.’
‘The U.S. has historically tried to back both Israel and the conservative arab states.’
‘A bob each way.’
‘Exactly,and this ambiguous policy has been remarkably successful.’
‘Especially for the arms dealers.’
‘At times the U.S. makes pro Arab gestures, fully aware the Arab states are too weak to challenge it’s pro-Israel tendency.The King knows not to rock this boat too much.If he were to threaten any oil squeeze against the advanced capitalist economies, he would be be reminded that to weaken the West is to strengthen Communism.He would face the the threat of the U.S. wanting to occupy Saudi oil fields.’
‘And the U.S. has to work hard to placate him.’
‘For their part the U.S. fears any coup in a domestic backlash against Faisal would deal a crippling blow to their economy.It is frightened of such a prospect. The U.S. is happy for the arms delivered to be used against militant nationalist and republican forces throughout the region as long as they’re not used against Israel,or at least sparingly.’
‘How are relations with the neighbouring more populous states? Do the bonds of background trump those of inter-regional rivalry ? The difference in living standards between The Saudis and their Arab neighbours could always tip over into an explosive regional imbalance. Things are rocky regarding Saudi-Egyptian relations,I believe. ’
‘The Muslim world is as as diverse in its political, social and religious traditions as the Western one. Trade, military advantage, and inter-ethnic rivalry play just as important a role as any idea of a unified Islam acting in concert.’
‘That which Faisal urges.’
'Yes.While the Arab world is divided into different states,there exists among all classes consciousness of a common Arab identity and a desire for unity.Hence Faisal’s collaboration with such odd bedfellows as Nasser and Yasser Arafat.’
‘Faisal is the proverbial ‘man behind the curtain,’ the guy who exerts power, wields influence, and manipulates events but seeks to remain largely anonymous.Nasser and Arafat are pursuing a more more vocal secular approach.’
‘The three are drawn together because of their mutual interest in obtaining Arab independence from non-Arab foreign intervention,’I suggested.
‘Beyond that point all similarity of objectives vanishes.The Egyptians and P.L.O. receive Soviet assistance. Moreover the kingdom faces a serious challenge from the popular, besuited Egyptian leader who deposed his own king and seems bent on dominating the Arabian peninsula. Saudi officials were aghast when Syria and Egypt merged in 1958 to form the United Arab Republic. In the on/off relationship between Riyadh and Cairo, Nasser’s reputed to have stated ‘To liberate all Jerusalem, the Arab people must first liberate Riyadh’.
‘Big Daddy is reputed as having tried to assassinate Nasser.’
‘With friends and family like these,who needs enemies? Faisal is still engaged in a proxy war with Egypt in Yemen.Just five years ago nine Saudi air force officers defected to the Nasserites,with the U.S. sending in planes to fill the gap.Faisal has exploited border skirmishes with the Egyptian military, referring to them as agents of Communist aggression.You can imagine how well this has gone down in Washington.A more virulent foreign outlook is taking place since the full scale entry of troops into Vietnam.’
‘Isn’t Nasser also fervently anti-Communist?’
‘He is but he’s fraught with dilemmas. He threw his lot in with the Soviet Union as the CIA were continually trying to undermine him. His tilt against imperialism is mostly rhetorical.His bark is worse than his bite.Nasser is trying to reach some agreement with the King.In spite of their differences the common language and heritage demand that all the Arab states engage in limited economic and political co-operation.Saudi aid can be deployed to stabilize whichever regime requires it.The Saudis bank reserves and develop services in Egypt and Lebanon.’
‘And fund the Palestinian cause, fighting the U.S.’s other close ally in the region.’
‘The Israelis beat up and kill the Palestinians and the Saudis patch them up and bury them.’
'How sincere is this expression of a shared Arab bond really?’
‘ Like all the Arab regimes,the trio you’ve mentioned invoke this mystified and classless conception of a common ‘Arabism’ to their advantage.At the Washington press corps luncheon Faisal bristled when a reporter asked whether Saudi Arabia considered Egypt or Israel a greater enemy. He replied: “I regret deeply this question. It is based on a premise very much contrary to truth.” He described Egypt as a “sister country” and the Egyptians as “our brethren.” He stressed that, despite differences between Saudi Arabians and Egyptians, “they remain our brethren.”
‘You’re suggesting that he’s manipulating the popular sense of unity in order to re-inforce his own position.’
‘ And thereby that of the Western powers.’
‘By posing as the champions of a classless Arabism,’said Russel, ‘those Arab leaders are able to deflect criticism from the oppressed within their own country.Their regimes manipulate the Palestinian question to ensure class collaboration within their own states.The Saudi position on Israel is dominated more by religious obsession about the ‘Islamic’ character of Jerusalem than by solidarity with the Palestinian people.’
‘Whose P.L.O. leadership includes members of different belief systems.’
‘ These leaders have proved incapable of assisting the Palestinian people to assert their self-determination.In this way the predominance of a national rather than a class conception contributes to the strength of imperialism throughout the area and to the disunity of the Arab world.’
I discussed the hurricane movement of the Six Day war that came the following week with Mr.Treloar.
'Relations between Israel and its neighbours’, he said , have never fully normalized following the 1948 Arab–Israeli War.All the attendant tensions have became dangerously heightened.They now have to be resolved on the battle field.
Despite the country’s alliance with America,it’s powerful foreign protector,Faisal is providing logistics and helping payroll it.’
After the short war we discussed it’s consequences.
‘A week is a long time in politics.’
‘Nasser’s defeat and a weakened Egypt has changed the political landscape.’
‘Any disputes between Arab states must now have to take a secondary position to what the Arabs call the ‘alien threat’ of Israel.It has seized and retains Jerusalem, the third holiest city of Islam.’
‘This is indeed a game changer.Any sense of completely secular Arab states may have ended. Saudi Arabia’s power in the region has been further enhanced.’
‘In what ways?’
‘It sees itself as guarantor of stability in the Middle East. Egypt desperately needs Saudi money to rebuild it’s military so must now come cap in hand to Riyadh. Faisal is now the predominant Arab leader, the moderator of Arab disputes., and one ready to use oil wealth to promote his idea of global Islamic solidarity.’
‘And also to buttress it’s political bargaining power with the recipients and the West.’
‘The US and Britain have secured a long list of major and minor contracts with the peninsular power.’
‘So what’s on the cards now?’
‘What we see happening today in the Middle East is a direct result of Western opposition to Nasser’s strategies and ideals. Saudi Arabia is set to play a more aggressive role in the Arab world. Both monarchism and Islamism will profit from the failure of the secular nationalist project.The ideological field is now wide open for proselytising competing versions of a central notion: that Muslims should not merely show solidarity with one another but go to each other’s aid when they are under attack,to capture the imagination of the Arab world.’
‘So who will define what the attacks are? Some shrill cleric with a reliance on religious references or an enlightened despot backed by his educated populace ? And what about when Muslims attack other Muslims?’ Isn’t this just as likely as nominally Christian states or their citizens attacking one another?’
‘ All citizens should show solidarity with all others irrespective of beliefs and go to each other’s aid when under attack.They have to be educated as to where any real potential attack could be coming from.’
‘What role can we expect now in the military sphere,Mr.Treloar?’
‘Faisal and the U.S. are building up Saudi Arabia into a massive military capable of not only crushing any internal threat but of intervening throughout the neighbouring states. The kingdom relied on Britain and the U.S. to set up it’s air force and navy and will continue this build up.’ . As a counterbalance to any potential regional Baathist upstarts, The U.S. provides the material guidelines and the Koran the ideological justification.’
The irony would be that it was this narrow interpretation that would scare the hell out of the House of Saud itself. It looked for years leftwards politically, towards communists, constitutionists, liberals,as the potential source of trouble. And what was clearly the coming threat to regimes in the Middle East, was that from the religious side of things. The rise of the clerical class would prove to be simultaneously a pillar of support and a potential threat. The unfortunate consequence of this arrangement would be the de facto encouragement of extreme figures at the expense of more reasoned voices.
In the Saudi Arabian tradition of violent religious extremism that resurfaces almost every generation, a portent of the future,Faisal was slain by a nephew following a family dispute over the propriety of introducing television to Riyadh.While trying to edge the Kingdom into modernization at the same time as retaining traditional values, he eventually paid with his life for his efforts.It is said by his Islamic admirers that on his death bed he asked the life of his assassin be spared.This rejection of capital punishment is in line with that of the Catholic Church and others.It is one to be held to by all.
Pan-Islamism, the core of Faisal’s foreign policy,would lie at at the core of global jihad. The idea would gain a further boost in the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan in the 1980s. But after the celebrated Soviet defeat and withdrawal in 1989, it became clear that pan-Islamism was a Pandora’s box from which unintended consequences would emerge, including Al-Qaeda and related groups.The country's roiling disaffection with the stationing of foreign troops and economic downturn would produce sixteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers, dreaming of messianic purity,proudly resisting the march of history, and sacrificing themselves and others to what they saw as a higher cause.Like soldiers of the Third Reich,who had it inscribed on their belt buckles,they too believed they had God with them. Saudis had a determining hand in the terror strikes, supplying the transmission belts to fanatical organizations.
These organizations had the blessing of the U.S.at first.Former US national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski had stood on the border with Afghanistan with religious leaders and said, ‘Go and wage the jihad.’After all,he would later add: ‘What was more important in the world view of history? The Taliban or the fall of the Soviet Empire? A few stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?’
The attacks and those that followed would have absolutely nothing to do with protecting the sanctity of Islam.As would the blind,wild lashing out by The House of Bush be nothing to do with protecting democracy and the sanctity of human life .
The Bush boys had seen what was inside the box too.
Continuing to disregard Faisal’s pleas for the Palestinian cause,the threat from Muslim ‘jihadists’ and their WMD totin’ terrerists[sic] would become for the U.S the catchall answer to demands for peace.
For Faisal’s successors, disregarding his warnings against sectarianism and racism, the “Shia threat” would become their catchall answer to demands for democratic reform and accountability, together with Uncle Sam replacing the Communist bogey with the new simple ‘Terrorist’ model.
It’s very convenient for governments. to encourage culture wars than allow critics to direct their ire toward the seat of power.
The marriage with the U.S. would prove fatally contradictory. American funding of jihadists in Afghanistan in the 80s, an alliance with the House of Saud, and visceral support for Israel at the expense of Arabs would provoke more death and destruction in the mainland United States than forty five years of cold war.
The Kingdom’s unique blending of worldly wealth and religious resources, the clash between the materialism that the east coast generates and the spiritual traditions of the holy cities in the west,would lead to a classic conflict between God and Mammon, ancient and modern. The puritan state would be strained to breaking point.
There would be no dearth of critics both within the Kingdom and across the Red Sea to point up the shortcomings of an antiquated Bedouin monarchy awash in money and self-indulgence.
I learned of Mr.Treloar’s acquaintance with Moshe Dayan and time spent in Egypt.
Dear Reader,
As you peruse these sections of, a work in progress,would you help me
with any critical feedback. Spotting not so much typos but glaring
things of a literary nature that can be improved.Keeping questions such
as the following in mind. Are the language or ideas in places
routine, contrived,hackneyed,corny,sentimental, or clichéd? Are the
emotions florid? What things could I express better?
Does the story hold together? Do I come across as ingenuous? Am I
convincing or entertaining where I try to be? Is the story credible or
far fetched in parts? Are there gross inaccuracies , inconsistencies,
repetitions or unnecessary and irrelevant parts? Do I spell things out
too forcefully? Do I grab you from the outset and keep you
enthralled,even though the kettle is boiling over?
Is there a rhythm to the story? Does it flow
or does it plod?
What parts need re-working or could be best left out?\
Would you kindly make any comments and suggestions.For example does it stir those strong feelings of affection or sympathy brought up by Stan Hunt?
You can do this by entering ‘tools’ and clicking ‘track changes’, allowing you to show your alterations.My address is: allanwdavis@hotmail.com]
