Passing bull 16 – the omitted poetry

16/10/201516/10/2015 / Geoffrey Gibson / 6 Comments

At the first opportunity, I omitted to add to this Passing Bull item an extract from the poet of the month, Yeats. I had promised not use his best known lines, but the revival of Sodom and Gomorrah really makes me now do so.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

A propos of another form of trading in sex, Playboy is going clothed. Do you remember the time when some diffident younger or older men said that they bought Playboy for the articles? Now, I can warrant you that some will say that they watch Nigella to learn how to cook.

Travelling North – Parts 8 and 9

14/10/201514/10/2015 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

VIII

The Kimberley Grand reception was the scene of a minor tremor on the Sunday. Exultant in the level of luxury I was now in, I went back to reception to find out how to equip myself to celebrate. There was a most charming, if slightly austere, lady of Chinese extraction behind the desk.

Does this noble establishment come to a bottle shop?

I am afraid not, Sir.

Well, can you point me to the nearest?

There may not be mush point in that, Sir?

Why not?

They are closed all Sunday. You cannot buy alcohol in containers on Sundays in Kununurra.

Well, well, well. Let us now be crystal clear on one thing. These are licensed premises and I can get a drink here as a guest whenever I want to – even on Sunday.

The good lady confirmed this with a sunny smile, and Mafeking had been relieved. But what if some bunny in a group had found themselves in the position that I had been in and had been despatched up here on a mercy mission – and arrived on a dry Sunday – and had to go back empty-handed to the parched troops by then under a tree inscribed ‘DIG HERE’?

The Kimberley Grand had in its reception area two large paintings purportedly by aboriginal artists whose work I have versions of at home. I say ‘purportedly by’ because there was no signature or ascription of the painter, but they were identifiably in the style of each of those artists. I am not an expert, but I had the clear view that at least one of them was not the real deal. This form of copy-catting may not be too bad, but it shows the kind of problem these people may have in marketing their art, the best of which has commanded very high prices in Paris and New York. Over breakfast, Trevor told me that for much of the day at Warmun, I could see a blackfella sitting outside the community shop under a stockman’s hat whose work sold for $20K. This is why I queried what would happen to the purchase price of the two little paintings by children that I bought at the Mowanjan Gallery at Derby.

Two of my favourite aboriginal paintings are by Freddie Timms, a former stockman from around Broome. They are like the aerial views of Rover Thomas, but in thrillingly bright colours. When I first went to Broome about fifteen years ago, I only had one, and I told the agent that I might run into Freddie at Broome. The reply was that Freddie might well be in the Broome slammer as we spoke. You always seem to run into these contradictions – if that is the word.

Something quite remarkable happened when I got to my previously booked accommodation at Kununurra. I was served from behind the counter by someone who was Australian born, and it started to happen more often, although the French presence remains strong. The Ibis Styles is what I think is called budget accommodation, but it is very adequate and very well managed by young and keen staff, with the capacity to eat around the pool when it got cooler. I met a guy there named Don who was a painter from Geelong, and who was a dead ringer for Roman Polanski. His wife Wala was from Germany with a Russian mother – or vice versa – and we shot the breeze over two evenings.

I had decided almost immediately on getting into my room at the prior establishment to book a fly and drive tour into the Bungles, and I had booked and paid for this on the Sunday. It was a bit more than $800, but this was really the focal point of the trip, and the marred visit of the Saturday, even with the helicopter flight, now hardly looked adequate, and it would have been something that I would have come to regret if I had left it at that.

This town is far more settled and green and orderly than others that I have been to up here. Perhaps it goes back to the wealth created by the Ord River Dam and the miners. The town has a sense of confidence and purpose that I did not see elsewhere – except perhaps in Broome, which is also a tourist hub, and more of a venue in its own right, and with access to mining and other wealth. Diamonds and pearls can do wonders for a town.

But a sense of confidence or purpose is not something that I saw in the first inhabitants of this land. I can hardly recall seeing many such people doing a job with a sense of purpose or at all. The contrast with the young Europeans and Australians in work is as marked as it is depressing. What you do see everywhere is groups of indigenous people sitting in public places in the shade of a tree – you never see white people meeting like that. Or you see people on their own flip-flopping about aimlessly, and in a dishevelled fashion. We know that these people can rise very high in art and sport, but we have a lot of trouble helping them out in other ways. It is very sad.

One way to see the Kimberley would be to use this town and Broome, or possibly just one of them for the base for tours. You could visit a lot of places around both in cheap orthodox vehicles and get professional operators to traverse the hard parts by 4WD, air, or water.

Lake Argyle, including the Ord River Dam, is most imposing from any perspective. It is set deep in a dry and craggy landscape – like a sand-blasted loch in the Highlands. You can take a tour by catamaran. I was told that in some places you are out of sight of land. People swim there all the time – they do not worry about the fresh-water crocs. There is a division of view about the salties there – they are the local Loch Ness Monster. Either category was enough for me to keep my togs dry, and keep the swimming to the pool; I also inclined to the view that I would require something in the nature of the Dreadnought to go out in a boat. On my last trip to Kakadu, I heard on the radio of two blokes fishing in a tinnie – that tipped over – obliging them to test the world record for the 50 meter freestyle sprint to save their skins.

Wyndham, if you look at the map, is the end of the line – and it bloody well feels like it. It is at one degree of separation from Halls Creek, but there is somehow a more stately and historical feel to its sense of decay. You feel like you could make a film about the end of the world there. It has a racetrack, a footy ground (that bristles with signs banning booze), and three cemeteries – including one for the Afghans, comfortably off limits, thank you.

It also has a sparkling police station and courthouse. God knows what you have to do to get sent to the former, or to get taken to the latter; God only knows the troubles they see there. Yet you go into places and meet people who are surprisingly normal and sane. I even managed to buy an HB pencil in the Post Office and the affable young man in the bottle shop – yes, a bottle shop – was at least part aboriginal. But Wyndham was also about three degrees hotter. The heat now is a matter to think of when touring – these temperatures make any kind of sustained exercise tricky – as I would find out.

El Questro offers walks, gorges and swimming about 50 ks off the Wyndham Road, and accommodation which ranges from the merely expensive, as everything is up here, to the utterly fabulous.

When I got back to my comfortable budget hotel, and went to check out dinner prospects, I came across a blackfella in the middle of town flopping aimlessly around in the middle of the road, and shouting obscenities into the dusky sky. But for his anguish, he might have been baying at the moon.

The words ‘sacred’ and ‘spiritual’ may not stand for much in our culture now – nor, for that matter, may the word ‘culture’ in a realm of selfies. White people up north, especially those with roles for tourists, tend to refer to the culture of the indigenous people. This is I think a handy way of saying that they have different ways and customs to ours – although many of their customs will I think be much older than ours.

You will see admonitions at tourist sites to protect the culture of the indigenous people. This, too, I think is right. So when I flew over the Bungles in the chopper with Ben, he pointed to an area that I think was called Horseshoe Valley, and said that they were precluded from flying over that area out of respect for the religious beliefs of the aborigines. I was not clear what kind of preclusion he was referring to. Was it illegal to fly over there? I think not. Certain gorges could only be entered with an elder. Is it illegal to go in without one? I thought of this when a guy said that at Kakadu, you can be fined up to $50K for disturbing crocodile eggs. I doubt whether anyone will get fined that amount for disturbing the religious sensibility of anyone, let alone that of a blackfella. It is curious how we sometimes put animals above humans.

On Tuesday, I was mighty glad that I had decided to take the fly/drive trip back to the Bungles, and into Cathedral Gorge. This was to be the highpoint – the grail of the quest.

A bus picked me up at the Ibis at 8.15am and dropped me back at about 5.30pm. The staff at Aviair were assured and professional. The flight down in a single engine Cessna took about an hour. There were about eight of us on board, although two Swiss people were just doing the two hour return trip – I would run into them later at Kakadu; I noticed that they held hands during take-off – and the ground tour would take others from another airline.

The pilot, Michael, gave a very good commentary on the way down. We learned all about the Ord River Dam and Lake Argyle. The idea was to water our food basket. We instead flew over plantations of sandalwood and pumpkins. The sandalwood is used for perfume, and that is a good business to get into, but you have to have the right strain – like grapes for wine, I suppose, and heaven knows that they depend on terroir – but it takes about fifteen years for these trees to mature. Then when you look at the size of the cattle stations, you get an idea of what is meant by the word capital. And you certainly get that idea on the way back when you fly over the diamond mine – which I and the lady across the aisle were happy to hear was owned by Rio Tinto, a company we held shares in. That is a good business to be in too, but the undertaking is truly immense. There is a huge inverted ziggurat carved out of the earth, which is worked from a large village, and the labour is flown in by jet to a privately owned two kilometre long bitumen airstrip – capital, indeed. The miners are flown for two shifts of seven days, one of night shift, and the other of day shift.

We collected on the ground and about eight of us proceeded on a trip in a ten passenger 4WD with Bruce, a very experienced and professional guide. We would spend about an hour on the bus to and from the south of the Bungles, and have about two hours down there for a short walk and the lunch that had been packed.

Bruce filled us in about the basics of the geology, fauna and flora and the local aboriginal customs. For example, because local aboriginal men tended to marry much younger women, a custom had grown up that a married man would not look his mother-in-law in the eye; to this day, they do not like to ride in the same vehicle: then we got the guide’s gag about the similarities to white culture. Bruce told me that he had tread Darwin’s Origin of Species, and I believed him. I also inferred that he had been mangled in the Palm-tree Palace. I asked what he did during the wet, and he said he just enjoyed being a tourist.

We were right in the middle of the famed bee-hive domes, and very near the site where they shot that ad with the schoolchildren choir for Qantas to that awful song by Peter Allen. We were to walk along the Picaninny track to the Cathedral Gorge, which is one of the famous spots in the Bungles. We passed a sign offering a quick 400 meter round trip and I nearly told Bruce that that would do me. We had lots of water, but I soon felt drained, and then distressed. I was struggling. It was 35 and very humid. It felt intimidatingly hot. When we got within the cool of the Gorge, in a protected wadi, I was glad to be able to sit down in the shade and tell Bruce that he and the others could go on the extra two hundred meters or so and pick me up one way back. It was an interesting if unsettling lesson in the brutality of the bush – and the frailty that comes with age.

That incident in no way detracted from what I got out of that whole visit. We were astounded. I spoke to a number of people, from here and Europe, and they were all entranced – entranced is I think the word, because where we were had a certain magic about it. It is definitively Australian magic, although I was again in part reminded of the Grampians in Victoria and Table Mountain in Cape Town. In addition, there were aspects down there that reminded me of Arizona – sharp, deeply coloured escarpments etched into the skyline with promontories broken off like charred icebergs. This is elemental territory.

I asked Bruce about sealing the road in. He said that those who controlled the area commercially were in favour of it, but it would have to be a major government initiative. Controlling the resulting human flood will take care. One thing I appreciated at the Grand Canyon was how unspoiled it was. The tourist hub is more than 20ks away, and there is very little on the rim itself. If tour operators get a free run here, there could be mayhem. I spoke to a young couple from Zurich. They were quite carried away in an un-Swiss manner. They had seen where we had just been on TV and decided that they just had to come here. When I was fading on the walk, I was helped an encouraged by a woman of Italian heritage half my age and with a religious name who spoke in the same terms.

It is very odd that this substantial jewel in our tourist crown was only ‘discovered’ about thirty years ago. A Channel 9 crew went into do a story on a cattle station, and the resulting documentaries started a tourist trickle that just keeps growing. It is a natural asset that is part of the world’s heritage, and I suspect that it may come to have a kind sacred value even to God-doubting white people, and even without the lachrymose ad. And even to those who can’t leave their iphone alone, but just keep taking selfies.

These small group tours in people-carriers are very different from big bus tours – in both numbers and duration. They are therefore easier to handle and much less risky in whom you draw. There was a farmer from Albany named Bob, I think, in our group who was five years older than me – and fitter on the walk (although I incline to the view that he cheated by firming up with a Mars Bar before we started.) Bob was travelling with his wife – they said something about hay – and both had that weathered face of people on the land. Bob had quietly dancing eyes, and his wife’s face was suffused with a kind of permanent youth. Bob said that he had been on the land all his life and that he would not mind having a go at the Canning stock Route for what he called historical purposes. But for going to major attractions off the better roads, he much preferred to leave all the worry and the risk to experts, and travel in the way that he and I and his wife and Maria and the Swiss couple were. Bob and his wife were being picked up at 6.30 the next morning to go to El Questro, and Maria was giving his wife the heads up on a hard gorge walk there.

For myself, Bob’s view has a lot to be said for it, especially for people getting on and who have less mechanical skill or knowledge of the bush than Bob. He looked at me – in that kindly way that he shared with his wife – and said: ‘Geoff, this is a big country, a bloody big country, and a lot of people lie dead out there because they just did not see how bloody big it is.’

You know exactly what Bob meant if you have just got into trouble after only half an hour in walking over sand under a brutal and unforgiving sun.

Passing bull 16 – Excess breeds excess: Dolce and Gabbana at Portofino

14/10/201514/10/2015 / Geoffrey Gibson / 4 Comments

If you want to know why Communism flourished and IS is threatening, consider the workings of Dolce and Gabbana revealed in a piece by Rebecca Mead in the New Yorker headed ‘The Couture Club’ (21 September). But don’t read it too soon after breakfast.

Each year, Dolce and Gabbana throw a weekender for their better patrons from, say, Japan, Lebanon, Libya, Nigeria, and Russia – all the corruption capitals of the world – who do not mind $40K for a frock. (A Hamburg client said her D&G collection took up twenty-six feet in her wardrobe.) They present their Alta Modo collection which, says Mead, consists of ‘one-of-a-kind made-to-measure pieces; virtuoso demonstrations of what can be achieved sartorially when the imagination of the designer and the spending power of his patron are given unconstrained expression.’

This year’s event was held at Portofino, and it looks like there was no one there who would not make you vomit. The hosts were their model, modest selves. The show would be a triple collaboration: ‘Homer, the visionary; Dante, the poet of Purgatory and Paradise, with Beatrice la bellezza; and Shakespeare, with crazy humour.’ Why not rope in God and all his gang?

The hosts, we are told, were once an item. We are not told whether they had a family, but we are told that ‘they maintain an affectionate bond that is augmented by the presence of handsome younger partners.’ One of those has inspired this collection by the 1999 movie of the Dream. Enthusiasm for this Italian dream was not dampened by the climax of the Greek tragedy next door. That may as well have been on Mars – like wedded bliss, or just plain sanity.

The guests are people of frightful taste who cannot be seen without their iPhone so that they can link to Instagram and text orders from the catwalk. It must be like taking candy from a baby. The wife of a gun English entrepreneur (who is ‘tan, slim, and silver-haired’) stepped out of a changing room ‘this time wearing the black dress, over a very visible pair of co-ordinating gold hot pants. She locked eyes with her husband. ‘It’s very me’ she said with delight. ‘When it’s right, I know it’s right, right away.’

Security guards were everywhere, but the models were unfazed. Each of the ninety-four of them would only model one couture outfit. The hand-written invitations said ‘We look forward to revealing the Alta Moda Summer Night’s Dream in our fairy garden under the moonlight.’ Gabbana was dressed in shorts and a tank-top that showed his tattoos (a scorpion, darling, and his name). Dolce said that ‘Disney is the best teacher for life.’

Liveried footmen of amazingly unguessable sexuality – in case, I suppose, some of the entrepreneurs were broad minded – held up gilded mirrors so that the chatelaines ready to expire from Botox overdoses could justify being robbed. There were eighty footmen and on the second night they became Roman centurions and Renaissance swains, with floral bowers to form an entrance of pink and blue. Three bare-chested acrobats wore velvet bloomers with feathery wings. A string quintet played (in jock-straps and thongs?) A young woman in glittery tunics and gladiator sandals spread rose petals. The supper was of course gilt-edged.

There had, sadly, been a spat in what might be called the community. Dolce had been quoted as saying that children born by IVF or surrogacy were ‘synthetic’. I wonder what he meant – he would be a world authority on synthetics, but he would know nothing about children or parenthood, and he would not get any help from his handsome younger partner. However, Elton John was upset. He has two children born through surrogacy. (Spare a thought at least for them.) He urged a ‘celebrity boycott’ – not just an ordinary boycott. He was immediately supported by such nice down-to-earth people as Victoria Beckham and Madonna. Gabbana called John a ‘fascist’ and posted an image ‘Je suis D&G.’ Dolce apologised and John rescinded the boycott. Wasn’t that handsome, if not downright sweet, of E J? We are not told what the children said.

One real charmer from Brooklyn said: ‘You know the Burlington Arcade? That’s ours….You know the controversy over Coney Island? We were the controversy.’ A maîtresse from Lebanon said ‘I’m Miss Perfect in Beirut.’ They all thought the tax charges against the hosts were an outrage and that their hosts had been ‘vindicated for their honesty and integrity.’ The ending of the tax charges shows why Italy is busted.

The final party was in gold. Guests were encouraged to show ‘eccentricity’, ‘ostentation’, and ‘elegance’. For that, they got the last word in kitsch – the songless, soulless, and tasteless Kylie Minogue in a gold mini and a towering gold headdress. She was accompanied by male burlesque dancers in spiked heels. Huge cut-out hearts were passed among the guests, who waved them aloft, and a cannon shot thousands of scraps of metallic paper so that it rained gold.

Well, it may remind some of Nero, and others of Hitler, especially the Knight of the Long Knives, but you would not trust one of them – not one – to mind your dog even for an instant. Haut couture is complete bullshit by which crooks relieve fools of their money.

Fear in faith

13/10/2015 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Australia is not alone in having a problem with young people wanting to kill other people in the name of their faith. We got frightful warnings of this kind of problem from murderous attacks in Paris and London over many years. People in the West have had to come to grips with what is called home-grown terrorism.

The relevant faith is Islam and its followers are called Muslims. These killings are called acts of terrorism. But none of those labels alters the fact that we are talking about crime – specifically the crime of murder, the most serious crime in our law. We should not allow any of those labels, or their connotations, which will vary greatly depending on the audience, to obscure that we are talking not just of a moral or political issue, but the most serious crime that we know.

In the ordinary course, the parents of a child are responsible for both the welfare and conduct of that child until the child comes of age, whenever that may be. I am talking of moral not legal responsibility, and of a responsibility not just to the child but to others who may be affected by the conduct of the child. Have the parents of these young killers done their duty to bring children up as members of our community? When some of these children want to leave the country to fight elsewhere, when they and their parents know or might fairly be taken to know that their death is almost inevitable, have the parents done enough to provide for the welfare of their children?

In the ordinary course, when some of those who subscribe to a faith want to kill those who do not, the members of the faith as a whole will have to accept some responsibility – at least where there is an identified pattern of conduct of people wishing to kill others because of their religion – that is, the religion of the would be killer. I am speaking now of a responsibility that is morally based but which extends across a community.

If we have a problem, either in ourselves or as a group, the first thing that we have to do is to admit the problem and then accept our responsibility to do something about it.

I am a distant and casual observer, but I have not seen this acknowledgment of a problem of their young would-be killers or an acceptance of responsibility for it from either Muslim parents or religious leaders. Indeed, it has been hard in the past to find a Muslim religious leader who is responsible for anything.

Some of the labels used are unhelpful if not silly. (I will deal at another rime with the problems in the notions of ‘terrorism’ and ‘extremism’.) We are told Muslims are ‘marginalised’. They need to ask if they can complain of being outside a home if they have not made a decent effort to join in the home.

Some young Muslims are said to have been ‘radicalised’. You cannot excuse murder by saying that some evil demon got into your head and gave you bad ideas. Adolf Hitler got into the heads of the Nazi Party and a large part of the German nation, the first to engage in the annihilation of a race, and the second to follow him in a war that killed fifty million people. Hitler could mesmerise people, but that power, and that history, do not of themselves absolve those who succumbed to his power. And if you want to know what it feels like to be ‘marginalised’, ask a Catholic priest – ask any Christian cleric in this country – or a Catholic parent whose son wants to be an altar boy.

It may be – I do not know – that government and the community may seek to deal with the problem of this kind of serious crime by looking at how these people are got at by those who want to put them to evil, but using a weasel term like ‘radicalisation’ – I do not think ‘extremism’ is any better – might just offer a shield to hide behind to those who are or who should be held responsible. Law enforcement will take its course, but the answer to the real problem must come from within the Muslim community itself.

Take the example of another cause of crimes of violence – drugs. The law and the community as a whole may wish to try to prevent these crimes by seeking to contain drugs, but the use of drugs does not of itself come even close to diminishing the responsibility of the affected criminal in the eye of the law. And if the criminal is not of age, the intervention of drugs does not affect the responsibility of the parents of the criminal for the relevant conduct. One of the first duties of parents nowadays is to do their best to protect their children from contamination by drugs. I know this from personal experience. It is now a paramount duty of Muslim parents to do their best to protect their children from contamination by false prophets.

It is hard to see any answer to this problem until the Muslim community as a whole accepts what most here would see as these facts of life. There is plenty of scope for argument at the edges, but it is very hard to suggest that we might have these problems even though Muslim parents and religious leaders have done their jobs well and have nothing to answer for.

It is wrong to say that every Muslim is tainted by or responsible for the actions of a few murderers. But it is in my view just as wrong to say that the Muslim community as a whole has no responsibility for its part in this problem – at least insofar as these criminals purport to act in the cause of Islam. It is not enough for those in the community to shrug their shoulders, and blame the internet and the gullibility of youth – or to put some anaemic label on the pathway to murder.

In my view, the comments of Hannah Arendt on the political responsibility of nations are analogous to the issues of the moral and social responsibility of communities for the failings of individual members.

Many people today would agree that there is no such thing as collective guilt, or, for that matter, collective innocence, and that if there were, no one person could ever be guilty or innocent. This of course is not to deny that there is such a thing as political responsibility which however exists quite apart from what the individual member of the group has done and therefore can neither be judged in moral terms or brought before a criminal court. Every government assumes political responsibility for the deeds and misdeeds of its predecessor and every nation for the deeds and misdeeds of the past. When Napoleon….said: I shall assume responsibility for everything France ever did…., he was only stating somewhat emphatically one of the basic facts of all political life. It means hardly more, generally speaking, than that every generation, by virtue of being born into a historical continuum, is burdened by the sins of the fathers as it is blessed with the deeds of the ancestors.

We Australians have been two faced on this –we are much quicker to bask in the sun of Bradman standing up to Bodyline than we are to own up to our murder and rape of the first inhabitants, but like it or not, it is a basic fact of political life that the Muslim community will have to account to others for crimes committed in its name by its own people.

If on the other hand, Muslims find that their faith makes it too hard to come to terms with the way that the rest of Australia lives, they should go to a place where they are more at home. There will be a price for that, a heavy one, but Australians are not prepared to pay the equally heavy price of their living with the alternative.

The evidence suggests that while the Muslim community is not doing enough, the problem just gets worse. Islam is not alone in having evil-doers on the fringe. We have ours in the gutter and on the radio, and if you want to talk about people being marginalised and then radicalised, there are plenty of drop-outs out there who are only too willing to accommodate their soul-mates in violence on the other side. We have already had frightening insight into these violent radicals at Cronulla and Bendigo.

We now face the nightmare of the migrant nation of migrants importing violence from their past and bringing out the worst in those who are already here. It is the first duty of government is to keep the peace. Unless this is done, and the problem is resolved, the end outcome is a form of civil war. The courses therefore left open to government unless the Muslim community takes responsibility do not look attractive for anyone.

Finally, another bad word is Islamophobia. A phobia is an irrational fear. The apprehension that is felt across the western world at the killing that is coming out of Islam is anything but irrational. You would have to be bloody mad not to be afraid.

Passing Bull 15 – Knights and Dames and Bad Sports – Very Bad Sports

05/10/201505/10/2015 / Geoffrey Gibson / 2 Comments

The Australian Spectator greatly admired and strongly supported Tony Abbott as PM. Its writers were very rude about people they saw as ‘Abbott-haters’ – a term they had to share with shock jocks and The Australian about the ABC and the Fairfax press and others. It was therefore natural that the fall of Mr Abbott would cause as much pain to The Spectator as it did to Andrew Bolt and Alan Jones. And the pain really shows.

The cover for 26 September has a crude cartoon of the new PM with some waffles. The editorial refers to the ‘excruciating love-in’ with Leigh Sales on the ABC – Anti-Christ at home in Hades.

Mr Turnbull’s entire 22 minutes of verbiage could be summed up in half a dozen slogans: Terrorists are bad. War is dangerous. Governments must work. And so on. His lengthy interview with David Speers on Sky News was more of the same with a bit of ‘innovation’ thrown in. The art of communications – and leadership – is to simply express single-minded core ideas and more importantly, to clearly convey goals your government can be measured by, such as ‘stopping the boats’ or ‘scrapping the carbon tax.’ Mr Turnbull’s banal, patronising platitudes seek to obscure the tough decision-making required of government under a fluffy blanket of cheeky smiles and good intentions. This is government for the asinine twitter generation. As we saw back in the days of ‘programmatic specificity’, its charm soon wears thin.

Well, let us put to one side the murder of the English language, and the dynamiting of infinitives – we now know that the Bolt poster-boy is one who has ‘single-minded core ideas.’ Mr Abbott qualifies there – he was not capable of anything else. You think that Syria is tricky? Not on your Nelly. Just pick out a ‘death cult’, keep repeating that ‘single-minded core idea’, and bomb them. But Mr Abbott was fired not because he was beyond ‘the tough decision-making required of government’, but because he had lost the nerve to make any decision at all.

Mr James Allen is in a more mortal form of agony. ‘But why are we Abbott supporters now supposed to help Turnbull.’ It would I suppose be damned silly to respond: ‘Perhaps because you are Australians?’ Mr Allen contemplates what might be called the Japanese gambit of hara-kiri:

It’s better sometimes to blow the whole thing up and –let’s be honest – lose to the other team. Why? Because you’ll have sent a message that loyalty ‘and no white anting’ and giving us support when things are a bit tough are the price they have to pay, not just that you have to pay. Reciprocity baby. Signal-sending my friend.

This sulking really is selfish. Political parties are what used to carry the system. The failure of the system comes in large part from the failure of the parties.

Can Mr Turnbull redeem himself? Yes. How? ‘Bring back the pre-election promise to repeal most (or better yet all) of the ghastly 18C.’ Here you have precise insight into the doctrinal purity, so removed from the sense of the nation, which saw our last PM hit the fence with such vigour.

Mr Philip Murphy likes the kitchen sink in the gutter. The reference to King Cnut is a reference to the crude abuse of an Abbott staffer to the new PM, in itself a golden reminder of the failure of that part of our constitution that said an impartial civil service was essential to our system. Apart from puerile vulgarity, we know that we are again lost in intellectual abstractions and labels by the sub-heading: ‘Will Malcolm Turnbull be able to hold back the rising tide of illiberalism.’ If you are too liberal, you become illiberal.

Poor Mr Murphy also got Leigh Sales. Why do these people torture themselves acquiring the stigmata of Antichrist from the ABC and Fairfax? What really scares Mr Murphy? Mr Turnbull’s

….following the pattern of others who have been involved in creeping republicanism. The mooted execution of Knights and Dames is no doubt on top of such a list.

The disease of eternal irrelevance extends to the once respectable parent. It says that Pope Francis ‘has become the darling of the international left’ and ‘an engaging chatterbox’, but that he should spend less time on the environmental crisis – where his view is ‘alarmist’ ‘and whose scale he may be exaggerating’ – and more time worrying about Christians in the Middle East.

You must feel sorry for these people, eternal victims not just of Fairfax and the ABC, but of Islam, and now the Holy Father and the Supreme Court of the USA. They have to carry the whole Christian world on their shoulders surrounded by all those demons.

But they are so removed from the rest of the nation that they are political poison. Australians distrust political theories and ideologies and people who claim to have the answer and look down on others. We look for something that works, not for doctrinal correctness. Since we get that from the English, it is curious that people who treat English as a comfy rug do not get it. Make no mistake – these are the people who brought Abbott down.

Just ask Mark Textor, the man who got him the job. (Peta says she got it for him, but Mark’s is the stronger claim.)

Nothing says more about the reality marginalisation of shock-jocks and news columnists than their misinterpretation of the decency of middle Australia over Goodes. Most want media-fuelled division to end.

If I may say so, that was exactly my sense of the reaction of most Australians, and it was an occasion of an appalling lack of leadership on the part of the then P M. He was the victim of ideologically induced gutlessness. It used to happen all the time.

And he is now just a bad loser. As is Mr Campbell Newman. According to the AFR, he is publishing a memoir Can Do which includes the following:

They [journalists] are not interested in the government or reform or the reasons behind the decisions we made. They are only interested in the tactical, the here and now, they only ever look for short-term politics and gossip. And they have got a nerve to ridicule people like me who tried to actually get things done. And they have always ridiculed and sneered.

Failed politicians are desperately unattractive people. They and their failed fan clubs are very bad sports.

And we beat the Poms in the World Cup. On their own turf. And one of the princes was there. Barracking for the wrong side.

Poet of the Month: Yeats.

I propose to add to the bullshit column, when I remember, an extract from a poet of the month. The poet for October is Yeats. The poetry will not relate to the bullshit, but hopefully provide some respite from a tedious world. The following extract is from A Prayer for my Daughter.

And may her bridegroom bring her to a house

Where all’s accustomed, ceremonious;

For arrogance and hatred are the wares

Peddled in the thoroughfares.

How but in custom and in ceremony

Are innocence and beauty born?

Thirty years on

01/10/2015 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

It is not the Eton boating song, but one of Harrow, and not thirty years but forty, that the song goes back from, but thirty years is still something. Although he thought that he had banned any such show of ritual, on 1 October 1985, an abashed inaugural member of the Taxation Division of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal of Victoria had to sit through a ceremony of welcome, in which I suspect that Ray Finkelstein was complicit judging from the knowing grin on his face, which contained the following remarks:

Although you have a wide practice at the Bar, your interest in literary works has no doubt assisted in your recognised abilities in the area of defamation. It seems that it has also enabled you to write copious amounts of correspondence to the people you not only deal with on a professional basis, but also on the social plane.

There was some gushing of the kind you get on these occasions, which it would be at best improvident for me to repeat, and then:

On a lighter note, I gather your disdain for humbug has meant that you are to be approached to be the inaugural President of the Society for the Prevention of Humbug.

Well, at least everyone was on notice that the first head of the Tax Division was anything but a tax lawyer, a disclaimer previously put in writing to the Attorney-General, and now that the member has survived thirty years on that and other tribunals later, perhaps those remarks may be tendered as some sign of constancy in a world made hard by inconstancy.

Some ungrateful types complain of the copiousness of the correspondence, but what would you do without the bullshit – and the continuing war on humbug?

Religious Violence – Not in God’s Name

29/09/201529/09/2015 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks is a man of astounding learning and, at last count, sixteen honorary degrees. When he writes a book with the above title, and the sub-title Confronting Religious Violence, we really should take note. Not least because his conclusions will frighten you out of your wits.

…the world will be more religious a generation from now, not less…It has to do with demography. The more religious people are, the more children they have. The indigenous populations of Europe, the most secular continent on earth are committing long slow suicide…..Within religion, the most extreme, anti-modern or anti-Western movements will prevail. This is happening in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The old marriage of religion and culture has ended in divorce. Today the secular West has largely lost the values that used to be called the Judeo-Christian heritage….Losing its religious faith, the west is beginning to lose the ideals that once made it inspiring to the altruistic…..The moral relativism that prevails today in the secular West is no defence of freedom…..In a world of relativism, what talks is power….So there will be more terror, more bloodshed….The West, indeed the world, has never faced a challenge quite like this.

As it happens, although I am as unreligious as you can decently get, I agree with every word. As I think the author says elsewhere, the threat is not so much between the religions as within them – or at least the three that we most focus on.

The book looks at the origins of violence among humans, develops a theory of sibling rivalry, and offers explanations for some unsavoury parts of the bible. I offer a few comments.

First, in looking at history, theology, philosophy, sociology and psychoanalysis – Freud is prominent – not to mention the huge literature of Judaism, it is not surprising if we get spread a bit thin. For example, the author finds that we are subject to ‘two sets of instincts, honed and refined by many centuries of evolutionary history’ – the readiness to co-operate within our own group and to fight those in another group. Darwin’s theory of evolution supplies the answer.

Let us put to one side that some people – a substantial part of the US Congress – do not accept that theory, what part does God have to play in our propensity for violence, whether we started in the Garden of Eden or in the backblocks of Africa? It is a little disconcerting that when the author comes to Nazi ideology, he says it was pagan and propped up by ideas thought at the time to be scientific – including ‘social Darwinism’ the theory that the same processes operating in nature operate in society also. The strong survive by eliminating the weak.’

It is not surprising that the process, whatever it is, continues in us, since we are its current end product, but it is a little worrying that the author’s starting point on human violence is the same theory. Similarly, the author flirts with the suggestion that violence does not come from religion – religion comes out of violence. That is a dangerous place to go for a man of God.

Secondly, Muslims are not the only ones with long memories when it comes to the Crusades. The author dates the massacres of Jews before the first crusade as the time when Jews became a scapegoat leading, for example, to the Black Death. ‘That period added to the vocabulary of the West such ideas as public disputation, book burning, forced conversion, Inquisition, auto-da fe, expulsion, ghetto and pogrom.’

Thirdly, Freud figures largely in the theory about sibling rivalry being at the core of the problem of violence. Any parent of more than one child knows about this. When she was about three and her sister about twelve months, our number one, a propos of nothing, picked up a handful of sand and pushed it firmly into the face of number two on Green Island, and number two let the mainland know. A few years later, on Christmas Day, I heard number one pick up a broken toy ukulele and say ‘that one’s buggered – it can be Amy’s.’ But how do you verify the theory that this rivalry is at the core of violence between groups? And where does it lead you? Well, one thing it tells you is that it is madness, moral madness, for a parent to treat one child differently to others without good reason

That leads to the next point. To deal with the complaint that God plays favourites by doing special deals with people he likes, Lord Sacks develops a distinction between the universality of God as Creator and Sovereign, and the particularity of the covenant with Abraham, Moses and the Israelites. There are two covenants – one with Noah and the rest of us, and the other with Abraham and one particular people. One represents universality and justice; the other particularity and love. There is a dualism – a spectre elsewhere for the Rabbi – in Hebrew spirituality. ‘It accepts the inevitability of the here-and- now. We are not all the same. There is an Us and Them. But God is universal as well as particular, which means he can be found among Them as well as Us. God transcends our particularities.’

Why in heaven’s name does He bother? I had thought that excessive, sense-defying intellectualism was a virus peculiar to Christianity. If it is silly for me to second-guess Einstein, why should I try it on with God? Does the ordinary member of the congregation understand or accept any of this?

If they do, where does it take us? God still does a special deal to single out one child from others and that is what inflames sibling rivalry – which the author says is the fount of all our problems. And if you want to see sibling rivalry in action here it is in the author’s own words:

For all the natural pride we feel in being part of our group – the people of the covenant, a holy nation – we are brought face to face with the fact that others may respond to the word of God better than we do.

If I may say so without offence, that remark gives a whole new meaning to the word ‘patronising’.

It seemed to me that a chicken-and–egg issue runs through a lot of this. You shift the problem back one stage, but the problem or question remains. Take the wars of conquest. The author has to confront the problem lawyers know so well: ‘Whatever else a verse means, it means what it says.’ The Promised Land was taken by people like Joshua with appalling slaughter of men, women, and children, what today we call ethnic cleansing, ordained by God.

As I understand Lord Sacks, he says two things. First, the victims were offered peace but refused it. Secondly, the nation of the sword became the people of the book. It is not hard to envisage a Palestinian response to either suggestion; indeed, as to the nation of the sword becoming the people of the book, I can imagine the reaction of most of Tel Aviv – most of them have to work for a living and help to defend the same nation; neither is within the contemplation of the people of the book.

So, we need some good news, and the author has it. He refers to the changed relationship between Jews and Christians after the Holocaust. He might have referred to the remark of Angela Merkel that the state of Israel is part of Germany’s raison d’etre, but he does quote the present pope: ‘God’s fidelity to the close covenant with Israel never failed, and… through the terrible trials of these centuries, the Jews have kept their faith in God. And for this we shall never be sufficiently grateful to them as Church but also as humanity.’ The author says that ‘this may be the first time that a pope has publicly recognised that in staying true to their faith, Jews were being loyal to God, not faithless to him. That is a statement capable of changing the world.’

People outside the religious circle may not be so optimistic. The author elsewhere describes the exodus of Jews from across Europe – largely, as it seems to me, in response to Muslim migration, to put it softly, and the inevitable demographic consequences. It is not a world that I will be sorry to leave.

May I conclude with perhaps just another example of Us versus Them? I could hardly claim that Immanuel Kant is a mate of mine, but I will certainly look up if he is attacked. Having referred to a throwaway line by Voltaire about the Jews (‘Still, we ought not to burn them’), Lord Sacks says that Kant ‘spoke of the Jews as ‘the vampires of society’ and called for ‘the euthanasia of Judaism.’

Kant is revered as a leader of the European Enlightenment, and is widely seen as the best placed to fill the ethical void left by the decline of religion. We know that Konigsberg, where Kant lived, was the home of a large and successful Jewish community, and that Kant was very proud of the width of his friendships across the city. (His best friend was an idiosyncratic English merchant.) We know that Kant had almost a life-long and amicable correspondence with Moses Mendelssohn, a prominent Jewish philosopher and theologian, and the father of the composer. We know that Kant conducted this correspondence and publicly defended Mendelsshon in a major controversy out of a deep intellectual respect – Mendelssohn had beaten Kant for a big prize. We know that Kant backed Jewish students to overcome their disability with the establishment, and that he expressed his admiration for the achievements of Jewish students. We know that Kant was warned off by the Prussian Establishment for his dangerous views on the state religion. We know that Kant said that both sides would seek to make something out of the preservation of the Jewish people and religion.

One man sees in the continuation of the people to which he belongs, and in his ancient faith which remained unmixed despite the dispersion among such diverse nations, the proof of a special beneficent Providence saving this people for a future kingdom on earth; the other sees nothing but the warning ruins of a disrupted state which set itself against the coming of the kingdom of heaven – ruins, however, which a special Providence still sustains, partly to preserve in memory the ancient prophecy of a Messiah arising from this people, partly to offer, in this people, an example of punitive justice visited upon it because it stiff-neckedly sought to create a political and moral concept of the Messiah.

Kant was a supreme moral and intellectual heavyweight, and is not to be reduced by some gnat straining at a camel. It is therefore disappointing that Lord Sacks does not give any context at all for the words alleged against Kant, and this in a book which labours the obvious point that context is indispensable in looking at statements that are controversial, and it is more than disappointing that when we go to the notes at the end, it appears that the author is not relying on the primary German source, but a citation by someone in Princeton in 1990 in a book about revolutionary antisemitism. Really, my lord, third party sledging is not smiled upon in the universities that we most admire. This might fairly be said to be a sample of the loose thinking and casual smearing that lie at the heart of the whole bloody problem.

J T

29/09/201529/09/2015 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

My footy team lost on the weekend. I was neither surprised nor upset. (I might same the same about Ferrari.) We had a good season and I got my money’s worth. It was going to be hard without Billy Slater, notwithstanding the great show by his replacement. And we were beaten by a clearly better side on the night led by Jonathon Thurston.

I have spoken of this player here before. He is clearly one of the best and most attractive sportsmen going around in this country, one of those it is a shame that we do not get to see on the world stage. In the course of the game, he gave one my boys a spray that Mr Will Swanton in The Australian said could serve as his motto – words to the effect, omitting colour, that there was no need to act like a half-wit. Mr Swanton says, and most would agree with him, that that is very good advice for a whole of people in and about sport in this country.

Having orchestrated a high octane win over the Melbourne Storm on Saturday night, a human pinball setting up tries with deft passes and one boomerang kick that ensured the Storm would not come back, Thurston returned to Townsville yesterday as the free-spirited, free-wheeling face and co-captain of a power-house club. More than 1000 cheering fans greeted the team’s return at the airport.

Good grief – this might take us back to when footy was a game.

Mr Swanton commends the spray about half-wits ‘to any athlete or alleged fan who reckons they have the right to behave atrociously before blaming the heat of the moment as an excuse’.

Thurston is the poster-boy for commitment without the cringe factor. Thurston shows you can be passionate. You can give it your all. And you can still be dressed in the cloak of human decency.

I commend Mr Swanton for his words. And on Sunday evening you may want to have a look at a real champion in action. Last night he won his fourth League Medal, so passing Andrew Johns, who I put up there with Ablett Senior. He is the blackfella in the headgear who somehow does not get killed and, unless I am putting the kiss of death on him, passes the ball in a way you have not seen. And you should get behind the Cowboys – they are yet to win a flag. They are like Hawthorn in 1961.

You might also give thought to the other rugby. There was a show last night on when South Africa won the World Cup, when Mandela went into the rooms before and presented the Cup later – a supreme moral genius of our time. I can offer you an unsurpassable incentive for this weekend. Australia plays England – and can knock them out. The only advice I offer is that when we are kicking for goal, you might want to go to the dunny. I feel better watching Jason Day with a twenty footer.

From journalist to Tory PM – Part II – Does the Sermon on the Mount apply to governments?

25/09/201525/09/2015 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Eton was not good for Robert Gascoyne-Cecil (Lord Salisbury). He was brutally bullied and his father would not take him away from the school. According to Andrew Roberts, Eton fed his ‘pessimism about human nature’, and his assumptions about the ‘cowardice of the silent majority, the cruelty of the mob and the vulnerability of the rights of the individual’ – not so bad in themselves, but worrying when the speaker puts himself above the majority – as he surely will. ‘I think the human heart naturally so bad that if not checked by true religion, the bad will generally prevail over the good’. That is far less healthy. And Salisbury sent his own sons to Eton – because he thought it had improved. That was a rare welcome of change from a man who was instinctively against it.

At one time, Cecil, while a journalist, said that ‘we are to be governed by a set of weathercocks, delicately poised, warranted to indicate with unnerving accuracy every variation in public feeling.’ Well, we have seen that gutlessness triumphant. But then he went on to speak of Realpolitik, and to put the teaching of Christ in its place.

No one dreams of conducting national affairs with the principles which are prescribed to individuals. The meek and poor spirited among nations are not to be blessed, and the common sense of Christendom has always prescribed for national policy principles which are diametrically opposed to those that are laid down in the Sermon on the Mount.’

This is most important. We suspect that governments proceed on this basis, but we rarely see it spelt out this way. The dispensation is said to come from ‘common sense’, not scripture. Jesus did not say that his teachings did not apply to Caesar. You will find no support in Scripture for the notion that government is as no-fly zone for the Sermon on the Mount. And how and when do you draw the line?

Later Salisbury ‘treated scruples….with marked contempt….if our ancestors had cared for the rights of other people, the British Empire would not have been made.’ How many hundred millions, including the Irish, would have said – so much the better? This is an imperial rejection of the Sermon on the Mount.

On another occasion, Salisbury said that ‘The vast multitude of Indians I thoroughly believe are well contented with our rule…they have changed masters so often that there is nothing humiliating to them in having gained a new one.’ But he later said that they would ‘certainly cut every English throat they can lay their hands on whenever they can do it safely’.

Christianity forced its way up from being the religion of slaves and outcasts, to become the religion of the powerful and rich; but somehow it seems to have lost the power of forcing its way down again.

You will find no warrant for that transition in Scripture. If it is a fair comment, it explains the near terminal position of the Church today.

Accordingly, rebellious subjects could easily be put down. When some Australian colonists got frisky, Cecil said that ‘four sloops of war could at any time bring the four colonies to their knees.’

This imperial Christian’s views on the Civil War were quite odd – to the point of madness. He supported the Confederacy because ‘the best chance for the alleviation of the slave’s condition lies in the increased wealth and prosperity of the South.’ Of the Red Indians, he had said that the Americans ‘sought to Christianise the country by the simple expedient of slaughtering all who were not Christians.’ John Wilkes Booth had shown ‘not only courage but the hardihood of desperation.’ And, you, too, Judas?

He was of course brutally racist with the Irish. ‘A sound whipping – stinging but not injurious – administered once a week for six months is the prescription and the world will have heard the last of Fenianism.’ A whipping that is ‘stinging but not injurious’ – was one taught that at Eton or Oxford? Like Cromwell, he wanted ‘a strong and merciless hand’ in Ireland. When people said the Irish should get their freedom like Canada and Australia, Salisbury said that Ireland was only four hours away and ‘a large proportion of the Irish people hated us.’ In one famous faux pas, he compared the Irish to the Hottentots – who were beneath the Orientals governed in India.

As Roberts remarked in another context, ‘Salisbury believed implicitly in the politics of prestige and vengeance.’ So do most politicians – but not many get to live up to it. If Britain could not rule Ireland, ‘what right have we to go lecturing the Sultan as to the state of things in Armenia or Macedonia?’ In the Transvaal, he said, ‘to put it in a terse Oriental phrase, they have eaten dirt in vain.’ This book really should be compulsory reading for the whole State Department.

Because of his birth, and connections, Salisbury did not have to ask for votes. He was spared

….days and weeks of screwed-up smiles and laboured courtesy, the mock geniality, the hearty shake of the filthy hand, the chuckling reply that has to be made to the coarse joke, the loathsome choking compliment that must be paid to the grimy wife and sluttish daughter, the indispensable flattery of the vilest religious prejudices, the wholesale deglutition of hypocritical pledges.

Well, at least the ruling class then did not have to mix with shock jocks.

Salisbury did have some journalistic flair. ‘Matters seem very critical….a woman on the Throne and a Jew adventurer who had found out the secret of getting around her.’ He was spot on there and he overcame his dislike of Disraeli to form a strong combination with him – and to learn from him. (He learned never to respond to the press unless they were dead wrong.) He spoke of politicians ‘whose courage overboils in Opposition and only simmers in office.’ There are plenty of those around.

He diagnosed the condition of Greece:

The Greeks have magnificent dreams and splendid recollections but after seventy years of independence, their exchequer is nearly bankrupt, their public men and their tribunals are corrupt, and their punishment of crime is so uncertain by political favouritism and brigandage is beginning to rear its head again.

Yes, we can see that; but later he said ‘the Greeks are a contemptible race.’

He of course savaged Rousseau and Voltaire: ‘By their writings – their infidelity and their rant about the rights of man that the gloomy enthusiasts were inspired.’ He also bucketed moderates like Lafayette, Necker and Sieyes.

They believed intensely in amiable theories, they loved the sympathy and applause of their fellow men, they were kind-hearted and charitably fancied everybody as well-meaning as themselves, and therefore…they were the proximate causes of a civil convulsion which, for the horror of its calamities, stands alone in the history of the world.

There is a lot to be said for that view.

He had the heart of a conservative. ‘With us the feebleness of our government is our security – and the only one we have against revolutionary changes in the law.’ Is government in the U S and here crippled now by that attitude?

We have so to conduct our legislation that we shall give some satisfaction to both classes and masses. This is specially different with the classes – because all legislation is rather unwelcome to them as tending to disturb a state of things with which they are satisfied.

This is a true conservative – but not a zealot. He wanted to legislate about housing for the poor, compensation for workers, and pensions for the aged – for each of which he could be damned as a socialist in the U S today.

When property is in question, I am guilty of erecting individual liberty as an idol, but when you pass from liberty to life, in no well-governed state, in no state governed according to the principles of common humanity, are the claims of mere liberty to endanger the lives of the citizens.

This was the British political genius – never let theory run over the facts. Which they did in the Boer War when 20,000 Boer women and children died in concentration camps. Still, Salisbury would not be the last conservative PM who professed to follow the teaching of the Sermon on the Mount who would be content to lock up unwanted foreigners in concentration camps.

And Salisbury also saw exactly how bad politics could get.

Nobody argues now. They give you an opinion neatly expressed in a single sentence, and that does the work of argument. My belief is that a fallacy in two lines will carry you further than a mathematical demonstration in two pages.

Bull’s eye!

Well, Salisbury was a real conservative in an imperial age. He was a man of his time, and what we now call a conviction politician – but it does not look like politics ever change much. Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose. Although that is not a proposition that would have commended itself to his lordship.

But to come back to the question posed at the head of this note – I am very confident that the present pope would be horrified at merely the suggestion that the question might be asked, and it is impossible to duck that question when looking at our moral obligation to refugees. What does the Sermon on the Mount say about detention camps for people who claim to be refugees?

Here truly is an issue ripe for discussion.

Up Your North – Parts 6 and 7

21/09/201521/09/2015 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

There is a saying, I am not sure if it is Jewish, that whatever does not kill you makes you stronger. I have always been sceptical of the validity of that proposition – with, say, rape or torture – but it did seem be handy for my arrival at the Bungles. The events of the day might even change my attitude to Saturdays at large.

I resolved to leave it until the morning to decide whether I would on the morrow go back to the Park. But when I got up and realised it was a full 80ks to get to where I wanted, which meant about four hours there and back before setting off on the highway, I decided to defer the issue until I was ensconced in comfort in Kununurra.

Breakfast was at 7am – sharp! And you may not want to play games with Storm number 8.

Any chance of some weeties?

This is a cooked breakfast!

This is what logicians call a non sequitur. The result does not follow from the premises. I have had cooked breakfasts all over the world – you even get offered a boiled egg in Paris – but I have never been denied weeties – even as a slushy for the army. It could send a man’s bowels berserk. But the South African lady was soft behind her firm exterior. We compared the Bungles to Table Mountain, where she had come from. There were big cast iron cooking urns around the campfire outside that reminded me of those used for breakfast on safari in Zimbabwe – one of which held curried potatoes as part of the best breakfast ever – which of course started with weeties.

It was a good breakfast, and I was keen to shake the dust from this wadi off my feet, until a friendly looking dude about my age strolled in to inquire about breakfast. I said I thought you had to have a token from the night before, but he might try his luck at HQ. He came back with a big relieved smile and a token that he gave to number 8 before waddling off saying that he could not face breakfast without a newspaper. He came back with a three day old Australian.

Trevor, for that was his name, was most interesting. He said that he had been visiting his sister who was doing community work at Warmun (Turkey Creek) about 40ks up the road. He was sympathetic to the condition of the indigenous people. He had been shown over the school and he thought it was first rate. ‘If we have done the wrong thing by these people, and we have, this is a good start in the repayment.’ He told me that he had visited a memorial to murdered aboriginals at Misery Creek – where a stockman had shot and burned aboriginals eating meat because he thought, wrongly, that they had taken his stock. I told Trevor of my own small part in the repayment, my own little Calvary, the day before, and we laughed. (I need not I think apologise for the religious reference, because I had firmly in mind that the first miracle was turning water into wine – which could cause bloody mayhem in this part of the world.)

Then Trevor said something that told me he might be a lawyer. He said that with mandatory sentencing, the bureaucrats had taken over the job of the judges – meaning that government rather than the judiciary was responsible for the sentencing of those convicted of breaking the law. Up there, you go inside for your third offence. A young man had just gone in for stealing loaf of bread – because this was his third offence – it would have been insane to do that for any other reason. We reflected that we like to think that this is how the white men came here to take this land from the blackfellas – by sentencing people to transportation to here for stealing a loaf of bread. It is a remarkable example not so much of history repeating itself as of our obdurately refusing to learn and being too scared to bend.

Trevor and I swapped cards – I had to go and get mine marked ‘Writer’ – and we had a good laugh about two Victorian lawyers meeting over breakfast in a caravan park at the back of nowhere. It was a helpful reminder of just how lucky we were – so, I left the Bungles area in as good a mood as I had entered it, and a little better informed, if not wiser.

The 240ks to Kununurra was more scenic. There was fire damage all along the road and a lot of dead livestock as well as wild life. I even saw wild horses. You have to be careful in passing very long road trains. I thought that the Nissan lacked grunt in overtaking, and its height did not make me confident on the bends on bitumen. You also have to be careful on one lane bridges – that is something we have in common with the Scots, although the scenery is rather different.

When I got to Kununurra, I breasted the bar of the Visitors’ Centre and politely inquired after the flashiest boozer in town, having even more politely informed them that Florence and I had had a little misunderstanding about the quality of the accommodation booked for me down the road. They took the news with the quiet equanimity that you expect in those parts.

VII

When I first went to see The Sistine Madonna of Raphael at the Zwinger in Dresden, I was horrified to find, after about thirty hours travel, that the gallery was shut for the duration of my stay there – which I had scheduled mainly to see that painting. When I finally got to see it a couple of years later, it left me a bit flat – it just did not come up so well in the flesh. It is famous not just for the Madonna holding the baby, and looking uncertainly into the future, but for the two putti at the bottom, with their credulous or quizzical gazes at a sacramental moment in western art. There is another painting, I think by Pontormo [I now think after checking that it is by Rosso Fiorentino], of two putti – winged cherubim that looked like innocent toddlers – where the two are seated and one of them is leaning across to whisper something confidential about something that they are reading to the other.

It is a phase of life that every parent remembers with comfort and fondness. The children are innocent – they are yet to be corrupted by the world. They are yet to be burdened with the failures of their parents. They are yet to be taught that people can be distinguished by the colour of their skin or by what they believe or by what their parents are. They are yet to be formed by an upbringing that teaches them that there is only one God who chose only one people. Toddlers are not conscious of such differences, whether they are discerned by man or imposed by God. They are still as innocent as the day that they were born. If the terms were not so charged, you might say that they are still in a state of grace undefiled by any notion of original sin.

I thought of the putti at the time I saw the most memorable image of the whole trip. It was at Derby outside a rather battered IGA store. Two young children about four years old were seated on the footpath. One was as black as you can get; the other was as white as me. They were just gabbling on without a care in the world. It is the only example I recall of a completely easy mixing of colour and culture. These kids did not even know what the word race means. We do get conscious of these differences in time, but we rely on our upbringing to control how we express and react to those differences. We rely on upbringing for courtesy and manners.

I thought about upbringing at the Sports Bar at the Kimberley Grand on that Sunday. This is the swish upmarket hotel whose elegant luxury I embraced – and it was not over-priced. The Sports Bar was not in Melbourne Club style, with giant TVs showing about six sports, with pride of place going to the AFL – I watched the start of the Belgian GP there later that evening. Upbringing came to mind when a young white couple, about 25 but already well spread out, came in for lunch with three kids – aged about five, three, and a baby. Both parents were drinking what we call pots of beer while taking it in turns to show the oldest kid the rudiments of pool – which required them temporarily to deposit their pots. The older kids watched the TVs in a desultory fashion, but this was a mother who may choose not to hear a child crying for attention.

I wondered what kind of upbringing this might represent – Sunday lunch at the local boozer. It was different to what the black kids were getting in the barren Halls Creek – but how different?

What about a white kid who was brought up to think that Sunday lunch was time to spend with grandma over the Sunday roast, although World of Sport was allowed into the family and as part of the family when sport was sport, and the whole world was not in your face, and you had to wait a long time after the event to see the Kennedy assassination on TV? What about a kid who went to state school and was sent to Sunday School, and then went on to a public school where he got a scholarship and where the day started with religion, and where he was exposed to literature, the national team sports, and to the army and to dancing class, and he was exposed to an education that equipped him to go into a learned profession, and then go on to sample the best that western civilisation can offer all over the world, and colour in that learning at his leisure in stints at Oxford, Cambridge and Harvard for kicks? Was not that kid immensely blessed? Is he doing enough to pay others back for the benefit of so fine and privileged an upbringing? Noblesse is no good unless it is oblige, very oblige.