Passing bull 14 – The Canberra Disease

19/09/201519/09/2015 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

On the second day after the fall of a Prime Minister, an article commencing on page one of a national daly was published. That article contained the following.

The inside story of the knighthood has not been revealed before and this information does not come from Abbott. But Abbott gave Philip a knighthood because he learned the Queen wanted her husband to have one. The Queen’s son, Prince Charles, had a number of Australian honours, but Philip had not been so richly rewarded by Australia.

The Queen is immensely well regarded in Australia, and rightly so. Prince Philip, like Prince Charles, is much less popular.

Abbott is a constitutional monarchist, the position a majority of Australians endorsed when the republic was put to a referendum in 1999. But most Australians are at best small-m monarchists like John Howard. They don’t want Australia to march backwards to old-style titles and regal pomp and circumstance.

That Abbott unilaterally restored knighthoods at all is an example of how poor his tactical judgment on political management was as a prime minister.

But for the Queen to make a request of Abbott meant that all that was honourable and generous in Abbott – loyalty, chivalry, romance – was lined up against the pragmatic political judgment that should have guided him.

Not only did Abbott endure enormous political damage because of his loyalty to the Queen, he never leaked the exculpatory explanation, which does not excuse his error of judgment, but gives it context, humanises it and may have made it a less toxic political issue.

Abbott’s government fell mainly because of questions of image and style and political management. His successor, Malcolm Turnbull, in a sense acknowledged that the substance of the Abbott government was good by essentially endorsing all the Abbott positions when he took over as Prime Minister this week.

Abbott’s greatest achievement lies in stopping the boats…..

Generally in foreign policy, Abbott’s record is outstanding….

No one was prepared for the spending cuts in the first budget, or that is to say the electorate was not prepared for them. In truth, it was a mild enough budget, with most of the notional savings occurring several years down the track. But Labor, in an act of deliberate national economic sabotage, had baked spending increases into the budget just beyond its own forward estimates in its last year of government…….

Abbott was again partly the victim of wickedly unhelpful external circumstances. The weird business of needing to rerun the West Australian half-senate election meant that for its first six months the government could not really prepare the electorate for a tough budget, because it was scared of losing at least one senator…..

Abbott was astonishingly successful as opposition leader…..

He has been vilified by the Left for many years and could never expect a fair shake from much of the media…..

Because his Catholicism was so relentlessly and unreasonably attacked, he learnt to shut down about the personal side of his identity…..

He had the potential to be the Liberals’ Bob Hawke. He had the same easy presence in a bar or at a community barbecue, the same mainstream Aussie bloke manner, along with a powerful intellect. I thought he would be a hit with Howard’s battlers, labelled only far too late, and unsuccessfully, in his prime ministership, as ‘Tony’s tradies’……

Abbott is without question a fine person. The basic human ingredients are of the highest order. But so often his virtues got him into trouble. And to the end [as] at the beginning, never more was this the case than on the question of loyalty. Joe Hockey failed as Treasurer, but Abbott would not consider moving him when he was still strong enough to do so. Yet Abbott has known Hockey for so long…..

There is tragedy in all this but there is also, as Howard remarked, great achievement. The Abbott prime ministership leaves more pluses than minuses.

Passing bull 13 – Which loyalty?

18/09/2015 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

The change of PM has brought a lot of hysteria about loyalty, treachery and coups.

Personal loyalties are good and should if possible be honoured. I did not like Mr Hawke as PM, but he stood up for a mate, Eddie Kornhauser, when it did not suit him to do so politically, and I admired him for it. It was a good case of personal loyalty in politics.

But members of a government or of a governing party also owe duties to the nation. Sometimes the duty to the nation will be in conflict with a duty of personal loyalty. Which should prevail? There is no one answer. But it is wrong to say that a person who resolves such a conflict in favour of the duty to the nation has been guilty of treachery by not allowing the personal loyalty to be paramount. It is not just wrong to say that – it is an abuse of logic and language of the kind that shock jocks live on. If anyone is to be charged with treachery, it is more likely to be the person who puts personal obligations over those owed to the nation – E M Forster notwithstanding.

It is also wrong to describe a party meeting to vote on the leadership as a coup. People vote for members of that party knowing that its rules enable just such a change to be made – just as people follow F1 drivers knowing that the rules (‘team orders’) allow teams to require one driver to give way to another. In February of this year, one such meeting effectively put the PM on probation for six months. If the party by a majority concluded that the PM had not improved enough in that time, the end was inevitable.

If you want a model of personal loyalty to a political leader being paramount over obligations to the nation, just look at the relationship between the SS and their Fuhrer. Even our shock jocks might draw the line there.

But in a week that was bound to offer tawdriness, Bronwyn Bishop, if the allegation levelled at her is true, gave new meaning to the term dishonour by voting against the man who in part signed his own death warrant by putting her on probation – simply out of personal loyalty, and when it did not suit him to do so politically.

A little aloofness, please

16/09/2015 / Geoffrey Gibson / 1 Comment

When I watched Jean-Claude Juncker address the European Parliament on refugees the other night, I was looking at a room full of people who were almost visibly looking for leadership. Making allowances for differences in style, I thought that they got some.

That body itself reflects the crisis affecting representative democracy across the West, and in two-party democracies in particular. People everywhere are sick of place-fillers and time-servers and parties that stand for nothing except themselves. Voters are repudiating all of them and looking for a way out – so making way for crooks and weirdoes.

As a result, one major party in each of the UK and the US is looking at blowing itself up to kingdom come. In Australia, the disenchantment has meant that parties have become forced to sack leaders who fall out with the voters. This show of party power does nothing for faith in the party system. What is to be done?

The answer is for governments to stop doing the bad things that have put their people offside. They need the sense to formulate policies and the nerve to implement them – even if they are in the short term unpopular. Mr Abbott did not have enough sense or nerve.

I think that Mr Turnbull does. Most of his parliamentary party agree. The dissidents are the mediocrity that got us into this trouble in the first place. If you want to see the prescription set out above in action, just have a look at Mr Baird in New South Wales. He is not just popular because he has shown sense and nerve – he is even respected, something that we have not seen here for a generation.

I doubt that Mr Turnbull presently has much to worry about. Mr Shorten looks to be a shifty little piece of work. He has now lost his main prop. A friend of mine, an artist from a country that knows despair, and who has the gift of getting to the heart of the matter, said: ‘I think Shorten has some character fault. Really dislike him. He said he wanted to get into politics, because he wants to be the Prime Minister. I want to be the Queen of Sheba.’

Mr Shorten looks like Hillary Clinton to me – raw ambition uninspired by any need to serve others. Every single thing that he does is calculated for its effect. I wonder if he ever did one sincere thing in all his life. If this were the season to mow down mediocrities, this talking head should be next. If he is not, it is only because his party has no alternative.

The other party did have one, and the necessary change was made. But whatever else may be said of Mr Abbott, he was not in the same mindless blank paper class as Mr Shorten. If nothing else, Mr Abbott has done more hands on and shown more commitment for our indigenous people than any other Australian politician that I can recall. There is no basis for saying that this politician was there only for himself.

Mr Abbott’s background was journalism, and it showed. The press are a large part of the cancer in Canberra. They see themselves as part of the game, and the results have been awful for government in general, and Mr Abbott in particular. He was held up by and got in hock to cheer squads on Sky News and The Australian – and two of the more loathsome shock jocks. Many people felt that this was conduct desperately unbecoming a Prime Minister. The shock jocks live off the earnings of those who pander to the deprived and depraved just as surely as do pimps for tarts in white boots. They, however, see themselves as the tribunes of the people. If you want to know just how sanctimonious tribunes can be, have another look at Coriolanus.

If you want to see the teams that play these blood sports in action, tune into Sky News and watch them spit the dummy if their favourite takes a hit – as happened on Monday night. Or look at some of the vaporising in today’s Australian (that includes a verbal of Her Majesty). Most of these players in the press make no effort to hide their revulsion at the other side. If you want to come to grips with the word sordid, tune into a show called Richo + Jones.

It was, frankly, silly of the outgoing PM to lecture the press on their role in his fall, or to disclaim ever having played the game himself. But it was not at all surprising that a member of ‘the team’ should have advised Mr Turnbull to make peace with a shock jock.

That is the last thing we want of our PM. Any leader has to be aloof at times. If you look up that word, which has now sadly got a bad feel to it, you will see that it had a nautical origin, of the order to keep the ship’s head to the wind. It came to mean generally standing at or keeping to a distance. Any captain or coach of a footy team, much less the captain of a ship, will tell you that a lot of the time, you have to do just that.

One of the reasons that I think that Mr Turnbull is up to the job is that some time ago, he shirtfronted – yes, shirtfronted is the word – that awful twerp they call the Parrot. If I could offer our new PM some advice, it would be to tell the Parrot and all his ilk to stand behind him, and to banish themselves to that wilderness that overlooks the old town of Jericho. There is a good precedent for this.

And do not be surprised if there is an election before year’s end, and some surgery at the top of the other party shortly before or after that election. The roundabout may have one more turn to come, but then I think things will settle down, and then we can all go back to sleep.

New Book

15/09/201515/09/2015 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

I have just put on Amazon a new book. Its title is:

Summers in Oxford and Cambridge and Elsewhere

A traveller’s reflections on history and philosophy – and place

The Foreword says:

This book is a collection of memoires or essays that were written in the course of travels to Oxford or Cambridge or both to attend summer schools. There is a note on the philosophy of religion and a note on Cromwell, but otherwise the notes consist of anecdotes and reflections more on the places visited and the people I met there than on the subjects that were taught.

I am fortunate to have been able to make these excursions, and I hope that others may be encouraged to do the same.

The contents are:

PRAGUISH 2005

PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION (OXFORD) 2007

OF BERLIN, OXFORD AND ELSEWHERE 2007

A WEEK AT OXFORD AND CAMBRIDGE 2009

BERLIN NOW – A MOLESKIN DIARY 2010

OXFORD AND CAMBRIDGE 2010

CROMWELL (CAMBRIDGE) 2011

SOJOURN IN SCOTLAND 2011

CAMBRIDGE AND OXFORD 2013

The first essay starts this way:

There is something Italianate about the Prague Symphony of Mozart. There is a lyrical throwaway line at the end of the second theme in the first movement; it is one of those wanton indulgences that remind you of Shakespeare. Then there is an exuberant trilling in the last movement, the kind of village band feeling that you get with Verdi. We are looking at Mitteleuropa, but with an Italian edge. You might call it ‘Praguish’.

Well, Prague, like St Petersburg, does have an Italian feel. The architects dressed each in lush Mediterranean colours. Both cities love yellow. I was standing on the hill under the castle – where they shot a lot of that great film on Mozart, Amadeus – staring at a yellow church and trying to pretend not to be listening to a guide informing her squad. I was listening – she was very good – and it took a while for it to sink in that I was reading a tablet on the church that said: Tu es Petrus, et super hanc saxum, meam ecclesiam aedificandam. (I do not vouch for the Latin. ‘Thou art Peter, and upon this rock, I shall build my church.’) The beginning of the Catholic Hour that I listened to on 3AW every Sunday Night! At 9pm – to hear the Trumpet Voluntary. Except, as I recall, those modernist revisionists used English, not Latin. (That would not do for Madingley Hall, Cambridge.)

Prague came back to me recently at Oxford. There was a thirty – something German lady there whom I had met before. I shall call her Charlotte. She has what might fairly be called firm views. She is not what you might call Praguish. She was struck dumb by my ‘Smash the Monarchy’ T-shirt – how preposterously non-Lutheran!

I said to Charlotte that Berlin was my favourite city in the world. She replied that Berlin has good points and bad points. This was an unusually catholic and embracing response from Charlotte. I therefore thought that I would honour it with an anecdote. ‘When I left Prague, I hired a car to…’ Half-way into the sentence, I realized that I was committed to a faux pas of John Cleese proportions. ‘…take me to Lidice, the little town wiped out by the German SS as a reprisal for the killing of Reinhardt Heydrich.’ It was one of those in for a shilling, in for a pound moments. You just keep going and focus on keeping a straight face. Charlotte did not blanch, but for a split second gave me one of her trade mark steely, glassy stares, above her tailored slacks and French shoes, and off the shoulder cashmere.

Later that week, I was in a discussion with Charlotte and others about the dangers or uselessness of philosophy. Some death wish led me to say that an English writer named Grayling had said that the Allied bombing of German cities was wrong – and that some pilots should have refused to fly. I regard that proposition to be as insane as it is offensive. Charlotte thought it to be self-evidently true. She said one English pilot had refused to fly over Dresden. I doubt whether that is so – he could have been shot – but I bailed out.

It would have been idle to ask how many German pilots refused to fly over London or Coventry; it would have been insane to ask how many of the Schutzpolitzei at Lidice refused to take part in the murder of the men, the rape or enslavement of the women, or the enforced adoption of Aryan looking Czech children. The one thing that I am sure of is that no one in occupied Europe was complaining that the British or American air forces were being too hard on the Germans. You only hear that nonsense from unemployable philosophers who have never held down a real job, much less have been in a real war, but who have been breast fed on pure bullshit.

The point of my Lidice anecdote about good and bad in a city was a good one. I had both a driver and a guide – it was just after the Wall had come down. As we were driving out, I said to my most charming female guide that ‘You have a beautiful city here in Prague – a real chocolate box city.’ She looked at me wanly and said: ‘You can say that because you have not been to the industrial estates where the skin-heads kill the gypsies.’ She said it almost philosophically; she was evidently far more intelligent than A C Grayling. But she was worried about the tensions developing – again – between Czechs and Germans, and by the time we got out at Lidice, she was, I thought, a little stressed.

From Lidice, we went to the airport, from where I flew to Budapest. I have three abiding memories of that old city. I saw a great performance of a ballet of Anna Karenin to the music of Tchaikovsky’s fifth and sixth symphonies in the opera house. I went to the baths and did not know whether to worry more about my wallet or my person. On the morning I left, I felt intimations of the trots – of which I have a holy terror when flying. At the head of a reasonable queue in my hotel, I told a smart middle aged female Hungarian concierge of my problem and then sought her assurance that the tablet that she smartly produced was of the stop, not the go variety. I told her I was in the hands of her and God, and I swallowed it. As the bus neared the airport, I felt that comforting, settling feeling.

It was a beautiful sunny day as we flew up low along the Thames and up to the west end. I could just about point out the Cavalry and Guards Club over Piccadilly from Green Park. You feel like tapping the pilot on the shoulder: ‘If you could put me down here, Sportsman, it would save a lot of buggerizing around on the ground.’

When I got to the Cavalry and Guards Club, about three hours later, Peter, the porter, was on his own, shirt open, braces, and toast on. You can fire cannon through these places on the weekend. I had known Peter for years and I was very fond of him. He was at peace this day. David Gower was in, and batting beautifully. I got my key and lugged the bag up to the single quarters on the third floor. Window on to Piccadilly; dunny 10 yards one way; bath – no shower – 10 yards the other way.

After a decent interval, I went back to see if there was a room free in the married quarters – where there are showers. But the mood was very different. The toast has burnt, and Gower was out, the weak bastard! I asked Peter about the married quarters. He gave me a very pained look and said ‘You don’t want to change rooms already, do you?’ Well, shit, of course not. The very idea was ridiculous. I sloped off to the RAF Club just up the road for a couple of heart starters and a meal in the Buttery.

Some few visits later, I made a different faux pas. I went down to the front desk. There was a figure in the gloom. I said I was looking for Peter, but as he came into the light, I saw that it was he. He was dying. It was very sad. As I left, he shook my hand firmly, for the last time, as we both knew.

The last note commences:

At breakfast on Saturday at Cambridge, an elderly German lady from my class gave me a big smile and asked me if I had ‘settled down yet’. A very urbane English man also gave me a big smile, but when I asked if we should go easy on the bastards, he said that I would be betraying our birthright. The plural was not royal.

The course was on how to settle wars, but the title was worryingly verbose. I was having a drink before dinner with the Post-Modernist Post-Colonial Lit In Crowd of Studies in Advanced Victimhood With Honours and I was happy to be rescued by someone saying that he was there for war and peace. (I read in my notebook that someone said that modernism was like playing tennis with the net down.) This rather mournful soul was one of the two advertised tutors. He looked like a Shropshire vicar, but he would have to do.

Then I met his mate. Fat, bearded, and wild eyed. The Naval Buddha. With a naval emblem on a navy jacket. Dead set dangerous at any rate of knots. Not the least troubling part of a very wordy c. v. were the words ‘Doctor’ and ‘Professor’ sliding in and out with no mention of any primary degree – they hang people, or shoot them, for that in Germany. I doubt whether either of our heroes had worn a uniform, but they had taught those who do. That is not an enticing recipe – in Oz, it has been an outright disaster.

Wait – the Naval Buddha was a petrol head. There might be hope. But no – when I mentioned my admiration for Michael Schumacher, the Naval Buddha permitted himself one of those vesuvial effusions for which he would become justly infamous in the upcoming bunfight. ‘Michael Schumacher never won a race unless he cheated.’ This remark is a silly as it is false, but the N B, like the Famous Bluebottle, paused for applause. But what if he had been addressing someone who admires Schumacher – and he was – what would that say for his taste and judgment? In the appalling argot of our time, what might that do for the brand of his then employer?

So, I took a stiff pull of my Spanish red, and thought I might mention the course. I said how much I admired Keynes’ The Economic Consequences of the Peace for both intellect and courage. The tutors exchanged long, sad, knowing looks, and said that it had caused ‘endless trouble.’ Why? Because it had helped the Germans say that they had been hardly done by. Oh my God – might this just have been the case?

Not palely loitering, I trudged alone to dinner and the Latin grace, firmly grasping my bottle of Spanish red, with a sickening awareness that this would be a course like those in Peace studies, or African studies, or Feminism – or any bloody ‘ism’ – pure, pure bullshit, something close to intellectual fraud. Opening up universities that we are pleased to call iconic to the unwashed is bonzer. Retailing bullshit is not.

There were only five in the class. There was the very worldly and bright Englishman. There was the German lady who had lived through the war and knew more about the subject than any library. Her companion was not far behind her. And then there was the English lady in her nineties. In my very fond experience, they do not say much, but they can be deadly.

You can make many mistakes teaching adults. The worst is to underestimate and then insult your class. The Naval Buddha did both, in spades, and what followed was what John Milton coined Pandemonium. The subject was the change in the character of warfare in the nineteenth century (without any reference to the Grande Armee, which to me is a bit like discussing the Fall without mentioning Eden). If you are suspicious of large claims, you are not relieved to hear them introduced by references to ‘socialization’. If you were about to be slaughtered at Balaclava, would it have helped to reflect that you were being socialized?

I did not ask what the word meant for fear of being landed on the rim of an infinite regress, but my English colleague did ask, and he persisted. Within five minutes, it was a free for all shitfight on the very sensitive political subjects of Iraq and Afghanistan – and open season on one former English PM (who is almost as unpopular as Mrs T.). It was not edifying. I enjoy a good shitfight but I object to paying for one. At one stage the polite aging German lady said to the N B ‘If you believe that, you are living in Wonderland.’ My astute English colleague was most enlightening – he had friends who had flown combat missions in these appalling wars, and he spoke with evident feeling commanding intellectual respect on these issues.

The two tutors looked very bruised the next morning. They changed their route of campaign. The N B would read a paper. There would be no questions or comment until he was finished and then only through the chair. We had been gagged. Still we bore up with it manfully, and politely.

Out tutors told us we should be grateful for opinion polls. Saying this to an Australian is like asking the Holy Father to hand out condoms during Mass. Elections have become a boring sideshow. What counts are polls taken by clever, rich, unattractive parasites on the basis of which a junta of Mafia dons posing as factional leaders and newspaper editors choreograph political assassinations which lead to the promotion of even worse bastards than we had before. Then one tutor said that at least they – polls – were better indicators than cab drivers. If we speak of London or Berlin cab drivers, this remark is a sad reflection on the dangers of faux science.

Then Keynes came up. I know nothing of the Black Magic that we call Economics, but my admiration for Keynes as a man is almost unlimited, and as a mind I would mention him with Newton, Darwin, and Einstein. I may of course be wrong, whatever that means, but I have deeply considered convictions about Keynes and Versailles. Keynes had at least two things in common with Dietrich Bonhoeffer – he was part of the noblesse oblige by birth and instinct; he lent honour to that awful word patriot.

The Shropshire vicar then ventured the private view that Keynes had been a ‘bit of a clot.’ This was at a university that Keynes had served with utter fidelity for his entire adult life, as he had his school and his nation. I have a nightmare vision of the N B saying that the main problem with the Treaty of Versailles was that it was not hard enough on the Germans.

In the book that I have mentioned, Keynes shirtfronted his own government with infinite courage, and he said two things. Versailles would break and bankrupt Germany. Their revenge would make the first war look like a cakewalk. Each prophecy was fulfilled to the letter, and more than forty million dead witnesses would offer mute testimony to our inability to see it. And there is a cemetery of eerie beauty to American airmen just around the corner from Madingley Hall.

I try not to get offended – it is in truth a weasel word – unless I should be, and this was one of those times. I was deeply offended. In some rootless, obscure way, I was offended in my sense of scholarship, and I am revolted by personal disloyalty.

Still, we kept our calm. The N B referred to his next posting and said that as part of the deal he had donated his library to the institution. And then our nonagenarian colleague spake, I think for the second time. It was like a blue-tongued lizard on a smouldering hot rock at Onkaparinga: ‘Do you mean a bribe?’ Zap! You’re dead, Sport. Bliss. The rest of us crossed ourselves movelessly, as I contemplated my white-lied escape to Oxford at lunchtime, and my happy deflowering at the hands of British rail tellers.

Throughout all this madness, two lines kept coming back to me out of nowhere. One was the remark of an Australian at Gallipoli: ‘Tonight we lost our amateur status.’ The other was a remark by an American journalist to lawyers at a Washington lunch in 1984: ‘Welcome to Washington, where you and the cab driver are seeing the city for the first time.’

I commend the book.

Up your north Part 5

11/09/201511/09/2015 / Geoffrey Gibson / 2 Comments

There is bugger-all at Fitzroy Crossing, and even less at Halls Creek, about 280 ks away. The River Lodge does however offer good bar and dining service under the stars. I had been waited on by two very attractive young women, one from Brittany, and one from Montpellier. (If you were into French more than me, you could brush up on it on a trip like this.) After dinner, I had sat behind a number of blackfellas sitting in a semi-circle in the bar watching Port Adelaide beat Hawthorn. They obviously barracked for the former, but I could not understand what they were saying. I do not recall seeing any drinking between the races.

The road to Halls Creek is dead flat and boring. Halls Creek itself is a very, very depressing place. The only alcohol you can get there is light beer. Asians were running the servo – very well; one rushed to get a Band-Aid when she saw I was bleeding – but the black people look very down and out, and the white people do not look much livelier. It is the kind of place you just want to get out of. I would meet others who had the same sad impression.

It is a further 120 ks to the Bungle Bungles turn off and then a notorious 53 ks of bone shaking and water hazard before you get to the Park Information Office, and then about a further 27ks to the famous beehive domes. The day might only cover 453ks, but it was always going to be a lot harder than just that. My booking agent at the Kununurra Visitors’ Centre, Florence (a fictitious name), had warned me that the last 53ks might take almost as long as the previous 400. That was an overstatement – one of a number from that source, I was to find – but this was clearly going to be my longest day. You bloody bet it was. In bloody spades, mate.

There is gate across the road just off the highway and before you get to the caravan park there. A guy was coming out. As he got to me, he wound down his windows and said: ‘Do you see that guy behind me in the read cap?’ ‘Yep.’ ‘It will cost you $5 just for him to shut the gate.’ We laughed, but I still asked the man in the cap where I checked in.

How would I bloody well know?

Ask your mate behind the wheel – if he waits for you.

So, I entered the Bungles in high spirits, the highlight of my quest, the grail if you like. After about ninety minutes of punishment I let out a shout of triumph when I passed the National Park Gate and arrived at the Information Office at about noon on the Saturday.

Office shut. Unmanned. Complex instructions on how to calculate fees. No credit card facility for payment. No change. Just calculate the fee – I thought it was $50 for my two nights but I may have been wrong – and I put $50 in the envelope, and sought to display the evidence as instructed. The complex instructions were only in English. Put to one side the pay as you go issue. This is supposed to be a World Heritage site and here we are behaving like hicks to tourists that we seek to attract. You would not this inane rudeness at Iguazzu or the Grand Canyon.

Then I started to get a sullen premonition. Why was there no sign for the soft accommodation that Florence had booked for me inside the National Park? My paper spoke of ‘a tourist park.’ It may have been under canvas but it was en suite and with meals and a bar. I drove about 7ks to the nearest camp ground and found a bloke in a tent who had been living there for some time. He said that there was such accommodation about 30ks down the road but that there was no caravan park in the National Park itself.

Does that mean that my place is back near the highway.

Looks like it, cobber.

And I have just done those 53ks plus for nothing?

Looks like it.

And now I have to go back.

They’ll be booked out down the road.

Well, well, well.

Or Anglo-Saxon terms to that effect, with unchristian thoughts about Florence. This was a major bugger-up, not perhaps without some contribution from me for not checking that the accommodation procured came within my written instructions. But at least I would get a beer when I made it back to join the people I may have looked down upon on my way in.

I retraced the 53ks and five water hazards, dangerously more quickly. There was one notorious stretch of corrugation where I found it was better to boost the engine a little to achieve a kind of skating effect, but I was told later that this damages the vehicle, and you have to be very careful to cut back as soon as the surface changes. I noticed a few drivers coming in looking like grim death.

I got back to the caravan park just before 2 pm, and, yes, I was booked in there. So the South African lady who could have worn number 8 for the Storm told me. She and a French guy with a beard from Brittany – I have forgotten his name, but a very nice guy – were attending to my needs as I informed them of a little misunderstanding – un petit faux pas – with Florence. The conversation went something like this.

Am I too late for lunch?

We don’t do lunch.

Well, it will be a slap-up dinner. With a bloody good red. It has been a bad day.

You will have to bring your own.

Why’s that?

We have no licence.

[After another reference to Florence] Where’s the next bottle shop?

180ks up the road mate.

[I remember that nice French guy saying that with just a hint of a glint in his eye.]

Well, well, well.

Unless you want beer. That’s only 120ks south. But I suppose that you have just come up from there.

And they only sell light beer.

Dinner’s at 6pm. Do you have any allergies?

No, why?

There is only one meal – pea soup and beef stew.

Bonzer.

Here is the combination to the lock on the zip on your tent. There is no power, but there is a light.

I take it that means there is no air-con.

Silly me. It was in danger of becoming a killing field of great expectations, and I started to giggle. But it took me about ten minutes to unlock the zip, and when I got inside it was about five degrees warmer than outside, which was north of 30. I had half a bottle of red, but can you imagine what it was like after about three hours on that road in that heat.

The first thing to do was to cancel the second night. When I went back to the HQ to deal with the South African lady about a refund for the second night and also to inquire about a helicopter flight, I met a guy called Bernard. Hearing my helicopter inquiry, he offered me his wife’s seat on a flight at 3pm. It was an hour’s flight, and I said I only needed 30 minutes (which should be true for everyone – you can see a lot in 30 minutes). I gather that Bernard’s wife, whom I later met, had gone off flying in helicopters, which is understandable, and that unless a third passenger could be found, the price for the other two would be excessive. I said to the South African Storm number 8 that if she assured me that I would get a refund of my second night – I had paid up front for this deluxe accommodation in the middle of nowhere – I would take the 3pm flight. The deal was struck. Everyone seemed happy. I could salvage something from the day – apart from experience, and some lines to dine out on. The Storm number 8 even made a little joke.

A little later an Italian lady from north of Milan weighed me in for the changed manifest that I was to give to the pilot, Ben. Bernie and I allowed Deirdre to sit in the front and Ben strapped us in the back.

We all had a wow of a time. Ben’s commentary was to the point, and we could ask questions over the intercom. We went over a lot of cattle country where they muster by helicopter. These flights, which I have taken at some of the world’s great sights, are expensive but worth every cent. Apart from the wow, you get to grips with scale and history.

Bernie thought my day had been hilarious – so did I – and thought that I would be carrying all of the white man’s burden for a full twenty-four hours. In sympathy, he invited me back to his base for a beer. He was travelling in a 4WD bus group of ten with two driver/guides and sleeping under canvass at each stop. I met a few of the group who said that the guides were terrific. They all looked very content around the evening fire, although I may have blanched at the 5.30 start the next morning. Here was an option for people who do not mind sleeping under canvas and sharing communal facilities. I have done some of that up there, but, as I made clear to Florence, those days are behind me.

At dinner – 6 pm sharp! – I spoke to a few caravaners and picked up some of their lore. They clearly have a sense of community and purpose, and I suspect that they get a better social life than people who travel like me – or in a big bus. A guy at dinner, who came from England, shared a bottle of red at the table, and when I got back to my still hot tent to finish off the shattered remains of my red stock, I could not find a glass. Perhaps this was because there was a sign saying that I should not drink the water unless I boiled it – but there was nothing to boil it with. Nor was there power. I went to the vans and borrowed a glass and had a couple with a convivial group there – who thought it was rich that I had not even been given a glass.

Good news at last!

11/09/201511/09/2015 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

At lunch with a journalist yesterday, we discussed aboriginal art and footballers. I recalled being at an exhibition looking at an aboriginal painting that seemed to change before my eyes. The curator asked what I thought. I said I was reminded of the Krakouer brothers. She did not know them, so I explained that they were aboriginal footballers who just saw things and did things that were beyond us white people.

We discussed the paintings of Minnie Pwerle. I have a fine one here. They are collections of rows of semi-circles in about five different colours. I said that I look at it a lot, and that I suspect that instinctively the artist may have arranged the colours very much after the Golden Rule or Ratio (sometimes called Fibonacci), which was applied by Jeffrey Smart. A tutor at Oxford had explained how Verdi had apparently arrived at the same result in the last act of Othello, around the kisses that come before and after the death of Desdemona. The class was of the view that this effect was probably instinctive rather than mathematical design. So it was with the Krakouers.

By chance, when I turned the TV on last night, it was on The Winners from the past. North Melbourne played South Melbourne in the second round in 1982. What got to me were the ludicrous hot pants on the boys. But the Krakouers put on a show kicking seven between them. And the best part is that they were both in the studio to watch it. I was aware that one had got into some trouble, but both were there looking fit and well, and not in any trouble, more than thirty years on.

I found it the show very uplifting. They slowed down one clip. The ball was free in a pack. One brother could see that the other could get to it, and set off briskly to offer him a lead. The other got to the ball, and instead of grabbing it and passing it, he just bunted the ball with a closed fist about twenty-five yards so that it just came in front of his brother on the lead. He then just gathered it in and after three or four steps slotted a goal on an acute angle. It was pure magic or consummate artistry – a joy to watch. They could do things, in footy and in art, that we whites just cannot do.

The other good news is that Chris Wallace-Crabbe and I are moving solidly in our book on writing and thinking – the title and a few other things are yet to be settled, but more on this later.

Discriminating religions

11/09/201511/09/2015 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

At least three factors lie behind the huge earth-moving conflicts that have led to the current refugee crisis. Not necessarily in order, they are the failure of Muslims and Jews to get on with each other; the failure of Muslims to get on with each other; and the collapse of nations or regimes created or supported by map-drawing imperialists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The first two grounds might fairly described as religious conflicts – the war against IS looks to be a war between two kinds of Islam. The third was the shameless and heartless arrogance with which almost every nation in Europe raped and dismembered almost every part of Africa in the nineteenth century – after they had stopped mining it for the human gold called slaves – and the failure of Europe properly to divide the Middle East between the wars or after them. The incursions of Europe and the US into the Middle East or Africa since then have on the whole made things worse.

You might therefore hope that a religious leader in the major former imperialist nation would tread carefully and lightly, and not compound the tragedy by discriminating against people on the ground of religion – the failure that underlies the two main grounds of religious conflict.

Lord Carey, a former archbishop of Canterbury, does not agree. After taking a swipe at the Germans, and Angela Merkel in particular, he advocates discriminating in favour of Christians – and, inevitably, against Muslims.

They [the Christians] are the most vulnerable and repeatedly targeted victims of this conflict. Indeed, a hundred years after the Armenian and Assyrian genocide, in which over a million Christians are estimated to have been killed by Ottoman Muslims, the same is happening today in the form of an ethnic cleansing of Christians in the region. Christians have been crucified, beheaded, raped, and subjected to forced conversion. The so-called Islamic State and other radical groups are openly glorifying the slaughter of Christians.

Britain should make Syrian Christians a priority because they are a particularly vulnerable group. Furthermore, we are a Christian nation with an established Church so Syrian Christians will find no challenge to integration. The churches are already well-prepared and eager to offer support and accommodation to those escaping the conflict.

The first thing to say is that this response is a word perfect example of the tendency I quoted a British traveler as seeing in religious conflict in the Balkans – we only notice an atrocity when a Muslim kills a Christian. But for that, we would not be bombing Syria – his lordship refers to ethnic cleansing; our PM has rediscovered his horror of genocide – well, he is after all, the man who says that IS is worse than the Nazis, so they will have to be done for genocide.

Secondly, may I say something about the swipe at Angela Merkel? His lordship says she panicked to bully the rest of Europe to follow suit. It is an unusual conjunction, panicking and bullying, and one that might show other lesions on the psyche of his lordship. The jingoism is full blooded.

Isn’t it a bit rich for the Germans to criticize other nations, including Britain, for failing to accept refugees? For years, our warm-hearted land has consistently accepted more asylum-seekers than Germany.

This rampant nationalist bullshit comes from a man of God. Most would agree with The Economist, probably to the Left of his lordship, that on this issue, Merkel was ‘brave decisive and right.’ She was ahead of her electorate, and will be reeled in, but the prospects of seeing that kind of leadership here or in England are nil, nought, nothing, nix, and zilch. It is disgraceful for a tory peer and prelate to be taking what the NRL calls cheap shots against someone with the courage to be merely decent.

May I then come to the third and main point – that Christians should get priority because they have suffered most and therefore need refuge the most? That raises an issue of fact on which the testimony of this witness is hopelessly biased. It would not be an easy case to make. Common experience suggests that heretics tend to end up worse than unbelievers in religious conflicts, such as one between Sunni and Shia. Kant said this:

Now, when, as usually happens, a church proclaims itself to be the one church universal (even though it is based upon faith in a special revelation which, being historical can never be required of everyone), he who refuses to acknowledge its (peculiar) ecclesiastical faith is called by it ‘an unbeliever’ and is hated wholeheartedly; he who diverges therefrom only in path (in non-essentials) is called ‘heterodox’ and is at least shunned as a source of infection. But he who avows allegiance to this church and; diverges from it on essentials of its faith (namely, regarding the practices connected with it), is called, especially if he spreads abroad his false belief, a ‘heretic’ and, as a rebel, such a man is held more culpable than a foreign foe, is expelled from the church with anathema (like that which the Romans pronounced on him who crossed the Rubicon against the Senate’s will) and is given over to all the gods of hell. Exclusive correctness of belief in matters of ecclesiastical faith claimed by the church’s teachers or heads is called orthodoxy. This could be sub-divided into ‘despotic’ (brutal) or ‘liberal’ orthodoxy.

If someone in what purports to be a Christian country seeks to establish the opposite, as I gather our government proposes, they should expect disbelief and hostility, and not just in Muslim countries. They may also give a propaganda coup to IS – a point I will come back to.

Fourthly, what does his lordship propose? Two things. First, a whip-around after croquet on the lawns at Lambeth.

It is equally right that our compassionate instincts will drive us to fund-raise and campaign for the innocent victims of the conflict.

I am sorry, my lord, but just washing your hands when the natives cut up rough over a religious spat does not get a good press in the books that define your belief. Gideon Rachman – is the Financial Times sound enough, my lord? – said this.

For almost 500 years, European nations dominated, colonized and populated the rest of the world. After 1945, the states of western Europe signed up to a new post-imperial and post-fascist set of values, based on universal human rights and enshrined in documents such as the 1951 UN convention on refugees.

But the desperate and dispossessed of the world were largely kept at a distance, while Europeans continued to enjoy some of the highest living standards in the world.

Faced with distressing images of famines or wars in ‘the third world’, Europeans could salve their consciences by making a donation to charity or attending a benefit concert.

Now the refugee crisis is asking Europeans to live up to their values in ways that are likely to be costly, inconvenient and will accelerate far-reaching social changes.

If I may so, I agree with every word. The chit is being called in on the white man’s burden – and it is bloody big chit. The white man’s nightmare is that he may have no option but to honour it because they now have the numbers.

But his lordship, like our government, favours the stick, as well as the carrot.

There must be renewed military and diplomatic efforts to crush the twin menaces of Islamic State and al-Qaeda once and for all. Make no mistake: this may mean air strikes and other British military assistance to create secure and safe enclaves in Syria.

Some will not like me saying this, but in recent years, there has been too much Muslim mass immigration to Europe. This has resulted in ghettos of Muslim communities living parallel lives to mainstream society, following their own customs and even their own laws.

The second part bears out the testimony of Mr Rachman about the inconvenience of doing the right thing – which is the problem with the Sermon on the Mount. The first part adds sabre-rattling to jingoism and is just plain frightening from a priest. It calls to mind the remarks of Melville in Billy Budd about a chaplain on a man-of-war:

Bluntly put, a chaplain is the minister of the Prince of Peace serving in the host of the God of War – Mars. As such, he is as incongruous as a musket would be on the altar of Christmas. Why then is he there? Because he indirectly subserves the purpose attended by the cannon; because too he lends the sanction of the religion of the meek to that which practically is the abrogation of everything but brute Force.

The fifth point is that it would not be hard for IS to paint this kind of stuff as partaking of a Christian crusade, and becoming a weapon in their hands. One underlying disability of the West is its failure to hold a spiritual alternative to the grizzly absolutes of religious fanatics in the East that enable outrages to be committed in the name of religion. We have no interest at all in reviving memories of the Crusades where unbelievers were worse dealt with than heretics and which led Gibbon to one of his more famous polemics.

… the name and nature of a ‘holy war’ demands a more rigorous scrutiny; nor can we hastily believe that the servants of the Prince of Peace would ensheath the sword of destruction unless the motive were pure, the quarrel legitimate, and the necessity inevitable.

Are we satisfied on those three criteria here? Gibbon attacked the indulgences that fuelled the Crusades with savagery. He then goes on to describe the beginning of the first Crusade.

Some counts and gentlemen, at the head of three thousand horse, attended the motions of the multitude to partake in the spoil, but their genuine leaders (may we credit such folly?) were a goose and a goat, who were carried in the front, and to whom these worthy Christians ascribed an infusion of the divine spirit. Of these, and of other bands of enthusiasts, the first and most easy warfare was against the Jews, the murderers of the Son of God. In the trading cities of the Moselle and the Rhine, their colonies were numerous and rich, and they enjoyed under the protection of the Emperor and the Bishops the free exercise of their religion. At Verdun, Trèves, Metz, Spires, Worms many thousands of that unhappy people were pillaged and massacred, nor had they felt a more bloody stroke since the persecution of Hadrian …. The more obstinate Jews exposed their fanaticism to the fanaticism of the Christians, barricadoed their houses, and precipitating themselves, their families and their wealth into the rivers of the flames, disappointed the malice, or at least the avarice, of their implacable foes.

Gibbon next savages the institution of knighthood and then goes on to describe the taking of the Holy City, Jerusalem.

A bloody sacrifice was offered by his mistaken votaries [Tancred’s] to the God of the Christians: resistance might provoke, but neither age nor sex could mollify their implacable rage: they indulged themselves three days in a promiscuous massacre; and the infection of the dead bodies produced an epidemical disease. After seventy thousand Moslems had been put to the sword, and the harmless Jews had been burnt in their synagogue, they could still reserve a multitude of captives whom interest or lassitude persuaded them to spare. …. The Holy Sepulchre was now free; and the bloody victors prepared to accomplish their vow. Bare-headed and bare foot, with contrite hearts and in a humble posture, they ascended the hill of Calvary, amidst the loud anthems of the clergy; kissed the stone which had covered the Saviour of the world; and bedewed with tears of joy and penitence the monument of their redemption. This union of the fiercest and most tender passions has been variously considered by two philosophers: by the one, as easy and natural; by the other, as absurd and critical.

The first philosopher referred to is David Hume; the second was Voltaire.

Finally, his lordship acknowledges the possibility that ‘some of what I say sounds harsh or, heaven forbid, a touch unchristian’. I would like to know of the converse. What part of the life or teaching of the Jewish man they called Christ is best evidenced in his lordship’s remarks?

The World’s Worst Headline?

08/09/201508/09/2015 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

AS GOVERNMENT MOVES TO APPROVE STRIKES AGAINST ISLAMIC STATE IN SYRIA, THE PRIME MINISTER PLEDGES

We will provide refuge

‘Fleeing Christians should go to the front of the queue’

The Australian, 8 September, 2015

Put to one side that the number of those fleeing to whom we will provide refuge will as a matter of national pride be determined by our wishes rather than their needs, that this nation fashioned a policy on refugees to stop refugees going to the front of the queue, and that these awful words would have given most offence to the man named Jesus of Nazareth, the man called Christ, whose name is invoked to discriminate against people on the ground of their religion, a proposition that shames all religion if it is not offensive to all religion, what kind of moral bankruptcy do we have here?

A long time ago, an English traveller said this of religious strife in the Balkans.

When a Muslim kills a Muslim, that does not count; when a Christian kills a Muslim, it is a righteous act; when a Christian kills a Christian, it is an error of judgment better not talked about; it is only when a Muslim kills a Christian that we arrive at a full-blown atrocity.

You will not therefore be surprised to learn that that the Archbishop who called for preference to be given in providing refuge to those people who shared his religious beliefs also supported the bombing of those in Syria who do not.

If you see a child being pursued by a killer, and it is within your power to make that child safe from the killer, and you refuse to do so because it does not suit you, what is the difference between you and the killer?

Passing bull 12: Strategic adjancies

07/09/2015 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

The great corrupter of thought is prejudice. Tariq Ali, as an old style socialist, would be sympathetic to Greece and the government of Mt Tsipras, and unsympathetic to those who lent Greece money. In The London Review of Books, he acknowledges the awful corruption in Greece. They spent a fortune on tanks in 2009 because the defence minister took huge bribes. But Ali chides the financial press for not noticing that the minister got jail for corruption while the corrupters only got a fine – the quantum of either is not revealed, but it does look like the courts were Greek. Then we get the German spray:

The EU has now succeeded in crushing the political alternative that Syriza represented. The German attitude to Greece, long before the rise of Syriza, was shaped by the discovery that Athens (helped by Goldman Sachs) had cooked its books in order to get into the Eurozone. This is indisputable. But isn’t it dangerous as well as wrong to punish the Greek people – and to carry on doing so even after they have rejected the political parties responsible for the lies?

Put to one side ‘crushing’ and ‘punish’ – does a country cease to be liable for its wrongs or debts just because it has had a change of government? This misconception underlay so much of the Greek response. ‘We are under new management that has a different ‘mandate’’. This was not a doctrine that the Greeks were keen to invoke in their claims against Nazi Germany.

Still, at least Tariq says something. Slavoj Zizek often misses out completely. A recent LRB piece headed Sinicisation started this way:

When Alan Badiou claims that democracy is our fetish, this statement is to be taken in the precise Freudian sense, not just to mean that we elevate democracy into an untouchable Absolute. ‘Democracy’ is the last thing we see before confronting the ‘lack’ constitutive of the social field, the fact that ‘there is no class relationship’, the trauma of social antagonism.

That is pure bullshit.

The Weekend AFT had a commercial challenger. In announcing its results, Telstra said:

Core acquisitions address specific capability gaps in our services, expand into strategic adjacencies and extend capacity and presence in specific geographies.

‘Adjacencies’ is going straight into the pool room. When a bowler went up for a loud appeal for LBW once, the late Richie Benaud quietly said: ‘That looks very adjacent.’

Up Your North Parts III and IV

06/09/201506/09/2015 / Geoffrey Gibson / 2 Comments

III

I am writing this at 3pm in Derby on the coast of Western Australia. Two guys have just come into the Derby Lodge Motel – an old fashioned motel that is quite adequate for the traveller, with the communal barbecue – lugging a slab on one shoulder and a bagful of shopping in the other hand, and giggling, happily.

You guys sound happy in the service.

We soon bloody well will be, mate.

That sounded like a sensible positive attitude to getting Mozart and Liszt. I heard them offering my host a beer.

What sort have you got, fellers?

Just about every colour under the sun, mate.

Well, there is no point in getting full just to get unhappy or nasty.

Derby is a more blokey, laid back kind of place, with a few degrees of social separation from the more upmarket Broome, where you half expect to pass a Porsche at any corner. It is only about 210 ks from Broome, but the atmosphere is less confected.

As at Broome, there is a very good café on the wharf that Frank had recommended. The food was good – but it was BYO. This might be a symptom of the difference in the two towns, and I have no doubt that they might get choosey about who brings what in. I was to find that liquor restrictions vary greatly all along the way. In Broome, I had asked a copper what time the bottle shops opened – he gave me his best cheesy smile, and said noon. I said that I could probably make it to then, and that I would not leave town on that count alone. I would say that if you want to be a walloper up there, it would help if you had a sense of humour. The same would go for being in hospitality. Running a boozer would be a more trying task. You would require a high degree of mental and physical fibre. A very high degree. Not of the type you collect at university or the city.

Also at Frank’s suggestion, I visited a gallery just outside Derby that belonged to the local indigenous community and specialised in Wanjina paintings that come from this region. I have one at home, a very good one. There is that eerie round face with a kind of striated halo that might remind you of a Russian icon or a figure of Giotto – they have black eyes and no mouths. They partake of what some call primitive art. The gallery is on a reservation that has a sign saying no fighting or drinking. There is a wide range of work as you might expect, and I thought some of it flirted with the Wanjina image, which I had thought was closely guarded. A lot of the work looked a little pricey to me, not least when the secondary market in the South is very soft. Still, I was able to buy two small Wanjina paintings for my daughters at a very good price. Not the least of their charm was that they were painted by children, girls aged about nine and fourteen. I even got a photographic certification of authenticity, although without a photo of the artist.

That morning, I had picked up a backpacker from Prague, a very pleasant and bright young man. We discussed hitching here and in Europe – he had not done it there and it was nearly fifty years since I had. I was learning that backpackers supply a lot of the labour in the tourist industry out there – indeed, almost all of it right up the road. I was coming to terms again with how ridiculously long are the lines of straight road out there as we swapped travel stories. He was about my age when I hitch-hiked around Europe, and I fancied that he was getting as much out of his travels as I did from mine. I had the sense that he was acquiring knowledge as we spoke.

I recalled my one visit to Prague, a city in love with Mozart. I had hired a car and a guide to take me to the airport and then on to a little town called Lidice, which the Germans had wiped out in reprisals for the assassination of that swine Heydrich. I told the guide that Prague was a chocolate box city. ‘Yes – but you have not been out to the industrial estates where the skinheads are killing the gypsies.’ I wondered whether we were showing our underbelly out here.

At the rather too snappy boozer over the road from the motel, I recognised another guest. Dick was my age, but full of interest. Tall, skinny, long-haired with a beard and a soft voice, Dick was a bird-watcher, and a very serious one. He lives in Newcastle but spends a lot of time in the never never. He has surely seen more of Oz than most – the Simpson Desert, the Canning Stock Route and other deserts and parts far too remote for me. He certainly knows a lot about 4WD travel and I was keen to learn. At one time in high grass country, Dick was seated on the bonnet to indicate to the driver which way the track ahead went. That should satisfy most definitions of ‘off-road.’

We discussed how bird-watchers had to learn to hear as well as see. Old Jack had taught me this. Dick had hired a little Hyundai for a couple of days to get out of town a bit in search of one particular bird. Dick is a Subaru fanatic, and he explained how those kinds of vehicles worked – he said that mine should go better in this country because it was higher. That made me feel better. Then he congratulated me on doing it on my own. That made me feel worse. But then I asked him what was the point of having someone sitting beside me if – putting to one side altogether issues of sex – that person was as mechanically deprived and physically frail as me? My only strong suit – navigation, even on compass and contours and ordinance maps – was not an issue, and the only time you might get use out of a GPS was in the bigger towns.

Dick explained to me that what I had been told were eagles around Broome were ospreys, and that I should look out for Peregrine Falcons at Winjana Gorge. They perch on the summit, and I think he said that when they dive, they are as fast as anything else on earth.

Dick was leaving early the next morning – on the tide! – on a catamaran to go up the coast. There were to be ten on board for ten nights. They would dine on board but sleep ashore under canvas. It was fearfully expensive – I think $8K – but I could understand its appeal – especially for bird-lovers, and Dick was on a quest for one rare bird. I hope he found it. I have not met that many bird-lovers, but I have not met a bad one. They look to me to be people at peace with themselves and the world. It might be a useful indicator of character – how do I think that person might go as a bird-watcher?

Wherever you travel around the world, there is – obviously – always something more to come, something else to discover and come to grips with. I felt this all the time when I first travelled around Europe and the centre of Australia. This conversation with Dick, and the young man from Prague, reminded me what it is to be keen to learn. Both those men were good sharers.

When I walked into the bottle shop a little earlier, a blackfella was trying to buy a bottle of plonk. He was asked politely to show his car keys, but he had none, so the sale was declined. I had seen signs to this effect in a grog shop in Broome, and I was getting to the parts where, like in at least parts of Nevada and Arizona you either pay up front for petrol or leave your licence before the pump is activated. Although the conversation was as polite as it was short, the lack of comprehension at either end was clear. A lot of them do not understand us, and not many of us understand them.

From Derby (pronounced durby) it is about 270ks to Fitzroy Crossing if you go via Winjana Gorge and Tunnel Creek, and you go into Geicke Gorge. Only about 100 of that is sealed. The parts of the Gibb River Road and the tourist road that you go on are tricky and bone-shaking – and car-wrecking. This was one of the three parts of the trip where I needed the best kind of 4WD under me. There is about four to five hours driving, but a lot of it calls for maximum concentration, and by the end you are ready for beer – and a massage.

When they say Slow Down, it is a good idea to do just that. There was a big sign to that effect in the door of the Tourist Information Office at Derby. I read that sign carefully, but I still came off some bitumen a bit too fast in one area, and nearly lost the vehicle. I could remember having covered a lot of this territory before in a 4WD people-carrier driven by a woman, a professional guide, who impressed with the great care and patience that she took to modulate her speed. She slowed right down for dips and changes of surface or gradient, and rarely increased her speed where I, being ignorant, would have thought that it was safe to do so – and she was not frightened to floor it on bitumen.

The signs at both ends of my route said that the roads were ‘open to all vehicles.’ I would not have tried it unless I had at least an AWD, and I cannot recall seeing any orthodox 2WD. I used 4WD for all the unsealed part, but only had to engage, or thought I should engage, the Low 4WD once. I only had to traverse one deep floodway. I would never have attempted it with an orthodox vehicle, and I would have been even more nervous in a vehicle that was not as high as mine, or that did not have the snorkel to allow the vehicle to breathe under water – and I saw plenty of them on the route.

There are different types of terrain, and about four different types of road surface. You have to be careful to adjust to the change. The snaky parts have dusty spikes. You can lose it across those, or in the dips.

Another reason for caution is that speed increases the risk of blowing tyres. I would have great difficulty changing a tyre on this vehicle. The spare wheel and tyre looks very heavy. And they had sent me out in a vehicle that had lost its instruction manual. I had by then also discovered that the reserve tank was dry. When I had checked it, it had taken $55 of diesel in the reserve tank. It must have been bone dry. In this country, that could be manslaughter. And later on the road, I would meet a guy with his wife who had blown two tyres on one trip to Jim Jim Falls.

In the course of the morning – I left early with Dick to try to beat the heat – I did not pass much traffic. You may just be able to recognise the ones who are as serious as you – they wave back. It felt like a kind of communal self-congratulation. When I stopped and got out, I told the first bloke I ran into that I doubted whether all this might be called fun. He said that he felt rooted, a proposition that was rather tersely endorsed by his wife. It took me two Oscar Peterson CDs to get to the Winjana Turn-off from the Gibb River Road (on which you pass a sign saying that the next amenity is 300ks up the road) and the first and sixth symphonies of Beethoven (conducted by Klemperer) to get from Tunnel Creek to the main highway.

I had been there before, but Winjana Gorge is majestic. This country reminds me very much of our Grampians as seen from Victoria Valley. It is real blackfella country. The rock faces, colours, and trees – gum or boab – are what people come here for. It is somehow Australian. If you were born or just live in Australia, and you do not feel like that you belong here, you might face what are called issues. This is about as close to God’s country as we get.

The sign at the gate helpfully says that the pythons are not venomous, but that it is not a good idea to upset the crocodiles. These are freshwater crocs and relatively small, although one looked about two meters, and they are not man-eaters, having a different mouth structure to the salty killers. They also look decidedly lazy, but it is best not to get them between you and the water – or, I would suggest, to descend to their level. Winjana Gorge was my first real ‘sight’, and it was a blinder.

Tunnel Creek was the scene of an uprising. There were montages about it that put the blackfellas in white hats and the whitefellas in black hats – to the point of appearing to condone the shooting of a white copper. I wondered what government put those signs up.

Geicke Gorge is not far from Fitzroy Crossing. You can do boat tours and see plenty of crocs there. You can certainly take tours into there from Fitzroy Crossing. I doubt whether they would go into Winjana. You can certainly cover those spots on three day tours out of Broome – or, at least, I did that fifteen years ago, when I spent one night at Fitzroy Crossing.

It is not much more than a staging post, but I was interested to see for the first time black men and women being served beer at the bar. I do not think I ever saw a blackfella behind the bar. A black lady came into reception, obviously deputed by her husband, to ask reception for half an hour on the Internet. He then joined her, and they had to ask the staff to start them off, and later correct an error – as they would have had to do for me. The black people were not much younger than me, and God only knows what blackfellas of that age make of the Internet – although it is common to see them nursing iphones as determinedly as young white people.

I visited two service stations in each of Derby and Fitzroy Crossing – all the staff were either of Asian extraction or European birth. The backpackers do supply the labour, and the Irish emigration is very evident all around here. It is a real mix, and an attractive one.

While I was having a beer and a decent pie for lunch, while unwinding after a grinding drive, a big tour bus pulled up, and disgorged its withered contents. It was described as a Seniors’ Tour. In the name of God, I am a senior, and was just then a grey nomad, but please God, not that kind of tour for me – not now; not ever. It must be like a mobile jail, or daytime TV – that some idiot thought should play in the bar I was eating in. That way madness lies.

If I could offer some advice, it would be not to leave it too late to come out here. I have been going to Europe or the States each year, having at the back of my mind the notion that I could leave this kind of thing to my dotage. I was dead wrong, for more than one reason.