The Boeing Pact

24/07/2024 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

In 2018, a Boeing aircraft for no apparent reason plunged to the earth killing all on board. Less than a year later, another Boeing of the same model suffered the same fate. More than three hundred people died in these crashes. In each case, the fault was found to be a failure in the computerised mechanisms that resulted in the pilot not being able to over-ride the robot driving or flying the plane.

Boeing struck a deal with regulators and was then prosecuted for fraud for reneging on it. So they struck another deal – and with no apologies to Groucho Marx. Federal prosecutors gave Boeing the choice last week of entering a guilty plea and paying a fine as part of its sentence or facing a trial on the felony criminal charge of conspiracy to defraud the United States. The families of the victims are outraged by the deal. The reasons are obvious. The court will be asked not to approve the settlement.

The origins of our laws come down to us from the forests of Germany that the Romans looked down on – until the Germans sacked Rome. In the first lecture in The Common Law, O W Holmes said that Roman law started from the blood feud and all authorities agreed that the German law started in the same way. The law of criminal and civil wrongs ‘started from a moral basis, from the thought that someone was to blame’.

Vengeance imports a feeling of blame, and an opinion, however distorted by passion, that a wrong has been done. (Little Brown and Co, 1881, 3,37.)

The first object of the law was to deal with vengeance – the vendetta.

As it happens, more than one hundred years before Holmes published his lectures, the Scots philosopher David Hume had looked at this . He set out a short extract that ‘contains the history of the criminal jurisprudence of the northern nations for several centuries’.

Hume describes two phases of the emergence of the ancient Germans from ‘the original state of nature.’ The vendetta remained ‘an indispensable point of honour for every clan’, but –

….the magistrate had acquired a right of interposing in the quarrel, and of accommodating the difference. He obliged the person maimed or injured, and the relations of one killed to…accept a compensation for the injury, and to drop all further prosecution of revenge….A present of this kind gratified the revenge of the injured family by the loss which the aggressor suffered. It satisfied their pride by the submission which it expressed. It diminished the regret for the loss or injury of a kinsman by their acquisition of new property, and thus general peace was for a moment restored…

Then the intervention by the ruler stepped up a notch.

The magistrate, whose office it was to guard public peace and to suppress private animosities, conceived himself to be injured by every injury done to any of his people; and besides the compensation to the person who suffered, he thought himself entitled to exact a fine, called the Fridwit, as an atonement for the breach of the peace, and as a reward for the pains which he had taken in accommodating the quarrel. (A History of England, Liberty Classics, 1983, 174-176).

And this is precisely what we got with the common law of England after 1215 when the writ of trespass alleged a breach of the peace of the king by force of arms – contra pacem regis, vi et armis. That allegation was essential to the process on which the English developed so much of their law dealing with civil or criminal wrongs.

We see immediately why the Boeing family victims are outraged by the second proposed Boeing settlement. They have suffered most grievously. Their reaction starts from a moral basis, from the thought that someone is to blame – a wrong has been done. What others call vengeance, they call justice. Their felt needs are as primal as you can get. If our law cannot accommodate them, have we gone backwards or, worse, sold out?

People trust airline manufacturers with more than money – they trust the manufacturers with their lives. Boeing breached that trust and many people died.

If the court is to find that someone was to blame, it will not be the corporate legal entity, but a real person. Instead, lawyers for the government and the corporation strike a commercial bargain. Shareholders will be mulcted for the benefit of the government treasury. The people responsible will walk away untouched. And the victims will not get to see due process of law.

A prime object of that process is to deter others from committing the harmful acts complained of. There too the law is mocked, but we see it all the time. It is as if there is one law for rich companies, and another for the rest of us.

But what we do know is that the sight of one executive behind bars will offer more deterrence than all these cosy club deals done behind firmly closed doors .

Open justice – regulators – criminals.

Racism at home and abroad

17/07/2024 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

In discussing the Voice, I said:

History, ireland, northern-ireland, Politics, Travel

‘Racism’ or ‘racist’ are not terms that I use. They are too broad in their reach, and they are too often applied as unfair and unwarranted labels of abuse.

But as I understand it, ‘racism’, at least in its pejorative sense, involves more than a recognition that people can be in some way classified according to race. It entails a belief that people of some racial backgrounds are in some way inferior to others, or may be discriminated against, on the ground of their race. And history is replete with stories of the misery that this vice has led to.

Such beliefs are irrational on the part of those holding them – such people are described as ‘prejudiced’ – and hurtful to the objects of such beliefs. Those holding such beliefs are open to the accusation that they are not seeing the dignity of other people that arises merely because they are human.

‘Prejudice’ is almost irrational by definition. It is irrational to hold that all people of the same tribe or colour have the same character.

But it is equally irrational to hold that reasoned criticism of some in a group evidences a prejudice against members of that group generally. Those expressing such a view are often trying make themselves out as victims and get sympathy or support that way.

And where two groups are in conflict, people on both sides will tend to be irrational – prejudiced – in assessing the conduct of either side. Their side cannot do wrong. The other side cannot do anything right.

You can see all this in the history of Ireland.

The English regarded the natives of Ireland with a contempt greater than that with which they greeted the natives of Australia five centuries later. The Statutes of Kilkenny of 1366 put most of the natives ‘beyond the pale’. It was apartheid that resembled the Spartan treatment of helots – to the discomfort of Oxbridge.

You could still find this racist contempt in polite circles much later. The sometime historian J H Round in 1899 in The Commune of London said:

We went to Ireland because her people were engaged in cutting one another’s throats; we are there now because if we left, they would all be breaking one another’ s heads….The leaders of the Irish people have not so greatly changed since the days when ‘King’ McDonnchadh blinded ‘King’ Dermot’s son, and when Dermot, in return, relieved his feelings by gnawing the nose of his butchered foe. Claiming to govern a people when they cannot even govern themselves, they clamor like the baboo of Bengal against that pax Britannica, by the presence of which alone they are preserved from mutual destruction. No doubt… .they would rather be governed badly by themselves than well by anyone else. But England also has a voice in the matter; and she cannot allow the creation of a Pandemonium at her doors.

The white man’s burden – you could not beat that even by crossing Hitler with Kipling.

So, the Irish arrived in Australia with centuries of history of being victims of racism. To which was now added discrimination against Catholics. Those two factors led to raw prejudice on their part. And that led to bitter division in Australia – right through to the end of my childhood.

Ned Kelly was taught ‘Death to any Judas Iscariot who betrays an Irishman to an English policeman.’ Kelly was a cold-blooded murderer, but many in the Irish diaspora – including otherwise sane lawyers in my lifetime – treated him as a champion of the dispossessed against the Protestant dominated Philistine society of Melbourne. It went beyond the Irish. Manning Clark said: ‘Yet Ned lived on as a hero, as a man through whom Australians were helped to discover our national identity.’ It was another sad instance of our saluting losers.

Daniel Mannix came from Ireland to be Archbishop of Melbourne. Just as the conscription issue got going here in the First World War, he launched an appeal for victims of the Easter Rising. He was righteously vehement in his opposition to the government and conscription. To whom did he and Irish Catholics owe allegiance – Ireland, Rome, or Australia? Part of this quandary had plagued England since Becket ran into Henry II. Australia was dangerously, and venomously, split by Mannix and his followers. Manning Clark said:

He was the mystic who saw in the face of the Irish peasant the image of Christ. He was the Irish patriot nursing a grudge against those guilty of that ancient wrong against the Irish people…. For him, any reflection on his people and their reputation was like the sin against the Holy Ghost – something which could never be forgiven. In Catholic countries, legend had it that when a person committed mortal sin fell across the face of the Virgin. For Daniel Mannix, any slur on his faith by or on his own people by the eternal enemies of the Irish caused a shadow to pass over his face.

All that proved a fierce cocktail of imported division in the brand-new Commonwealth. You can see that the fear and loathing felt by Mannix for the English and Protestant establishments, more than matched that felt by the English against the Irish five or so centuries before. And then you get to the phase where the ultimate insult is for the conduct of your team to be compared with that of the other. The inarticulate premise is of course that the members of the other team are inferior. Which takes us back to where we started.

Then, after the next war, Catholics were, fairly or otherwise, seen to be the drivers of the ‘Split’ – the breakdown of the Labor Party that effectively left Australian as a one-party state for a generation.

It is a notorious fact of history that religious conflicts are the worst of the lot. And that conflicts within one faith – say Sunni and Shiite, or Protestant and Catholic – are the worst of those. The stakes are so high. Which is worse – treason, or heresy?

Well, all this comes to you from a lapsed Prot who now looks askance at most religion (and who could not give a hoot about the schism in Christianity) . I have no doubt those brought up as Catholics, whether Irish or not, may well see things very differently – and possibly say so; possibly, vehemently.

It is both natural and inevitable that people will associate with others of the same tribe and faith. It is equally natural and inevitable that such associations will affect the way we think, frequently with results that bespeak raw prejudice. It is not a good idea in Melbourne to engage your cab driver in discussion about the governance of Kosovo, Lebanon, or India.

But the few instances mentioned here, which reflect wrongs wrought on people over centuries, and which fed bad tensions here over generations, show that we must be wary of those whose interest in foreign conflicts leads them to seek to interfere with our own domestic politics here in Australia. Such people are dangerous.

Racism – Logic – Diasporas – Ireland – Gaza – Kosovo – Balkans – India.

13/01/2024 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Lessons from the massacre at Glencoe

About six or so years ago, I put out two notes about the consequences of the massacre at Glencoe, one of the most revolting episodes in the history of Britain. I leave it to others to say whether any of the discussion may bear on lethal conflicts in the world today.

One post

The Clan McDonald (or Macdonald) of Glencoe was a band of robbers. Most Highlanders were. The Campbells of Argyle hated them and they had ruthlessly preyed on a man named Breadalbane. The British Crown offered money to all Highlanders to take an oath of allegiance by 31 December 1691. Anyone who did not do so in time would be treated a traitor and outside the law. Breadalbane was in charge of handling the money. The Highland chiefs dragged their feet but they came in. The McDonald chief left it to the last day – but no one there could take his oath. He finally got sworn six days later. That the McDonald chief was outside the law was good news for the Campbells, Breadalbane and for the Scots Prime Minister, Sir John Dalrymple, known as the Master of Stair. Dalrymple had hoped to strike at a number of clans. In a letter written in this expectation, he said ‘I hope the soldiers will not trouble the government with prisoners.’ Then he found out that McDonald had sworn his oath after the cut-off. He resolved to strike at that clan. Without saying that McDonald had taken the oath late, Dalrymple put an order before King William that said:

As for Mac Ian of Glencoe [the McDonald chief] and that tribe, if they can be well distinguished from the other Highlanders, it will be proper for the vindication of public justice to extirpate that set of thieves.

You can get an argument about what ‘extirpate’ might mean there – clean the glen out of these bandits by rooting them out (as the Scots king swore to ‘root out’ heresies), or wipe them out in the sense of killing all, including women and children? A soldier killing a bandit might seek to rely on that order as a defence – but killing a woman or child?

The design of the Master of Stair was ‘to butcher the whole race of thieves, the whole damnable race.’ But the troops would not just march in and execute the condemned outlaws. Dalrymple was afraid that most of them would escape. ‘Better not meddle with them than meddle to no purpose. When the thing is resolved, let it be secret and sudden.’ Macbeth himself might have said that.

The troops accepted the hospitality of the clan at Glencoe for twelve days. Then at five o’clock in the morning, the troops started to kill men, women and children. But they used firearms, and three quarters of the clan escaped the fate of their chief.

Macaulay could understand the hatred of Argyle and Breadalbane for the McDonalds, but Dalrymple – ‘one of the first men of his time, a jurist, a statesman, a fine scholar, an eloquent orator’?

To what cause are we to ascribe so strange an antipathy. The most probable conjecture is that he was actuated by an inordinate, an unscrupulous, a remorseless zeal for what seemed to him to be the interest of the State. This explanation may startle those who have not considered how large a proportion of the blackest crimes recorded in history is to be ascribed to ill regulated public spirit. We daily see men do for their party, for their sect, for their country, for their favourite schemes of political and social reform, what they would not do to enrich or avenge themselves. A temptation addressed to our private cupidity or to our private animosity, whatever virtue we have takes the alarm. But virtue itself may contribute to the fall of him who imagines that it is in his power, by violating some general rule of morality, to confer an important benefit on a church on a commonwealth, on mankind. He silences the remonstrances of conscience, and hardens his heart against the most touching spectacles of misery, by repeating to himself that his intentions are pure, that his objects are noble, that he is doing a little evil for the sake of a great good. By degrees he comes altogether to forget the turpitude of the means in the excellence of the end, and at length perpetrates without one internal twinge acts which would shock a buccaneer. There is no reason to believe that Dominic would, for the best archbishopric in Christendom, have incited ferocious marauders to plunder and slaughter a peaceful and industrious population, that Everard Digby would, for a dukedom, have blown a large assembly of people into the air, or that Robespierre would have murdered for hire one of the thousands whom he murdered from philanthropy.

This analysis is vital. There we have a description of our greatest enemy – the zealot who has God or the people on his side; the quintessential Catholic terrorist, Guy Fawkes; Robespierre and the people of la patrie; Osama bin Laden and the religion of Islam – all responsible for some of ‘the blackest crimes recorded in history’, and all convinced of the blackest falsity mankind has been guilty of – that the ends justify the means.

Dostoevsky put it this way.

One cannot live by rebellion, and I want to live. Tell me straight out, I call on you –imagine me: imagine that you yourself are building the edifice of human destiny with the object of making people happy in the finale, of giving them peace and rest at last, but for that you must inevitably and unavoidably torture just one tiny creature, that same child who was beating her chest with her little fist, and raise your edifice on the foundation of her unrequited tears – would you agree to be the architect on such conditions? Tell me the truth.

So the great Russian writer, in The Brothers Karamazov, foretold the misery that would flow over all of the Russias from the righteousness of Marx, Lenin and Stalin.

In the House of the Dead, Dostoevsky explained how we are corrupted by power.

Whoever has experienced the power, the unrestrained ability to humiliate another human being….automatically loses power over his own sensations. Tyranny is a habit, it has its own organic life, it develops finally into a disease. The habit can kill and coarsen the very best man to the level of a beast. Blood and power intoxicate…The man and the citizen die with the tyrant forever; the return to human dignity, to repentance, to regeneration becomes almost impossible.

Those words are deathless because they are so true, but they have frightening ramifications for Donald Trump.

Shortly before citing those words, Paul Johnson referred to some equally relevant remarks of Joseph Conrad in Under Western Eyes in 1911:

In a real revolution, the best characters do not come to the front. A violent revolution falls into the hands of narrow-minded fanatics and of tyrannical hypocrites at first. Afterwards come the turn of all the pretentious intellectual failures of the time. Such are the chiefs and the leaders. You will notice that I have left out the mere rogues. The scrupulous and the just, the noble humane and devoted natures, the unselfish and the intelligent may begin a revolution, but it passes away from them. Hopes grotesquely betrayed, ideals caricatured – that is the definition of revolutionary success.

All that is so true of the French and Russian revolutions. A Marxist historian applied this kind of learning to the Communist Party under Stalin: ‘The whole party became an organization of torturers and oppressors. No one was innocent and all Communists were accomplices in the coercion of society. Thus the party acquired a new species of moral unity, and embarked on a course from which there was no turning back.’ George Orwell saw all this.

The violence, the randomness, and the cruelty all come to be taken as part of life, and people become what we now call ‘desensitised’. Commenting on the butchery that followed the fall of the Bastille, the French historian Taine reflected mordantly that some mockery is found in every triumph, and ‘beneath the butcher, the buffoon becomes apparent.’

The result is that the people become less civilised. They are degraded. You can get an argument over whether terror or ‘the Terror’ commenced on 14 July 1789, but there is no denying that bloody violence and lawless butchery erupted on that day and continued off and on until at least the time when Napoleon put a former break on hostilities with a whiff of grapeshot. The nation itself was destabilised for the best part of a century.

To go back to Glencoe, who was to be answerable? It was all hushed up for a while, but word got out, and there had to be a public inquiry. It was full and fair, and its findings went to the Scots parliament, the Estates. The commissioners of inquiry concluded that the slaughter at Glencoe was murder, and that the cause of that crime lay in the letters of Dalrymple, the Master of Stair. They resolved with no dissenting voice that the order signed by King William did not authorise the slaughter at Glencoe. But the Estates let Dalrymple off with a censure, while they designated the officers in charge as murderers.

Macaulay says they were wrong on both counts.

Whoever can bring himself to look at the conduct of these men with judicial impartiality will probably be of opinion that they could not, without great detriment to the commonwealth, have been treated as assassins. They had slain no one whom they had not been positively directed by their commanding officer to slay. That subordination without which an army would be the worst of all rabbles would be at an end, if every soldier were to be held answerable for the justice of every order in obedience to which he pulls his trigger. The Case of Glencoe was doubtless an extreme case: but it cannot easily be distinguished in principle from cases which, in war, are of ordinary occurrence. Very terrible military executions are sometimes indispensable. Humanity itself may require them….It is remarkable that no member of the Scottish Parliament proposed that any of the private men of Argyle’s regiment should be prosecuted for murder. Absolute impunity was granted to everybody below the rank of serjeant. Yet on what principle? Surely, if military obedience was not a valid plea, every man who shot a McDonald on that horrible night was a murderer?

Should officers have resigned rather than carry out their orders?

In this case, disobedience was assuredly a moral duty: but it does not follow that obedience was a legal crime.

That sounds to me like common sense. What about the Scots Prime Minister, the Master of Stair?

Every argument which can be urged against punishing the soldier who executes the unjust and inhuman orders of his superior is an argument for punishing with the utmost rigour of the law the superior with whom the unjust and inhuman orders originate. Where there can be no responsibility below, there should be double responsibility above. What the parliament of Scotland ought with one voice to have demanded was, not that a poor illiterate serjeant…should be hanged in the Grassmarket, but that the real murderer, the most politic, the most eloquent, the most powerful of Scottish statesmen, should be brought to a public trial and should, if found guilty, die the death of a felon….Unhappily the Estates, by extenuating the guilt of the chief offender, and, at the same time demanding that his humble agents should be treated with a severity beyond the law, made the stain which the massacre had left on the honour of the nation broader and deeper than before.

That analysis seems fair – even if it is distorted by the author’s need to be gentle with King William, one of his heroes, and the failure to mention in this context the hatred of the Campbells for their targets, the McDonalds. You wonder how many of these killers were reluctant, and how many were actuated by what lawyers call ‘malice’. And it must take some acquired coldness to kill in cold blood members of a family you have lived, eaten, and slept with for so long, and some of whom were morally and legally incapable of committing any crime.

But people who say that the soldiers should have rebelled rather than comply with orders are postulating a very high moral standard, one that calls for immense courage, which may not be appreciated by the dependants of the soldier so called upon.

Very few people have the still strength or firm insight of Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Germany after Hitler became the Chancellor.

We have been silent witnesses of evil deeds; we have been drenched by many storms; we have learned the arts of equivocation and pretence; experience has made us suspicious of others and stopped us being truthful and open; intolerable conflicts have worn us down and even made us cynical. Are we still of any use? What we shall need is not geniuses, or cynics, or misanthropes, or clever tacticians, but plain, honest, straightforward men. Will our inward power of resistance be strong enough, and our honesty with ourselves remorseless enough, for us to find our way back to simplicity and straightforwardness?

It took a hero even to ask the question. Moral giants like Lincoln, Bonhoeffer and Mandela come along once or twice a century. The rest of us just hope that we don’t get called on to seek to emulate them. If we do, and if we fail, as is most likely, then the judgment will belong not to us or the law, but to God.

This sordid affair was all Scottish. The avengers took the view that the ends justified the means. In doing so, they sank below the level of those whom they attacked. It’s a lesson on how not now to respond to terrorism. Lawyers have a saying that hard cases make bad law. If you stretch or bend the law for a tricky or hard case, you make the law worse. You debauch it. That, too, is a lesson of the massacre at Glencoe.

Another post

The other day I was driving my Mini in the Grampians listening to Gibbon’s Decline and Fall when it got to one of my favourite parts – the luscious put-down of the Emperor Gallienus. I was laughing out loud, and then my mood changed when I heard a passage which I have read and heard before, but which I could not recall. Gibbon referred to ‘a most savage mandate’ Gallienus issued after he had put down a revolt by a man called Ingenuus, who had assumed the purple (claimed the title of Emperor) in the provinces. The mandate was indeed savage, but it had a revoltingly modern air to it.

It is not enough that you exterminate such as have appeared in arms: the chance of battle might have served me as effectually. The male sex of every age must be extirpated; provided that in the execution of the children and old men, you can contrive means to save our reputation. Let everyone die who has dropped an expression, who has entertained a thought against me, against me, the son of Valerian, the father and brother of so many princes. Remember that Ingenuus was made emperor: tear, kill, hew in pieces. I write to you with my own hand, and would inspire you with my own feelings.

All that is revolting, but the modern part is that in bold. And the word ‘extirpate’ immediately brought to mind the mandate that led to the infamous massacre at Glencoe. It occurred about thirteen hundred years after the extirpation of the followers of Ingenuus, and is so movingly described by the other great English composer of history, T B Macaulay.

The tribal conflicts left the Highlands in a savage state. The clan MacDonald had an awful reputation for outlawry. Their blood enemies were the Campbells. (Still now in Australia you might hesitate to ask a MacDonald to break bread with a Campbell.) The new king, King William III, asked the clans to take an oath of loyalty. The Macdonald chief was a day late in turning up and his enemies saw their chance to get even.

The Scot responsible for managing the clans was the Master of Stair. ‘He justly thought it was monstrous that a third part of Scotland should be in a state scarcely less savage than New Guinea…..In his view the clans, as they existed, were the plagues of the kingdom; and of all the clans the worst was that which inhabited Glencoe….In his private correspondence, he applied to them the short and terrible form of words in which the implacable Roman pronounced the doom of Carthage. His project was no less than this, that the whole hill country from sea to sea, and the neighbouring islands, should be wasted with fire and sword, that the Camerons, the Macleans, and all the branches of the race of Macdonald should be rooted out.’ (The word ‘race’ is there used for ‘clan’. The word ‘extirpation’ is built on the Latin word stirps, meaning the stem or block of a tree, and the OED quotes Macaulay in support of its definition ‘to root out, exterminate; to render extinct.’)

The Master of Stair was dire in his directive.

Your troops will destroy the country of Lochaber, Lochiel’s lands, Glengarry’s and Glencoe’s. Your power shall be large enough. I hope the soldiers will not trouble the government with prisoners.

Troops of the Campbells accepted the hospitality of the Macdonalds over twelve days and then, like Macbeth, murdered their hosts. Many escaped, but about thirty-eight were murdered – that is the word – and perhaps many more died of the cold or starvation. The massacre proceeded under an order signed by King William that included these words.

As for Mac Ian of Glencoe and that tribe, if they can be well distinguished from the other Highlanders, it will be proper, for the vindication of public justice, to exterminate that set of thieves.

That was not a lawful order for a king to give in a nation that subscribed to the rule of law –which says that people are ruled by laws not people, and that they are only to be punished for a breach of those laws, and not at the arbitrary whim of the monarch.

Well, it was unlikely that anyone down the line would take that point, even had they wanted to. And it is plain enough that extirpation in this context means extermination. And that apparently is how the Campbells saw their authority and duty – to commit mass murder. It is not to be supposed that they could have reported to the Master of Stair, or their king: ‘We shot and killed a dozen, but the others promised to behave in the future, so we stopped the killing.’ Among other things, they would be leaving witnesses to an act of infamy that no decent person could want to see the light of day; and the vendettas would have made Sicilian fishermen look decidedly docile.

But this was a problem for our author. He was a bigger fan of William of Orange than all the people of Belfast put together. Had his hero given a warrant for ethnic cleansing, if not genocide? (Remember that the historian used the word ‘race.’) Macaulay said that people as high as kings – he might have added me and my tax returns – rarely read a lot of what they sign. That is true enough – but we all have to live with the consequences of so acting.

But Macaulay gets into trouble saying that ‘extirpate’ has more than one meaning – in this context.

It is one of the first duties of every government to extirpate gangs of thieves. This does not mean that every thief ought to be treacherously assassinated in his sleep, or even that every thief ought to be put to death after a fair trial, but that every gang as a gang, ought to be completely broken up, and that whatever severity is indispensably necessary for that end ought to be used.

That’s like kids playing marbles behind the shelter shed and making up the rules as they go. You don’t authorise or order a killing in ambiguous terms. Nor do you make the killing subject to a value judgment – that this killing is ‘indispensably necessary’ to effect ‘extirpation’ – what if the family of a deceased and a prosecutor appointed by a government of a different colour come to a different result, and the executioner finds himself on a murder charge for doing what he reasonably believed to be his lawful duty. (And the history of revolutions is full of instances where the executioners are among the first to die when their government falls.)

(Macaulay comes across this difficulty again when, much later, he discusses the government findings on the massacre. The finding was that the massacre was murder and was not authorised by the King’s warrant. But the report merely censured the real author of the crime, the Master of Stair, and recommended that some officers down to the rank of sergeant be charged with murder. Macaulay says this was dead wrong. (If it matters, I agree.) ‘They had slain nobody whom they had not been positively directed by their commanding officer not to slay. That subordination without which an army is the worst of all rabbles would be at an end if every soldier were to be held answerable for the justice of every order in obedience to which he pulls his trigger….Who then is to decide whether there be an emergency such as makes severity the truest mercy? Who is to determine whether it be or not be necessary to lay a thriving town in ashes, to decimate a large body of mutineers, to shoot a whole gang of banditti?…..And if the general rule be that the responsibility is with the commanding officer, and not with those who obey him, is it possible to find any reason for pronouncing the case of Glencoe an exception to that rule?’ All that seems very right to me, and the government response looks like another case of the Establishment looking after itself.)

Macaulay then makes his case worse by referring to Hastings’ dealings with the Pindarees, and Bentinck and the Thugs. Any reference to different kinds of savagery is only likely to inflame the issue, and the Scots.

Finally, he says that another example of the soft use of ‘extirpate’ is in the coronation oath in Scotland when the king swears ‘to root out heresies.’ Heretics were commonly burnt then, but a heresy is not a person and cannot be put to death. Macaulay says that King William asked what this meant and the Earl of Argyle (the Campbell chief, as it happens) was authorised by the Estates at Edinburgh to say that ‘the words did not imply persecution.’ The politest thing that you can say about that is that it is plain silly.

A simpler explanation for the liability of the English for the massacre at Glencoe was that this was just a manifestation of the evil that had already plagued England for two centuries in its dealings with Ireland, and which had descended to a new low point under that religious fanatic named Cromwell – their contempt for people they regarded as being of an inferior race.

Well, a painter of history as gorgeous as Macaulay is entitled to the odd blemish. And the people of Glencoe have moved on. Or at least their publican has. I have visited the site on three occasions, and if you visit my second loo, you will find a framed collage of scenes of Glencoe, in the middle of which is a photo of a brass sign on the front door of the pub: ‘NO HAWKERS OR CAMPBELLS.’

Finally, because I regard Macaulay’s account of the massacre as one of the glories of our letters, I just read it again. People like Gibbon, Macaulay and Carlyle don’t write history –they compose it, or paint it, or write an opera about it. For the first time, I think, I read the long footnote in which Macaulay mentioned his only two sources. One was the government Report of 1695. The other was a contemporary pamphlet that helped blow up the cover-up. It was called Gallienus Redivivus. It was published well before Gibbon, but its author was aware of the mandate of Gallienus that I have set out above, and part of which Macaulay quotes. ‘Gallienus ordered the whole province to be laid waste, and wrote to one of his lieutenants in language to which that of the Master of Stair bore but too much resemblance.’ The man who said that there is nothing new under the sun was dead right on this point.

Glencoe – massacres – extirpation – ethnic cleansing.glencoe, glencoe, History, massacre, scotland, Travel

Travelling North – Parts 8 and 9

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

VIII

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

Does this noble establishment come to a bottle shop?

I am afraid not, Sir.

Well, can you point me to the nearest?

There may not be mush point in that, Sir?

Why not?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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