Passing Bull 22 – The poem

19/11/2015 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

My apologies for forgetting a poem of the poet of the month, Gwen Harwood. It is below. I will shorty put out a note on terror and Paris. First it must be vetted – by lawyers, ASIO, the CIA, and my household fire insurers.

Oyster Cove

Dreams drip to stone. Barracks and salt marsh blaze

opal beneath a crackling glaze of frost.

Boot-black, in graceless Christian rags, a lost

race breathes out cold. Parting the milky haze

on mudflats, seabirds, clean and separate, wade.

Mother, Husband and Child: stars which forecast

fine weather, all are set. The long night’s past

and the long day begins.

To be continued.

Passing bull 22 – I told you so, Paris

15/11/201515/11/2015 / Geoffrey Gibson / 1 Comment

Crimes against humanity cross borders and suspend politics. Not everywhere.

The President of Syria, Mr Assad, fairly smirked. He said that he had been putting up with this kind of thing for years.

Mr Chris Kenny, of The Australian and Sky, a sadly vacuous twerp who looks like Mr Putin after a hard night on the tiles on Mars, found it his sad duty to remind viewers that he had been writing about this, and that now it was time for ‘jihad denialism’ to end. He did not say whether he has registered the term ‘jihad denialism’ as a trademark.

What did our former PM Tony Abbott do? He went on to the show of his bosom friend, Andrew Bolt, the master of ceremonies for divisions of race or creed. Bolt was in full ‘I told you so’ mode about jihad denialism, as even someone as obtuse as Abbott would have known. Abbott said, according to The Australian:

Any death-to-the-infidel mindset is ultimately conducive to the kind of vicious evil that we have seen on the streets of Paris and elsewhere in recent times.

And it’s absolutely incumbent on all decent people, particularly on religious leaders, Muslim religious leaders, to say: ‘This is not part of our faith. It never should have been and it must not be now.’

Mr Abbott said it was ‘very important’ that Australia take in the 12,000 Syrian refugees announced when he was prime minister, but warned the effort to resettle persecuted minorities should not harm the national interest.

The point is that we want to take people who have no realistic prospect of peacefully resettling in these parts of the Middle East. And obviously what we want to do as a general matter of principle is bring people to Australia who are prepared to join our team, he said.

We want people who come to this country to feel absolutely welcome, but we want them to join our team.

Mr Abbott said the government should continue to support the US in the Middle East and warned it was not Australia’s role to ‘sit in critical judgment of the leader of the free world.’

Well, at least it was very generous of Mr Abbott to suspend judgment on the President of the United States.

Passing Bull 21 – I am not racist

13/11/201513/11/2015 / Geoffrey Gibson / 2 Comments

Almost everyone is. It is natural for people to feel better than those who are different to them. We rarely feel that people who are different to us are better than us – luckier, yes; better, no. If being racist is feeling better than others of a different race, this is natural enough. Just look at dogs and acts. We just hope that people are well brought up enough to cancel, control or at least conceal part of our make-up that can cause real harm to others. If you hear someone say ‘I am not a racist’, you therefore wonder why. The statement suggests that the contrary is the case.

A piece by George Megalogenis in The Monthly looks at our spotty record.

When Sir Henry Parkes wanted to stop Chinese coming in, he said:

I disclaim any aversion to the Chinese people settled in this country. I have for thirty years, at many times and often, borne testimony to their law-abiding, industrious, thrifty and peaceable character, and I have never for a single moment joined with those who have held them up as in many respects more disreputable than a similar number of English subjects.

Another time, it was the Irish.

I would advance every opposition in my power to the bringing here of a majority of people from Ireland. I hope I may be able to express this opinion boldly and without reserve, without being charged with bigotry or with a dislike to the Irish people.

(Is bigotry something to be charged for?)

According to the citation, Chifley was not apologising when he accused the government of preferring ‘dagoes’ to ‘heroes’, a phrase that would have got him a job with a recent P M.

Arthur Calwell was not PM which may be just as well. His disclaimer in favour of White Australia was the most nauseating of all.

My Celtic ancestry has given me as tender and as sentimental a heart as the next man. But unlike the irresponsible newspapers and the addle-headed sentimentalists, I have a stern duty to my country and my countrymen.

How like Andrew Bolt. This will hurt me more than it hurts you. Don’t they see that singling out people by the ancestry of their race is where the whole bloody problem starts?

Well, racism is not the subject for a bullshit column. But a sometime PM called Forde gets the Jaffas for pure bullshit on the dagoes. He said that he was not ‘opposed to the Italians as a race’:

We admit that they make good settlers, and are useful workers. I recognise too that they are white men, and that their country is noted for its art, science, and learning.

Bonzer, Cobber, but what about their bloody opera?

Poet of the month: Gwen Harwood

I see that lost enchantment wake

in light, on water, and the spirit

like a loved guest on earth can take

its need and its delight, and wander

freely. The dazzling moments burn

to time again. In simple twilight

water speaks peace, the swallows turn

in lessening arcs. The dry reeds rustle

and part to the nightwind free.

The heart holds, like remembered music,

a landscape grown too dark to see.

(From Alla Siciliana)

My Compliments to Michelle Payne

05/11/201505/11/2015 / Geoffrey Gibson / 1 Comment

Off hand, it is not easy to think of any –‘ism’ that is attractive. Feminism, at least in its strident or radical form, is plainly not. There is a war to be fought. Any parent of daughters knows that. But wars are not won by bullshit – or by bureaucrats, or by regulations, or by quotas. We should remember that mordant remark of George Bernard Shaw – those who can do; those who can’t teach. (This is an uncomfortable truism for think tanks and other parasites and their fellow-travellers in the gospel press to reflect on.)

One fighter and winner like Simone Young is worth more than a battalion of drab but devout acolytes. She is now joined by Michelle Payne – a woman who fought and won, and then celebrated with a cool radiance that has gone round the world.

I congratulate this morning’s AFR for its editorial which under the heading ‘Tell ‘em to get stuffed’ concluded:

We agree with Ms Payne that anyone who doesn’t cheer this overdue piercing of the grass ceiling can go and get stuffed.

It is just as well that snooty prudes have not got in the way. Michelle Payne has a grace that does not come from a flash finishing school. It comes from within – just as it did for Eric Liddell in Chariots of Fire.

So, I offer my compliments to Michelle Payne with a note that I wrote on the war ahead of women. It comes from a book called The English Difference? The Tablets of their Laws. And if you don’t like it, you know what you can go and do.

EXTRACT

CHAPTER VI

WOMEN (1905 – 2011)

Patriotism is not enough. (Edith Cavell)

In a war-time speech that you do not hear so much now, Churchill spoke of the need to deal with class and snobbery in England. You would think that he was giving an election speech before the election just after the war, but he was speaking in the middle of the war. It was as if the politician could sniff the political writing on the electoral wall. But Churchill also had to face the dilemna of all friends of equality – you do not want to condemn ability and wind up with mediocrity, an appalling result that threatens democracy all over the world.

Well, when it came time for the English to choose after the war, they chose, as was their most perfect right, the Labour Party as the best to rebuild their nation. There is just no point in talking about gratitude – but the English people do seem to have shown uncommon maturity in quietly dropping the leader who had just brought them through the most dangerous war that they or the world had ever faced – and for whom they would erect a statue outside their parliament. This shows a hardness at the edge of English politics that you do not see often elsewhere.

There is a famous photo of Lloyd George and Winston Churchill on their way to delivering the People’s Budget on 29 April 1909. Lloyd George is obviously the older (by about twelve years). Both men are in pinstriped trousers, frock-coat, waistcoat and watch-chain, wing collar, a bow tie or necktie, and top hat. Lloyd George is carrying a furled brolly and the red despatch box. Churchill is carrying a cane and folded gloves. To our left, Margaret Lloyd George looks wary. (What woman married to Lloyd George would not look wary?) To our right, a tall and desperately humble functionary is wearing gloves and carrying a brolly and another despatch box. Behind them is a double-decker bus carrying a sign for Tatcho and Dewars, and a man with a boater and a moustache.

Lloyd George is looking at the camera, unflinchingly; Churchill is looking both determinedly and devoutly at his leader, as if seeking some sort of assurance. It is of course a still photo, but you can still sense the rhythm and purpose of their stride. Here are two men on a mission, two men who do not mind a fight – on the contrary, their opponents, both in Britain and in Germany, would from time to time lament that they would rather have had a fight than a feed.

These two, very much an odd couple of the sorcerer and his apprentice, were on their way to take from the rich to give to the poor. They were intent on developing ‘real change’ in a way and to an extent that the President of the United States and the American nation itself could never even dream of. And for that purpose they were giving battle – you might as well say that they had gone to war – with the British ruling class in a way that Karl Marx and his disciples could never have dreamed of. These two fighting men – these two British samurai – were largely responsible for winning that battle or war, and in so doing they led the reshaping of British society and its constitution. We may not see such peace-time leadership again.

Lloyd George was a Welshman, the protégé of a cobbler, a defender of the Welsh church, and a great admirer of Abraham Lincoln. Churchill was the son of a lord and an American heiress (a popular conjunction for a fading aristocracy). These two men of very different backgrounds joined together to forge what was in truth a social revolution. The opposition from entrenched wealth and class was ferocious – they had to use all their political skill, and that of Asquith, their PM, to get by. They also had to deal with two kings.

The opposition was so visceral because that vicious little Welshman appeared to be committed to something more than equality – he looked like he wanted to make the Sermon on the Mount one of the tablets of the law in England. Lloyd George had told the Commons: ‘These problems of the sick, the infirm, of the men who cannot find a means of earning a livelihood, are problems with which it is the business of the state to deal.’ Was he quite mad? Was he really saying that ‘it is the business of the state’ to deal with the sick and the unemployed? Had this little Welsh lunatic forgotten what happened to the first man who said the meek shall inherit the earth? Would that the old Duke of Wellington were here – his grace would certainly have known how to clear the stables of this sort of rabble.

Both Lloyd George and Churchill were moved by compassion – nothing more, nothing less; what Sir Lewis Namier in another context referred to as ‘plain human kindness’. Each of them was also a consummate politician, and each was alert to the politics of what they were about. Churchill had publicly warned that the Liberal Party had to begin to address social issues or die. The Labour Party was coming around the bend and might soon gobble them all up.

Competition with Germany offered a plus and a minus – the need to maintain naval supremacy was a heavy financial strain; but Bismarck had introduced a prosperous scheme for old age, for infirmity, for sickness and unemployment – and it would not do to let the Germans be seen as longer on compassion than their English descendants. The Germans were, after all, supposed to be the war-mongers, not the peace-makers.

Churchill said that the Conservatives wanted a class war. Lloyd George said there might be revolution. He loved ridiculing the Dukes, and he gave cheek to the king. In the end they got home, but it was a close-run affair.

When Lloyd George died near the end of the Second World War an exhausted war leader, Winston Churchill, stayed up until 4am to write a eulogy that he gave later that day in parliament. In it, he said:

Most people are unconscious of how much their lives have been shaped by the laws for which Lloyd George was responsible. Health insurance and old age pensions were the first large-scale state-conscious effort to set a balustrade along the crowded causeway of the people’s life …. I was his lieutenant and disciple in those bygone days, and shared in a minor way in the work. I have lived to see long strides taken, and being taken, and going to be taken, on this path of insurance by which the vultures of utter ruin are driven from the dwellings of the nation. The stamps we lick, the roads we travel, the system of progressive taxation, the principal remedies that have yet been used against unemployment – all these to a very great extent were part not only of the mission but of the actual achievement of Lloyd George ….

Each of these men was Prime Minister of England during a world war, but each is entitled to be remembered for this social revolution alone. It led directly to the change of the constitution which took from the Lords the right to stop supply. The Parliament Act 1911 caused the same kind pain as the budget as the Reform Act, 1832, but again the aristocracy did just enough to avoid death – and it was finally euthanased.

These were stirring and progressive times for Asquith, Lloyd George, and Churchill. There was another hot issue on which they were stirred but not so progressive – the rights of women, especially the right to vote. Their attitude to women reminds us of Jefferson’s attitude to slaves. Independence was a wonderful universal good; but it was not for slaves – slaves were not in the same universe. A universal franchise was a wonderful universal good: but it was not for women; women were not in the same universe. Some poor men were coming to terms with the view that they had descended from the apes – now a lunatic fringe was saying that men were no different to women. Where will it all end? In the trenches, perhaps.

The agitators came to be called suffragettes. One group started with John Stuart Mill. Of them, the French historian Elie Halevy said: ‘…its members abandoned themselves to the pleasure which English people enjoy so keenly of founding groups, gathering recruits – they began to come in large numbers – drawing up rules, electing presidents, secretaries, and treasurers, and organizing public meetings in the customary style.’ The other group was more militant. Its leader was Mrs Emily Pankhurst. They would use the word ‘militant’ in the titles of their memoirs. They were long on what cricketers call sledging to sabotage public meetings. Two of them wrecked a meeting addressed by Sir Edward Grey. They went to jail rather than pay the fine. The movement had martyrs. There is a photo of two others in a carriage on their release – they had garlands in their hair. They marched in great concourses, mixing with the unemployed. They especially targeted Grey and Lloyd George. When jailed, they went on hunger strike, and by violence made force feeding impossible. They were evicted from the Commons, but then men took their place. On Derby Day 1913, Miss Davidson committed suicide by throwing herself on the track. They put bombs in letter-boxes, and they burned down churches.

How did Monsieur Halevy relate to all his when writing in 1952? ‘The suffragettes exploited the weakness of their sex, its proneness to hysteria.’ It was not all violence. There was a political movement. One group broke with the Liberals to support the Labour Party. The leaders of that party were not wild with enthusiasm about the idea, but the women had real money, and money talks. Then Mrs Pankhurst got nine years’ jail, but what good would that do in the face of fanatics intent on martyrdom and bombing? Should the Establishment follow the example of Napoleon and the Tsars and answer fire with fire?

Then a much, much more earthy but powerful force intervened that made all this internal conflict and excitement look both irrelevant and tawdry. We recall from our discussion of the Anglo-Saxon levee of arms, of the law not simply allowing arms to be borne but requiring their men to carry arms, that such a law promotes a kind of equality. If the state depends on you to protect and sustain it, then your standing in the state is so much surer. Even the feudal relation went both ways – the vassal gave service, but the lord had to protect the vassal; if the lord did not discharge his obligation, the vassal was freed from his obedience. If you fight for someone, you expect them to look after you.

At 6 am at Brussels on 12 October 1915, a German firing party assembled for that purpose executed by firing squad an English nurse named Edith Cavell. Edith was forty-nine, the daughter of a vicar at a village near Norwich. She had been practising her profession in Belgium before the war broke out. Then she was engaged in saving the lives of both British and German soldiers. She had also spied, but she was tried before a German military court for helping about 200 British soldiers to escape. She had therefore been aiding the enemy. She freely admitted what she had done. The verdict and sentence were open to the German military court, but the latter was a frightful military mistake.

The night before she died, Edith Cavell took Holy Communion with an Anglican priest. She told him that ‘patriotism is not enough.’ Those four words should be enrolled on every military school, mess, and court in the land; they are on her memorial at Trafalgar Square, and for them alone Edith Cavell should be remembered. The next morning she told a German Lutheran chaplain that ‘I am glad to die for my country.’ The German laws under which she was executed did not discriminate between men and women; neither did the English laws; laws against treason or military laws rarely do. It is not recorded that the condemned prisoner showed any of the suggested weakness of her sex, ‘its proneness to hysteria,’ in the time leading up to her being shot for what she had done for her country.

Now, here you had a hero, a real hero, the kind of hero that a nation can sustain its faith on. It was open to the Germans to say to Edith Cavell that if it was good enough for you to aid our enemy then it is good enough for you to be executed under the laws of war. So could the women of England say to their government that if it is good enough for us to die to see that the country is run properly, it is good enough for us to vote to see that the country is run properly. That argument is unanswerable; it was unanswerable even by those inbred fops out of Eton who had been sheltered from girls by mummy and daddy, but to whom exclusion came naturally, and who believed that old fairy tale about the battle of Waterloo being won on the playing fields of Eton.

When they voted against these reforms, had Asquith, Lloyd George and Churchill forgotten that their longest serving monarch, before whom all mere Prime Ministers had kow-towed, was a woman; that the monarch who defeated the Spanish Armada, and who had put on a uniform before addressing her troops at Tilbury, was a woman; and that the mother of God was, of necessity, a woman?

These World Wars fell to be won or lost in the great armaments factories at home, and in the great arsenal of the United States. And those fields of war were mainly staffed by women. By the end of the First World War, there were nearly five million women in the workforce, and many of them were engaged in armaments and munitions. You cannot deny the vote to those you depend on to win your wars.

There is another point. This was not the time for the ruling classes of Europe to be saying ‘Leave well enough alone. Leave it to us.’ The rulers of Europe behaved appallingly to get Europe into war, and then they behaved even worse in allowing inept officer classes to lead millions upon millions of poor workers to useless death in the mud of the Western Front. The Kaiser and the Tsar – both deriving from Caesar – were deposed forever, but many of the men at the front thought that in an orderly world the entire officer corps – or at least the entire general staff – should have had to face the penalty faced by Edith Cavell for a war crime constituted by sending men to their death when there was no reasonable prospect of their being able to obtain a tactical or strategic objective. It is very hard to believe that people like Haig behaved as they did while believing that the men that they were killing were as valuable as those men at the top.

The move to equality therefore was bottom up and top down. The men and women at the bottom believed that they were worth more, and that those at the top were worse than useless. Women had to get the vote. They did in 1918, although then only those who had made it to thirty were trusted. The battle was in substance over. But some would not be able to break free of caste. When the first woman MP took her place in the House, Winston Churchill could not bring himself to acknowledge the presence of this infidel in his temple – although he had broken bread with her in her own house.

[There is an interlude about the rule of law in war.]

The other great constitutional issues for England in the twentieth century were the granting of sovereignty to the colonies and the ceding of sovereignty to Europe. Neither is part of this book, and we may close the history by referring to two other matters, each, as it happens, involving a woman.

England had to wait more than half a century to see the vote for women being translated into a woman as Prime Minister. Her name was Margaret Thatcher, and she aroused strong feelings back then. She arouses even stronger feelings now – and not just in England, but in the colonies. We will therefore completely ignore her politics. Why are we looking at her at all in a book about the constitution? Because the fact that Margaret Thatcher became PM about sixty years after Winston Churchill could not acknowledge a lady friend in the House of Commons says something about the tolerance and capacity of the English to adapt to change and to accept diversity.

Three things about the Iron Lady. First, to get where she did, she had to get past those who were still the prisoners of their shibboleths about sex, many of the ilk of Monsieur Halevy. But more than that, she had to confront and overcome the most appalling snobbery. ‘In the name of Heaven, my dear boy, her father was an alderman – an alderman! – at Grantham – at Grantham! – and she – yes, SHE – stood behind the counter at a shop! Not even trade, Old Boy! Retail. Bloody retail, Old Boy. Not at this club! If she gets in, she will prove Napoleon right – a nation of bloody shopkeepers.’

Secondly, before she was elected, Mrs Thatcher said what she would do. She had a policy and it was different to that of anyone else. She was not afraid to adopt a position and then stick to it. We do not see politicians like that now. They cower behind minders and opinion polls and the dregs of the press.

Finally, when she became PM, Mrs Thatcher was not going to take any nonsense from any of those boys in either party who had not supported her, or who had let England down – and there were not many boys that were in neither category. They were lined up on shelves like laced up poodles so that she could from time to time wipe the floor with them. If the world knew a stronger political leader at that time, it was a very well-kept secret. Perhaps that is why she still makes so many people generally, and men in particular, anxious. The only PM since to try to take a position has been sullied by Napoleonic ambitions in the Middle East evidenced by decisions to go to war based on false premises and not even referred to Cabinet –and a Napoleonic refusal to apologize to the nation.

Well, it took time to produce a Mrs Thatcher, but she certainly gave them something to talk about. The Latin countries have not made it yet. They are the ones bringing Europe down because they cannot balance their books. Might there be a causal connection between the inability of France, Italy, Spain and Greece to elect a woman leader, and their inability to run their own economies? How strong is the economy of the nation being run by Frau Merkel?

Finally, for more than 1000 years, the great stain on England’s record was Ireland. The history is too long and too painful to recount. In 2011, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II visited Ireland, the first English monarch to visit the Irish Republic. A descendant of a people that had come over the water from Saxon forests, this singular queen is descended from another German line from around Hanover. She was visiting a land of Celtic people with their own royal line. The visit was an unqualified success. The Irish President, also a woman, palpably gasped when the queen began a major speech in Irish in one of those parts of the program broadcast live on TV to a breathless Irish diaspora around the world. There is good reason to believe that the peace will now hold, and that both nations can move on. This was an affecting instance of the way that the English crown still holds an essential working place in the English constitution whose story we have tried to trace.

Serving it up to the boys – at the Cup

03/11/201503/11/2015 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

She did not just win, comfortably – she stuck right up them. She said that some in a chauvinistic sport had tried to get her off the horse – they could go and get stuffed. As could those who did not think that women were up to it. She radiated defiance, in a great moment, a very great moment for us, and not just in sport. It was thrilling. it was like an America’s Cup moment.

And then it got surreal. Instead of this bright new star, we got three bourgeois suits – one of them with a gong, in the name of God – just banging on. And on. The trainer brought us back to earth. A true man of the soil from Ballarat – who had stuck by his jockey in the face of opposition. He said there would be a do at the pub. The jockey was again not short for words. And her brother, who suffers from Down Syndrome, got an award as the strapper.

Not all the toffs or the money in the world can top that story, and some day the timeless Australian face of Michelle Payne will look down on us from a postage stamp.

Passing bull 20 Think tanks’ drag

03/11/201503/11/2015 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Mr John Roskam is a God-send to a bullshit column; almost as solid as Freedom Boy. In his AFR piece the other day, Mr Roskam was on a favourite mantra. Mr Turnbull should not raise taxes. Why? He shouldn’t even be contemplating raising taxes. Australia is already a high-tax country. The second reason is that raising taxes is easy. Mr Roskam says that the Productivity Commission supports the IPA research. He laments that neither received media coverage. Have you noticed this paranoia on that side? Someone actually complained that Christianity was not getting a fair run. Try that on a Muslim or Buddhist. In a nation whose head of state has to be an Anglican.

Then we go straight to another mantra or slogan. ‘There’s one thing that’s even harder to do in Australia than cutting government spending, or restoring freedom of speech – although it’s not as hard as Turnbull seems to think it is. Does anyone honestly believe that in a free country it should be against the law to insult someone?’

In Victoria, you can go to jail for insulting, indecent or offensive behaviour in public. Take the following examples.

On a tense, packed train full of drunks after a Collingwood v Carlton match, one supporter says to one of the opposite camp ‘You’se sucks were hiding behind the fuckin’ door when they handed out guts. You are a push-over.’

On a less packed tram to North Balwyn during the daytime, a fourteen year old girl discusses her sex life on her mobile phone loudly enough for the whole tram to hear. ‘I was so horny, I could have fucked a horse.’ After that, it gets a little personal. Other people of various ages and backgrounds are discomfited – except for one evidently stimulated bogan who is showing unsettling symptoms of becoming amorous.

While he is opening a garden show, the Governor General is insulted in obscene terms by a group of men naked except for lippy, tattoos and tutus, who claim to be upset that His Excellency, Sir Peter, sold out for a gong.

A very well dressed group of people who object to the grants made to performing arts and the mining company sponsoring this concert take a seat for the Mozart Requiem and start insulting the miner on their mobile phones during the Kyrie.

At a military funeral in Australia for an Australian soldier killed in Afghanistan, a well-dressed and quietly behaved group of demonstrators parade outside the church in silence. Their only protest is to carry placards denouncing going to war for the U S. The placards say that the Americans are fascists. The widow is horrified. The brother of the deceased vows to kill the demonstrators. Comrades in uniform look like they will do just that.

A frustrated suitor marches up and down the street outside a wedding with a loud hailer saying that the bride is a slut but Snow White compared to Mum. On the bride’s side, deranged Black Belt Martial Arts Champions are foaming; the groom’s side is quieter – they are down from the sticks. On Ice.

Mantras and slogans collapse in the light of the facts. They are like bats. They disappear in the light. The first object of the law is to keep the peace. That is why it is against the law to engage in conduct that will lead to a breach of the peace. Offensive or insulting conduct in public can lead to a breach of the peace. Does Mr Roskam honestly believe that in a civilised country, the police should be powerless to intervene in these cases because to do so would inhibit people from expressing their views? If the offensive or insulting conduct is based on race, is it not so much more dangerous?

This deformed simplicity was at the heart of the Abbott disaster.

Poet of the Month: Gwen Harwood

He sings, often at night; his voice is shocking.

The embarrassed aristocracy are fuel

for his crude wit, and something wild and cruel

flashes through early sweetness. Fate is knocking

………

……Half his life is gone.

Now from your dolphin hands I learn the strong

leaping of spirit through a temporal sea

of human love and grief. Pain breaks upon

these notes in splintering twills; here, changed to song,

wears the calm aspect of divinity.

(From Beethoven, 1798)

He couldn’t dance either.

PS I have a small investment on the German horse in the Cup, but I offer hope, not warranty.

New books

31/10/201531/10/2015 / Geoffrey Gibson / 2 Comments

Having achieved the biblical age, at which all judges must be younger than me, I have decided to release a book a day over the last three days – partly to keep the house in order, and partly in case God takes a different view about departure times. The three books just released are, like the recent one on Summers in Oxford and Cambridge, collections of notes and essays previously released. I would hope that they might all suit the general reader. The collection on legal history might be reserved for lawyers, but it should be mandatory for all of them.

There is plenty of choice for Christmas shopping.

There is a mighty footy match tonight – may peace be upon the Wallabies. They have nearly restored my faith in sport.

***

Summers in Oxford and Cambridge and Elsewhere

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

Geoffrey Gibson

2015

CONTENTS

PRAGUISH 2005

Reflections on Prague, Oxford, and the Cavalry and Guards Club

PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION (OXFORD) 2007

The philosophy of religion at Oxford

OF BERLIN, OXFORD AND ELSEWHERE 2007

Berlin, Dresden, Paris, Oxford (Great Opera Singers), London, Cavalry and Guards and RAF Clubs

A WEEK AT OXFORD AND CAMBRIDGE 2009

Oxford (Hume and Kant) and Cambridge (Post-Modernism – playing tennis with the net down)

BERLIN NOW – A MOLESKIN DIARY 2010

Berlin and the World Cup

OXFORD AND CAMBRIDGE 2010

Wittgenstein at Oxford and Bach at Cambridge

CROMWELL (CAMBRIDGE) 2011

Course taught by Dr David Smith

SOJOURN IN SCOTLAND 2011

Touring the Highlands

CAMBRIDGE AND OXFORD 2013

Not keeping the peace at Cambridge and Chaucer at Oxford

FOREWORD

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.

Geoffrey Gibson

Melbourne

September 2015

41,000 words

SOME LITERARY PAPERS

Tilting at windmills

Geoffrey Gibson

2015

CONTENTS

Foreword

Adolph and Richard

Meditating upon evil – Richard III (Shakespeare) and Adolf Hitler

Anna and Penny

A note on Anna Karenin and Penelope Cruz – mainly the former

Big Four of Shakespeare

My problems

A personal miscellany on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth

Chaucer and hierarchy

The medieval hierarchy of Chaucer

Courtliness and Courtesy

The role of courtliness and courtesy in Shakespeare

Covert acts in Hamlet

Mystery within mystery in Hamlet

Crime and Punishment

A note on the Dostoevsky novel

Crime Fiction

A note on the novels of Donna Leon

Dead Proud Heroes

The argument, as Milton used to call it, is that the heroes of our two great epics, The Iliad and Paradise Lost, fell through pride. We have grown out of heroes who seek honour through valour and we have grown out of the myth that a woman was the author of our original sin. We look to our epics for heroes for our times. The hero of The Iliad is Priam. He declares that he is human by breaking free of the cycle of revenge. The hero of Paradise Lost is Satan. He has the courage to defy authority and to break the ties that stopped our becoming human. Our epics still show us what we are.

Doctor Zhivago

The great novel of Boris Pasternak

Falstaff, Tchaikovsky, and Gatsby

Serendipity, theatre, concert hall and the Storm

Four pilgrims in Chaucer

Four pilgrims in the Prologue for Oxford Summer School

Henry IV at the Globe

A great play in a great theatre

Imagination, snobbery, and enlightenment

The place of snobbery and meaning in literature

Kangaroo

A note on the novel by D H Lawrence

Pasternak on Shakespeare

Thoughts of Pasternak on Shakespeare from two works

Poets in prose; and the First Fleet

Tony and Betty! Rope and Pulley!

Whimsy

Provincial Cooking

The art of prose of Elizabeth David

Rich and Will

Richard Burton on William Shakespeare

Riders in the Chariot

A great novel pf Patrick White

The novel as opera: dramatic truth

Thoughts on literary and historical meaning

Two big novels

Middlemarch and Les Miserables

Two novelists on Shakespeare

Tolstoy and Flaubert

24 Shakespeare’s Fan

John Keats idolised Shakespeare

Sons and Lovers – A Little Touch of Hamlet in the Night

D H Lawrence and Hamlet

Throwaways

The lines in Shakespeare that come from nowhere out of nothing

Who is that can tell me who I am?

The bottomless depth of King Lear

Foreword

These essays and notes come from the last five years or so. They come from a lawyer and they do not claim to be works of scholarship. I have written elsewhere about Shakespeare, great writing in history, and our great novels. About half of the present pieces relate to Shakespeare, some in an anecdotal manner, although the grip of the Big Four goes on. Most of these have been published by the Melbourne Shakespeare Society. The other pieces relate to other kinds of writing, from cooking to crime, but with a few on novels. The two substantive essays deal with great peaks in our literature – the role of Achilles and Satan in our two greatest epics, and our two greatest characters, Falstaff and Don Quixote. If you said that the whole book was Quixotic, I would he happy.

Geoffrey Gibson

Malmsbury

Victoria

Reformation Day (Martin Luther Day)

2015

The 70^th birthday of the author.

80,000 words

LOOKING DOWN THE WELL

Papers on legal history

Geoffrey Gibson

2015

CONTENTS

Foreword

1689 and 1789

Aide Memoire on Terminology

Different phases of constitutional change in England, France, and Russia

God Save Our Anglican Queen

Our Constitution is religiously biased in a way that is beyond us

Blackstone’s Magna Carta

A view of Magna Carta from the author of the American legal bible

The Role of Contract in the English Constitution

Why are English historians so coy about contract in their constitution?

The Dragon in the Cave

How America lost the War of Independence

As America continues to deal with the lesion of slavery and the separateness of black and white, its continuing fascination with God and guns means that it has not lived up to its revolutionary promise. The Americans do not understand the history of the English Constitution. The decision of the Supreme Court in Heller is a throwback that puts into relief the failure of the nation to grow up.

English Serfs

What did serfdom mean in England?

Free Speech: Am I Free to Insult or Offend You?

The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely.

A look at some of the nonsense about ‘freedom of speech.’

Hampden: A Note

A first look at Ship Money

How Moses v Macferlan Enriched Our Law –

Lord Mansfield’s Heresy

The origin of our law of Unjust Enrichment

Jury and Parliament

From adviser to the Crown to the protector of the people. We have not done enough to recognise how the jury and the parliament are there to protect us.

Penalties

How Do Public Servants Punish Us?

Positions of Trust: A Duty of Integrity

That we should know and respect our history does not entail that we should stay locked in jails built for other purposes. The word ‘fiduciary’ causes people to go round in circles.

Sir Paul

The juristic work of Vinogradoff

The Ship Money Case

The case that stopped a nation: the biggest case ever?

The Trial of the Seven Bishops

Another case that stopped the nation – litigation as sport.

The Tyrannicide Brief

A review of The Tyrannicide Brief, Geoffrey Robertson, Vintage, 2006, PB $35.00 (429 pages). (Written in 2006)

Three slippery words – liberty, freedom and prerogative

The ancients too were seduced by labels

800 Years On

Outlawry was a form of process, or unprocess, developed by Anglo-Saxons in the Dark Age when the notion of a judiciary was not known and when the only choice above this world was between God and Satan. In the year of Our Lord 2015, the closest Australian advisers of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II – still the Supreme Governor of the Church of England but not the Empress of India – are conducting an audible debate about reintroducing a form of outlawry by depriving people of their rights as citizens of the Commonwealth without any judgment of their peers. If they persuade the parliament and Her Majesty to make a law to that effect, they will risk going back more than 800 years and breaking a promise made by the English Crown that it would not go or send against any free man except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.

It took the English about seven centuries to build the rule of law and the Westminster system, with a little help from the Americans at the end. It will take only a fraction of that time to lose both. We have already given up two essential parts: that the executive should be run by an apolitical civil service with secure tenure, and that ministers should be responsible to the parliament for the failings of that civil service. There has been an obvious and sustained decline in the quality of people attracted to the parliament or the executive. That decline has not yet substantially damaged the judiciary, but there is little ground to hope that the decline will be reversed, or that the judiciary will remain untainted.

In a real sense, a lot of our legal process goes back to Magna Carta, given, it is thought, on 15 June 2015. English philosophers have ignored it. English legal historians and too many judges have just got it wrong, including some who should have known better. Curiously, it is better known and better understood in places like the U S and Australia that are used to working under a written compact that separates powers and that has the force of binding and supreme law.

Magna Carta is one of the title deeds of Western civilisation, and the most significant tablet of the law in our history. It is worth celebrating its 800^th birthday.

Appendix

Some tips for young advocates

Foreword

A great English judge, Lord Devlin, said that the ‘English jury is not what it is because some lawgiver so decreed, but because that is the way it has grown up’. That is so true of almost every part of our law. Our law is its history.

This is why anyone claiming to be a real lawyer, and not just a bean-counter or meter-watcher, needs to get hand to hand with our legal history. It is a rollicking story going for more than a thousand years of a people with a genius for law-making while pretending that they were doing no such thing. It is the story of how the world got its only workable way of protecting people against bullies and each other – whether in the form of government or at large.

That which took a millennium to construct could be washed down the drain in a generation. We have already trashed two vital parts of our governance – responsible government, and an independent civil service – and we have been scandalously weak in standing up for juries. These failings come in large part because we have chosen to forget and then betray our heritage. Sadly, I see no prospect of that decline being reversed.

Geoffrey Gibson

Malmsbury

Victoria

Australia

31 October 2015

70 years to the day from his birth.

95,000 words

SOME HISTORY PAPERS

Essays on Modern History in England and Europe

Geoffrey Gibson

Melbourne, Australia, 2

CONTENTS

Foreword

1 A Remarkable Politician- Joseph Fouché

The life of Fouché, terrorist in the Revolution, who survived Robespierre and then Napoleon – a cold blooded killer who became the ultimate survivor.

2 A Secular State

A look at the impact of the Reformation on the rule of law and the secular state in England and France compared to Spain under Franco.

3 A C Grayling

The Philosophy of a Man and the Atom Bomb

A detailed study of the arguments about bombing cities and civilians.

4 Cromwell

A short analysis of Cromwell as dictator following a Summer School at Cambridge taught by Dr David Smith.

5 Foretelling Armageddon

The Two Books that Predicted the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

(With note on the Rise and Fall as they happened)

An essay on how Keynes and Hitler wrote books that predicted in detail the Second World War plus a summary of events as they unfolded.

6 La patrie violente

A detailed view of the century of unrest and violence that followed the outset of the French Revolution and reflections on the notion of historical truth.

7.Money and Politics

American gridlock and the refusal of supply – a failure in governance.

8 Napoleon and Hitler

Meditating upon Evil

A detailed comparison of the lives of Napoleon and Hitler and of the deaths they caused.

9 Oxford Essays on the Stuarts

The Anti-Catholic Tradition in late Stuart Society

Two essays about the Stuarts and the Constitution for an Oxford Summer School.

10 Some historians

An essay about great British and European historians, and Pieter Geyl.

11 The Have-nots are Going Down

A brief note on the rising problem of inequality.

12 The Last Two Samurai

An essay on how Lloyd George and Winston Churchill led a social revolution and brought in the Welfare State.

13 Faust and Perfidy in Albion

The Treaty of Dover 1670

How a King Sold his Soul – Or Did He?

An essay about a king selling out a country for God and gold.

14 Why the French Revolution was not English

An essay on the differences in revolutions in France and England.

15 Witchhunts, Holy Wars, and Failures of the Mind

An essay on witchhunts and holy wars from Salem to McCarthy; consideration of relations between Church and State.

Foreword

These papers were written between 2008 and 2015. They relate to what we call the modern history of Europe and Britain. Some were written in or as a result of Summer Schools at Cambridge and Oxford. For example, the two pieces headed Foretelling Armageddon were first written as course notes at Clare College Cambridge, and now can be found in the fifth volume of A History of the West.

Five of the essays deal with the two big questions that have followed me for fifty years – how did France and Germany, two of the most civilised nations on earth, succumb to their total moral collapses, and with such frightful consequences for the rest of the world? If you are being raped or killed by a soldier, do you care about the motives of those who sent him.

Three of the pieces deal with issues in Stuart England, and all come from Summer Schools. My notes on Cromwell come from a remarkable weekender at Cambridge taught by Dr David Smith; those on the Stuart parliaments come from a week at Oxford taught by Dr Andrew Lacey. The story of the Treaty of Dover should be told in a play or film.

There is a long look at the very flawed views on the bomb of A C Grayling, who might just be too busy to be able to indulge in scholarship, and a piece on the great story of Lloyd George and Winston Churchill on the People’s Budget – at a time when politics had real leaders. The piece on witchhunts is the oldest, but the bullying of the majority is still just as threatening.

These are contributions by a lawyer and a legal historian whose professional training teaches him to proceed by example, and to look at what goes on elsewhere. I hope that you enjoy them.

Geoffrey Gibson

Malmsbury

Victoria

Melbourne Cup Day, 2015.

128,000 words.

Up Your North – Parts 10 to 13

26/10/201526/10/2015 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

The trip from Kununurra to Katherine is about 500ks. It takes about five hours and there is a one and a half hour time change from Western to Central Australia. I had originally planned to break the trip with a night at Timber Creek or Victoria River, but I changed my mind to have more night in Katherine.

It was just as well – these places have roadhouse accommodation, and not much else. They are not as depressing as Halls Creek, but nothing to write home about either. There is some very attractive escarpment country around those two stops, and some big river views, but otherwise the trip is uneventful.

I was finishing off the Iliad read by Anton Lesser. Since I also have him reading Paradise Lost and this was the Cowper translation, I could easily get the two epics confused – there are plenty of battles and ‘consults’. I forget how Cowper translates the part where Priam, the father of the Trojan warrior Hector seeks out that outrageous sulk Achilles to reclaim the slain body of his son, but I recall Peter O’Toole in a frightful film saying:

I have done what no man before me has done

I have kissed the hand of the man who killed my son.

We find it remarkable that those lines were written between two and three thousand years ago. The Bungles were being formed hundreds of millions of years ago. God knows how long the blackfellas have been there – somewhere well beyond 40,000 years, possibly as much as twenty times the period between Homer and us.

Some people do not speak well of Katherine, but I saw nothing untoward – at least in comparison to what I had seen elsewhere. The aborigines can get raucous at night, and I saw hardly any assimilation, but the parties appear to have achieved a kind of modus vivendi. There is a strong police presence – and I do mean presence – and the liquor restrictions are different. I was told that extra police were in town to crack down on those restrictions.

Sure enough, when I went to a bottle shop, there was a copper just standing outside, and casting a benign eye on some blackfellas kicking up a small ruckus down the road. Chris at the Pine Tree Motel had told me I would be asked to produce my licence, and evidence of my accommodation. I just bought some beer and wine and the young lady who served me waved aside my licence and room-key – she said I would have needed that for cask wine or fortified wine but not for what I had bought. Since the copper was only ten feet away, I think she was probably right. I could recall Frank saying that they had stopped cask wine in Broome, but that this had upset the grey nomads and done little for the blackfellas.

When I drove out to Katherine Gorge, I passed a stern sign: ‘Keep out – community access only.’ I take it that ‘community’ meant the local indigenous tribes. If so, it really means ‘Whites keep out,’ a kind of reverse apartheid. Putting to one side questions of legality, I could not help wondering about the wisdom of this policy. Ironically, an ambulance was going in as I passed, and I assumed that the signed prohibition would not have extended to white ambulance officers called to attend to sick aborigines. I daresay that if a pub put up a sign ‘Blackfellas keep out,’ we would hear a different level of noise.

Depending on your direction of travel, you might be about gorged out by the time that you get to the Katherine Gorge. It is a short drive on a sealed road and there are quite adequate amenities – including helicopters, canoes, cruise boats, and a good café and shop. The daily weather sign said: ‘38 and humid. Start walks early.’ After ten minutes in the sun, I knew what they meant and started to feel signs of distress. I retreated to the shop and museum and took in the sights by a slide show. It featured very large and nasty snakes as well as crocs, and killed any idea I might have had of a longer walk. I took tea in the café served by a Frenchman and a blackfella. I even got in a gag.

I cased a ‘Happy’ takeaway joint just around the corner from the Pine Tree Motel. I observed that it was being patronised by black locals and white copper (in a lethal looking Monaro) and that people of Chinese extraction were working the kitchen. By the time I got there for dinner, the Chinese food was off the menu, and for the first time in my life I ate Barramundi, which is everywhere up here – with a load of batter that would bring tears to the eyes of the heart surgeon whose opinion I am waiting on.

On the first night at the Pine Tree, I had had a choose-your-own hamburger with other guests around the barbecue beside the pool. This becomes a social hub, as at the Ibis in Kununurra. This motel is very well and happily run, and it is a good place to stay in Katherine. The staff are very friendly, and I like a place where the staff can take the mickey out of the boss –who is patiently used to switching on wifi into the iphones of idiots like me.

For the first time in ten days I bought a newspaper. That was a mistake. Then I made a bigger mistake. I switched on the TV – and to an Australian news service. There I saw film of two oafs – Abbott and Dutton – standing before God knows how many of our silly imperial flags and devoutly singing the national anthem as they launched a group pf Blackshirts who had sworn, apparently, a kind of oath of fealty to their uniform. This film was being shown because that day these blackshirted clowns had already revealed themselves as serious Keystone Cops by threatening to arrest the City of Melbourne.

The road from Katherine to Kakadu is not of much interest. There was a venerable old store called Ah Toy’s at pine Creek that somehow reminded me of Cannery Row. There is a further roadhouse at Mount Mary, but I would not advise staying at any of these places, like Halls Creek, Timber Creek, or Victoria River, except in emergency. The services are better in the bigger towns, and in some of these places, it is the white people who look scratchy. The Mount Mary roadhouse featured a large set of photos of ugly looking snakes. I bought a black long-sleeved T with a croc on it. It should be well received when the bikies are in town. This Mount Mary is very different to the home of those distinguished Victorian reds.

The whole road from there into Jabiluka is burnt out. At one time, I drove through heavy smoke, and in clear sight of an unattended blaze. That can be unsettling to survivors of Black Saturday in Victoria.

Cooinda Lodge is about 50 ks south of the main tourist centre of Jabiluka. It is very modern and swish. At $300+ a night, it bloody well ought to be. It is light years away from my accommodation for the previous Saturday, the famous Bungles Caravan Park, and I planned to savour the difference after an easy three hour drive, starting with a slap-up lunch. It is only about 290 ks to Darwin from here, and I was checked in early, by a young French man and American woman, while a Russian maid called Emily finished servicing my room or cabin.

There is a cosmopolitan feeling all along the route, but one thing that you notice in the Kimberley is the genuine pride of the locals in what they have to offer. You get it all the time, and I did not feel it as much in Kakadu. As I remarked to Maria at Cathedral Gorge, I could recall going up through the centre in 1964 via Alice Springs, Tenant Creek and Mount Isa, and hitch-hiking back from Townsville. I was struck by the number of people who would point out the window, and say: ‘Do you see that country there? That is God’s country, mate.’ I thought that this was bonzer – until I found out about their politics

One thing I noticed immediately about my room – or suite – at Cooinda – beautifully built as it was (and opened by Clyde Holding) – is that it does not have a welcome book showing the services of the establishment, a phone, a writing desk, or even a chair inside – they are all outside, on your own portico, but not so easy to put inside. Nor does the Lodge offer wifi. The Pine Tree Lodge offered all this and more – at about one third of the cost. Even the humble Derby Lodge Motel had a phone and wifi. The upshot is that I am for the first time out of touch on-line – and in the dearest place. We are I fear in rip-off territory.

The lunch was mostly self-serve and not air-conditioned. The restaurant was said to be closed for a private function – for the whole of my stay, as I would discover. The couple beside me had to clear their own table.

I had seen enough to cancel the third night. I am very much in favour of the Scottish – it may be British – system of accredited ratings to tourist accommodation, where you have to offer certain facilities to get so many stars. Since tourism is a real part of our economy, this is a matter of national interest. I am wondering if the Territory does as good a job as W A. Nor do I think that we as a nation have any interest in offering up products to people from our major trading partners that make us look like Hicks – or crooks.

You do not need a Harvard MBA to know that in hospitality, first impressions count. If a relationship starts badly, because something obvious is missing, it may never recover. Some people have no sense of business at all. I was reminded of a Shell servo 300 meters off the highway as you come into Kununurra from the west. It is invisible from the highway, but it has a car-wash that I later heard of by accident. While I was getting change for the car-wash from the nice Asian man at the counter, a wizened local was giving him a razz about his boss. It looked to me like she lets a large part of the population of Australia just cruise by without even knowing that she is there.

Well, what man has left out, God might put together. As you come up from Katherine, there are the Edith Falls which are part of the Nitmiluk National Park (Katherine Gorge), and in the Kakadu N P, there is Maguk (Barramundi Gorge) before you reach Cooinda. I had been there before, so from now on I was on ground that was not new. They say that you can get a swim up there.

At Cooinda, there is the Yellow Water, and you are not far from the Jim Jim Falls turn-off, another 50+ks of brutal road, and Noarlangie Rock, which is a far more accessible site, even for wheelchairs, and which features some rock art. I had previously gone up to the aboriginal settlement at Oenpelli where all grog is banned, and I had seen a footy match where the blackfellas were running around in bare feet kicking goals from all angles, while some white boys waddled round to make up the numbers. The one thing that tourists should do here is to take a fixed wing flight to get a view of the escarpment, and a sense of what Arnhem Land is like. It is as if you are seeing it as God made it. The aerial view of the crocs in the Gulph is, for the want of a better word, impressive.

The lodge redeemed itself a little at dinner when it offered a lamb shank. The shank was on the bar before the drink I ordered – which was a shiraz from a chilled bottle into a chilled glass, poured by a young woman from Melbourne to go with a shank ordered from a young man from Indiana. We had quite a chat about Lincoln. It was not until the next night that I learned that I could get a red unchilled, and a full bottle of it – after I had been unable to buy a bottle in Jabiluka – and there is not much more reason to go in there.

Breakfast was fair, but at $300+ a night, I do not expect to have to get salt and pepper in packets to apply to food on a bare unset table. It was not nearly as good as the breakfast at Pine Tree Motel, which served the best bacon I have eaten in Australia.

After I revisited some sites, I took a pleasant buffet lunch. When I asked the man at the bar the temperature, he consulted his iphone. He said he was on Telstra and that they had their own signal station. I then got reception to fix mine – something about data usage – and I was back in touch. This is the kind of thing that should be dealt with in the introduction book, but I did notice then that they had a sign apologising for not having wifi. And I found out that at this location they were not offering half hour flights – that is a shame, because you can see a lot in 30 minutes, and I doubt whether the extra expense is worth it.

While out, I picked up two backpackers from France, Toulouse and Lyon. I was a little surprised that they did not know what had happened to Lyon during the Terror, or the identity of the man responsible.

There was a very scenic billabong with a jetty at the end of the path outside my cabin. It is sternly guarded with warnings, this time in at least some other languages, about the capacity of salt-water crocs to kill people. The nice young French man at reception told me that they used to fish off that jetty, but had lost some enthusiasm when they kept catching the eye of a seven meter croc who looked unhappy.

XII

The bad news for the AFL is that the footy grounds from Katherine to Jabiluka are for rugby. They only get to AFL at about Darwin, and the road into there from Kakadu is what a Danish prince called ‘weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable.’ That citation seems hardly apt since on my way in I was listening to Dylan Thomas sounding like an inflated Welsh cantor with a bad hangover.

The road is not in good nick, and for about 20ks I was locked between two four-unit road trains because there was no overtaking lane – which did not stop two presumably local maniacs whistling past the three of us, and the Welsh poet, when they could not possibly have known if it was safe to do so. I recalled that Bob from Albany had given another reason for leaving driving up to the pros – ‘You never what kind of stuff some idiot coming the other way may be on.’ The risk of hoons rises as you get near a city – I did not see any dangerous driving in the outback.

Darwin is bigger than I recall it, an odd kind of cosmopolitan kitsch and tropical drop-out zone. The main issue is the temperature – it is either uncomfortable or unbearable.

I discussed this and other things at the drop-off point for the Nissan. I told the very relaxed and amiable guys there that it had not missed a beat, but that the launch had been at best farcical. I noticed their eyes dilate on a couple of issues, and they had a firm view about the superiority of the Toyota. (The precise phrase was ‘a shitload of difference.’) We also discussed the weather conditions. I thought I should have come earlier; they said it would be more dry, but it is hard to imagine it drier than I saw it. The Wetlands coming into Darwin were bone dry and scarred by fire. But if you go in the wet, the heat gets much worse, and you risk roads, including major roads becoming impassable. I said that I did not fancy stalling in a stream and looking out for crocs. They said that on the road to Oenpelli, which I had passed that morning, and driven through some years ago, you could see crocodile tracks getting closer to the road as the water rose to cover it. That is the sort of thing that you would rather hear at the end a trip than at the beginning. It would not be pleasant to become a person of interest to a croc in a place like that.

I took pot luck on the Novotel in town. It was more than adequate and a about half the price and much better appointed than my lodging the night before.

Before dinner, I watched a documentary on NITV about an aborigine who had been very badly on the grog for many years. He had got off it, and now holds a solo pilot’s licence. That seemed to me to be a very large achievement. He spoke very movingly. The young people need to learn their culture ‘because that is their life.’ The risk is that they end up between cultures and with no tribe. No wonder so many succumb to the empty darkness of the bottle.

I took dinner at the hotel outside on the most balmy evening I had felt the whole time away. I joined an Irish environmental scientist from Limerick. He was very interesting on the economic recovery of Ireland and the reversal of the great migration that is now happening – he and his New Zealand wife will certainly stay here.

Later we invited Heinz, a German from Frankfurt not far south of me in years. Heinz had just spent about two weeks in the middle of nowhere – Arnhem Land – with some colleagues and a guide. He regularly comes here or goes to Africa to hunt. Hunting in Germany is much, much more upmarket than here. It is obviously a lifelong passion for Heinz. You could see it in his eyes and hear it in his voice. His specialty – if that is the term: ‘party trick’ would be tart – is that he uses what is called a flintlock rifle. It is a replica of a muzzle loaded rifle in use about 250 years ago. It is literally ‘powder and shot’ – but you only get one shot. You need to be within 50 yards to kill one of those big bullocks, so you need to have a steady nerve, and a back-up, who presumably knows how to operate a weapon with a lot bigger calibre than my 30.06 Steyr (made in Austria, and used by Australian infantry). I forget the calibre of the shot that Heinz uses, but I think it was at least of the order of the biggest used in orthodox bolt action rifles made today.

This was a really compelling discussion – with photos. I have only seen passion and acquired skill like that in fly fishermen. I remember a discussion at the Ballarat Fly Fishers’ Club when I was discussing shooting. The guy I was talking to pointed to a member who was on the land. He said: ‘Do you see that guy – he hunts like he fishes. Just bloody deadly.’ You come across it in all sports. At one casting lesson, I said ‘Who’s that old bugger over there trying his hand’. ‘A former Australian champion, you bloody idiot.’ That’s the bloody trouble – they make it look so bloody easy.

We discussed the different kinds of lightning in Europe, Africa, and Australia. I was amazed by it in Africa, and Heinz was attracted to it here. Lightning is likely to be of interest to white hunters and blackfellas. The one I had seen on TV earlier had spoken of how the land is renewed in the wet, our word for the monsoon. He referred to the thunderstorm ‘the giver of life, the mover of clouds – it gives you life back.’ It called to mind the music of Richard Wagner in Das Rheingold for the entry of the gods into Valhalla – a dazzling invocation of tribal rite and faith.

XIII

When I did bankruptcy cases, more than forty years ago, the late Mr Justice Sweeney, with the inevitable politesse of a knight of the church, said to me on more than occasion: ‘Mr Gibson, you are too young to have seen this, but during the war, the trains used to carry a sign, ‘Is this journey really necessary?’’ The great German philosopher Wittgenstein had a recollection to the same effect in his common-place book – he thought that most bad thinking came from asking the wrong question.

You learn more from a journey than a book, and it does not make much sense to ask whether my journey from Broome to Darwin was really necessary. (It was originally planned in the other direction, but Australian 4WD said that I could avoid the return fee of one thousand dollars if I reversed it.) I wanted to do this trip, and I am glad that I have. I have now travelled overland over most of Oz. I had seen Kakadu and the West Kimberley before, but I wanted to traverse the lot. The Bungles were a prime objective and duly became the highpoint.

But, as I heard a lady say after a walk, ‘I am glad that I did it, but I feel no need to do it again in the near future, if at all.’

Let us put to one side cruising the coast, which is very expensive, or doing an air safari, which is even more expensive. Let us put to one side big bus tours. Let us also put to one side those who pull vans or camp – they do it because they like it and it suits them. From my observation, the range of sorts of people travelling this way is as wide as the range of means to do so. For example, the bigger new vans come with all facilities, and you can get home units built into the vehicle – I am told that there is a growing trend here to follow the US model of using one of these and pulling a small 4WD behind for travel at the destination. These people have access to social life – a communal drink – in the evenings that motels are learning to seek to emulate with the barbecue and pool.

Let us look at my model – driving yourself across the region, and staying in reasonable or better fixed accommodation. You will be told, or should be warned, that you will need the biggest and best 4WD at least for the Jim Jim Falls, the Bungles, and the gorges off the Gibb River Road. That raises the cost of the exercise, and what for at least some will be the worry of driving through hazards. The rough roads also increase the risk of breaking down – I met a guy at Darwin airport who had blown two tyres on one trip to Jim Jim Falls; the second one led to a long delay while they brought in the replacement.

My base costing is shown in the original itinerary set out at the end of this book. I varied this by reducing the stays at the Bungles and Kakadu for the reasons I have stated. The fuel costs (diesel) were about $760. The two flights into the Bungles cost about $1400 between them. If you add the Itinerary costs of $6692, you get about $8800 without meals. That is a lot of money, but a lot of it is the cost of travelling alone – the accommodation and land travel costs would be the same for a couple.

An alternative would be to base your trip around one or more hubs, and hire professionals to do the hard and dirty bits. You could then just relax, whether at your base or on the move, and come out much better informed – and, as like as not, much more relaxed.

One variation would be to fly to Darwin and hire a cheap orthodox car to go to and from Kakadu for say three nights, and then fly to Kununurra for say four nights and then fly to Broome for say five nights – allowing for say a two night tour into the West Kimberley, and possibly a flight to the Horizontal Falls. You would want at least a full day tour in Kakadu, and the fly-drive tour to the Bungles. I also wanted to do the flight to the coast and Mitchell Falls, but the one day a week this was on did not fit my schedule. You might also consider something like that schedule with a train trip from Adelaide to Katherine or Darwin, or from Perth to Sydney.

If you pursued an option like that, you would have as good a notion of the vastness of it all as someone who has driven all the way. The roadhouses are not worth stopping at; a lot of the scenery is tedious; and you do not have to go up every gorge, or gaze upon every waterfall.

If you wanted to go that way, and narrow the focus, I would suggest cutting out Kakadu and concentrating on the Kimberley and the two main towns. They are much, much better served for accommodation and other amenities and chances for tourists – the prices and services are so much better because of the competition – and they are in no way deficient for things to do and see. Broome of course is a beach resort in its own right, but Kununurra struck me as being surprisingly amenable for tourists, and if you shout yourself a stay at something like the Kimberley Grand – which is much cheaper than Cooinda Lodge and much better appointed – you will have a very comfortable and relaxing stay.

If you would prefer to drive all the way, and include the Bungle Bungles or Jim Jim Falls, you will need the big 4WD with snorkel. You should then do the following. Work out what car you want. I believe that the big Toyota enjoys the best reputation, but you can make your own inquiries. Work out which company you want to hire the vehicle from. Before booking anything, ask if they have a slot where you will not have to pay the return fee. Hire a satellite phone for the time you will be in charge of the vehicle. You should require instruction of at least one hour on the controls of the vehicle, the use of 4WD, and driving on the roads that you will encounter. You should also require a demonstration of a change of tyre on your vehicle to ensure that you and the equipment on the vehicle are up to it. Unless you go through these procedures you will not have sufficient confidence in the vehicle or yourself fully to enjoy the majesty that awaits you. I of course did none of them.

My own view, which is that of Bob from Albany, is that there is a lot to be said for people over sixty from the city leaving at least the hard bits to the experts. I repeat that I am glad that I did what I did, but I am also glad that I made it – and I will not be doing it again. If you do not come to terms with the facts of life in this country – for example when swimming in the surf or driving in the outback – you might easily be worse than a bloody idiot – you might be a dead bloody idiot. And those forms of death are not attractive.

The highlights of my trip? The putti outside the IGA at Derby; 180 ks up the road, mate, if you want a bottle of grog; and, above all, the unexampled glory of the Bungles. If I can convey one thing to you, it would be this – before you quit this earth, go to the Bungles. Go right into them – I should know, I have made three bloody trips in or over them. Go down to the bottom, where it gets like Arizona. Go to where they made that Qantas ad. Go up the Picaninny trail and into the Cathedral Gorge. And just drink in the wonder of it all, and, yes, the Australianness of it all.

If you are Australian and you shuffle off this mortal coil without having gone into the Bungles, you might end up being a lot worse off than a bloody idiot – you might go out as a dead-set bludger.

Itinerary

18/8 Melbourne – Broome (Tuesday)

18-20 Broome (Tues –Wednesday nights) Ochre Moon B&B $320

20-21 Derby (Thursday night) Derby Lodge Motel $160 (222 ks from Broome)

21-22 Fitzroy Crossing (Friday night) Fitzroy Crossing River Lodge $220 (293 ks from Derby)

22-24 Bungle Bungles (Saturday, Sunday nights) Bungle Bungle Tourist Park (En suite) $450 (468 ks from Fitzroy Crossing)

24-27 Kununurra (Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday nights) Ibis Styles Hotel $400 (304 ks from Bungle Bungles)

27-28 Timber Creek (Thursday night) Victoria River R’house (Motel) $150 (226 ks from Kununurra)

28-29 Katherine (Friday night) Pine Tree Lodge $120 (286 ks from Timber Creek)

29- 1 Kakadu (Saturday, Sunday, Monday nights) Cooinda Lodge $1042 (258 ks from Katherine)

1/9 Darwin – Melbourne (Tuesday) (285 ks from Cooinda/Kakadu)

Road distance about: 2342 ks.

Accommodation about: $2862

4WD (return fee waived, unlimited ks): $3000

Airfares Melbourne – Broome, Darwin –Melbourne: $830

Total cost about $6692 – without sight-seeing flights and fuel, and meals

Passing bull 19 – Tribalism

23/10/201523/10/2015 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

A generation or so ago, it was the Looney Tunes on the Left that disfigured politics and sought to make one party unelectable. Now we see it on the Right, alarmingly so in the U S, although Labour in the U K has suffered a remarkable reversion to form.

The following are my drafts relating to the problem for a book I am writing with another on logic and language.

10 Tribalism

We started this chapter on the subject of prejudice as the main corrupter of thought, and near the end of it we come to a common source of prejudice – you might call it tribalism or clannishness, or just the herd instinct. It is our tendency to surrender our judgment, and therefore our dignity, to the crowd, or the mob. In its most terrifying form, it is the lynch mob, which the French reached on a national scale during the Great Terror of the French Revolution in 1793. The surrender was more complete, and the consequences more severe, during the Great Crash in 1929, but we see it all round us every day, and as often as not we do not notice when we have switched into the mode of group control.

A harmless form is the one-eyed Collingwood supporter. Indeed, one reason why people enjoy that part of the entertainment industry called sport is that this is just the area, either in the stands or on the terraces or around the firm’s coffee machine, where independent judgment may be suspended and blind prejudice masquerading as loyalty can be safely put on show. (You might from time to time graciously applaud someone from the other side, but you may want to watch who you do that in front of.) You can even blow the ref a raspberry without going to the slammer.

One worrying form of clannishness is the tendency of some groups to form their own language, and retreat behind it when they come under attack or when they feel insecure or when they just feel like being pompous. Lawyers and doctors used to be notorious for this, but both have improved. It is no longer smart or clever to be obscure; the contrary is the case.

This kind of corruption of thought is dangerous because it obscures meaning – it makes the author harder to pin down – and it masks a crude self-interest in protecting the relevant group as the proper or even the sole repository of truth – which is very worrying when they are unable to spell out a verifiable meaning for the benefit of the uninitiated. Secular thinkers for many centuries have accused priests of doing just this – of denying ordinary people access to the truth, or, if you prefer, the light, by refusing to give them the keys to the codes. You might recall that before the Reformation, you could be burnt at the stake in England if you dared to translate the Bible into the native language of the believers. That must be the ultimate example of people being asked to take articles of faith on trust.

We see examples of this form of clannish or tribal protectionism, and the consequent mutilation of language and logic, in the newer social sciences – which some think is a phrase that contradicts itself – and in marketing, ideologues, especially think tanks and their acolytes, political advisers, and some parts of academe. We tend to see the problem at its worst with the think tanks and political ideologues – the political advisers tend to be more hard-headed people who hardly believe anything, whereas the ideologues bring commitment and passion and are likely to invoke that most dangerous ingredient in rational discussion called sincerity. (We will come back to sincerity in the next section.)

The problem now is that you are dealing with people with a position and with a patch to defend. Helen Garner referred to people who have an agenda. You are dealing with someone who subscribes to articles of faith, and they may not realise or accept that articles of faith lie outside the borders of rational debate. You might therefore be talking to a zealot. Zealots are people whose zeal has infected their judgment. They become like one-eyed Collingwood supporters, but much, much worse because they believe that the stakes are so big. In the language of the stock market, they have their own skin in the game.

They become unable to see the world from the other person’s point of view. They are very likely to think that they have uncovered the logical answer – that is, the answer, and there can only be one of those. They become progressively less able to see that reasonable people might differ on almost any question relating to human behaviour or belief. That is to say, they get more and more intolerant, and intolerance is the cancer of sensible discussion. If you think, if you feel, that your position is superior to that of others, the corollary is as unattractive as it is unavoidable.

They tend to look on disputes not as disputes about ideas but as conflicts between the kinds of people who hold various ideas. They become emotionally attached to their own side and emotionally opposed to the others. Their judgment goes clean out the window. They are ready to argue about things that they know little or nothing about, and that must end up in bullshit. They then get ready to attack almost anything said by the other side, and to defend almost anything that has come out of their side. They become driven by and to conflict.

They therefore pick fights that they do not have to, and so they ignore the first rule of advocacy – if you have a good point, make it, and don’t bugger it up with a dud; if you don’t have a good point, shut up.

They are heavily into mockery, and into nodding and winking among themselves. They are not beyond sneering, and they may have an obsession about sneering that is one of those cases where they project their own feelings and reactions on to their opponents. They often accuse others of being dogmatic or feeling morally or intellectually superior because they have right on their side. Their essential sin is to feel that they are superior. It follows that others must be inferior. This is certainly the case for some of different faith or ethnic background, but their righteous indignation knows no bounds when the implications of this position are spelled out. Their besetting vice is to deny that every person has their own worth or dignity – this is why they react so much against the word ‘equality’. This ‘extremism’ is now seen mainly on the Right and is given political expression by demands on government to be hard (‘tough’) on inferiors like refugees and Muslims. The capacity of the Left to blow itself is in remission.

They are long on conspiracies, especially when it comes to the newspapers or television consulted by the other side. They stereotype people by reference to their chosen media – readers of Fairfax or viewers of the ABC must be different to readers of The New York Times or The Guardian or the Murdoch press or Fox News. (Would you be insulted if described as a typical Age reader or adherent to Fox News? Or would you just think that the author of the remark was both thick and presumptuous?) They speak of ‘the love media’ and twitterati, even when they thrive on social media. (What is the opposite of the love media?) Their media affiliations are the very essence of tribalism. If you are not into these nuances, a word that people known as culture warriors may be fond of, you are not part of the game. Indeed, there are times when they seem unable to choose their cheerleader – the Famous Five or Kim, Enid Blighton or Rudyard Kipling.

They are very defensive about their own culture or faith – words broad enough to mean or contain what they want them to mean or contain – and very suspicious of those who want to share the good life, or who threaten to change its underlying fabric. For this purpose, they may allow a shock jock or some other gutter-rat to put up kites for them, but the sensible ones always preserve deniability and a distance from the overtly vulgar. (These gradations were very carefully measured during the French Revolution. The punctilious Robespierre could benefit from the work of Marat in stirring people up without adopting his squalid venom.)

Their arguments are mainly aimed at the man – ad hominem – in part because of their innate or acquired hostility, and in part because they tend not to play by the rules, and in part because they have lost control of their moral or intellectual compass. They always accuse the other side of hypocrisy, of which they are World’s Best Practice exponents, and of utter indifference to the consequences of their ideology – which they are past noticing in themselves. Even when they set out their own contradictions in black and white, they cannot see them for what they are. They are not just biased or unbalanced – they are wilfully beyond persuasion. In ordinary terms, they are crippled by the chips on their shoulders.

You will recognise many of the attributes of a bush lawyer and far too many of our politicians. It will only get worse – as people subscribe to Internet sites for the true believers, and commune in language-killing terms on what are preposterously described as social media – the first and last resort of the intellectually challenged – and banish the anxiety that comes with uncertainty by cocooning themselves in their own echo chambers. But the tribalists also understand that populism depends on outraging people – the more outrageous a man of the people is, the better are his ratings. Shock jocks know this instinctively – so did Hitler and Mussolini – but they are apoplectic at the suggestion that they are appealing to the gutter. That has been the position of the gutter press through the ages – power without responsibility.

11 Bullshit

There might be a residue of categories of falsity which are commonly described, and not just in Australia, as bullshit. Lest it be thought that that word is too common for a book directed to professional people, let us refer you to a priceless little monograph by Professor Harry Frankfurt of Princeton University, On Bullshit. The professor said:

It is just this lack of a connection to a concern with truth – this indifference to how things really are – that I regard as of the essence of bullshit…..Bullshit is unavoidable wherever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about. The essence of bullshit is not that it is false but that it is phony.

Being fake does not of itself mean that you are wrong. Since we have referred to politicians, we may add that Professor Frankfurt cites a remark that is the credo of politicians: ‘Never tell a lie when you can bullshit your way through.’ The professor says that bullshitting involves a kind of bluff, and that it is understood by everyone in a bull session that the statements that people make do not necessarily reveal what they in fact believe of feel. And since it may be objected that we have taken objection to things done in all sincerity, especially the ideologues referred to in the last section, we may say that Professor Frankfurt also says at the very end of this little book, ‘Our natures are, indeed, elusively insubstantial – notoriously less stable and less inherent than the natures of other things. And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit.’

The emphases on people being unconstrained by a concern with truth and on bullshit being phony rather than merely false are important in this book. They are also very instructive on the links between bluff merchants, bull artists, and con men. We will come back to the subject of bullshit later in this book. It is a proper subject of study, and a reminder that the headings for the ways we can go off the rails in this chapter are not terms of art, and are very far from being a comprehensive account of how we can go wrong in fact. It is the same for the failures of logic described in the next chapter that are commonly called fallacies.

Yeats

The Four Ages of Man (Supernatural Songs)

He with body waged a fight,

But body won; it walks upright.

Then he struggled with the heart;

Innocence and peace depart.

Then he struggled with the mind;

His proud heart he left behind.

Now his wars on God begin;

At stroke of midnight God shall win.

Passing Bull 18 – The Dean’s Wake Syndrome

19/10/2015 / Geoffrey Gibson / 2 Comments

....unlike progressives, conservative commentators tend to stand on principle rather than indulge in partisan or personal cheerleading….

Chris Kenny, The Saturday Australian, 17-18 October, 2015.

On any given Saturday you can get about five whoppers like this from that newspaper as the ‘conservatives’ make faces at the ‘progressives’, like little girls to little boys behind the shelter-shed. What was the context?

Rowan Dean, the editor of the Oz Spectator, and the leader of the unattractive pack described in Passing Bull 15, threw a wake for the former PM. We are told that Dean was smarting if not seething. The usual idolaters were there – Andrew Bolt, Miranda Devine and Paul Murray (who has been inconsolable on Sky ever since, routinely throwing objects as well as tantrums, and imploring the new PM to be tough on Muslims).

Mr Kenny, another idolater in his time, says he knows how these people feel. He does so in terms that contradict point blank the silly boast set out above, and which show why Australians are revolted by the cabal of politicians and journalists that have dragged us down to our present level, on both sides of politics, and where all except the addicts, or those who profit from or traffic in the addiction, are praying for relief, if not enlightenment from a mix of the Wars of the Roses and a New Dark Age.

After years of sneering at the poll-driven, media-grovelling superficiality of the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd Labor years, the Liberals have descended into the same sand-pit.

And with the ABC, Fairfax Media Newspapers, Canberra press gallery, academe and sundry other elements of the love media and political/media class railing against their version of the anti-Christ – a socially conservative prime minister – a great opportunity to prove them all wrong has been frittered away.

Most of us with a view to the structural ebbs and flows of politics could see that despite the antipathy directed at Abbott, some obvious failings and poor poll ratings, the Coalition was most likely to be re-elected next year.

This would have confounded the love media and twittersphere, and confirmed the good sense of mainstream voters.

In Abbott’s failure were strong policy settings (border protection, climate change, and attempted budget repair), the escalating issue of union power and corruption being teased out in the royal commission he established, and how all this had rendered Bill Shorten nigh-on unelectable.

When an impatient Turnbull launched his challenge the week before the Canning by-election he not only robbed Abbott of a chance for recovery but denied many true believers the pleasure of this social-political experiment – this vindication.

It passes belief. If you did not know that you were the victim of an experiment, at least you know it is not one that will be repeated. Here is why politics presently revolt Australians. There is hardly any reference to principle, but just a focus on partisan political cheerleading. And do you know why? The people and their representatives do not know as much as Messrs Kenny or Bolt. They cannot be trusted.

As usual, the crucial partyroom votes were exercised by inexperienced, impressionable and self-interested MPs, many of whom would not have entered parliament if not for Abbott’s campaigning skills and who might have been less than helpful in briefing journalists and voicing disharmony as they fretted over the polls.

In the next post, I will try to spell out this disease of the mind, but Mr Kenny does offer one frightening thought:

I sense the republican cause may be at the heart of much conservative antipathy.

These embittered relics of Plato’s Republic and the Split are not just harmless Looney Tunes. They are intent on not allowing us to break with the Mother Country and become self-governing without support from the Anglican Crown. Bring back 1788 – and the lash. They are Monarchists envenomed. Don’t they know about 1789?

Poet of the month: Yeats

The Choice

The intellect of man is forced to choose

Perfection of the life, or of the work,

And if it take the second must refuse

A heavenly mansion raging in the dark.

When all that story’s finished, what’s the news?

In luck or out the toil has left its mark:

That old perplexity and empty purse,

Or the day’s vanity, the night’s remorse.