Back to the River

Late this afternoon I took the kayak back to the same stretch of river on which I'd previously capsized. Since it wasn't a black moonless night, and as I certainly wasn't racing, there was plenty of time to stop and take pictures.





The spot I went for an involuntary swim is directly in front, by the far side of the the oncoming bend. Sorry about the poor quality of these pictures; given my proven stability issues I'm obviously not going to take our good camera with me. These were taken on my mobile phone, from inside a waterproof pouch.





This is also the site of one of Australia's greatest mysteries: it was just here on the river bank (about 25 meters beyond the mangroves fronting the water) that the bodies of Gilbert Bogle and Margaret Chandler were found in 1963. Which is something I'm glad didn't cross my mind when I was struggling in the mud and blackness ;-)

A really great documentary made in 2007 presented a very plausible solution to the Bogle-Chandler puzzle, suggesting that their deaths were caused by accidental hydrogen sulphide poisoning. Up until the late 60s there were a number tanneries and other noxious industries near hear, all of which discharged their effluent directly into the water. While the water quality still leaves an awful lot to be desired, during the years after the war it must have been revolting.

Paddling home was magic. My little kayak mightn't be the most impressive vessel afloat, but tonight as I remember drifting across water like glass, watching the water-birds settle down while the winter sun slowly moved beneath the hills, I wouldn't swap her for all of Cunard's finest.


The two most important women in my life were waiting on the pier when I returned. Miss Three is currently fascinated (read "absolutely obsessed") with sharks, and had doubted the wisdom of revisiting the scene of my earlier swim: "Daddy - are you sure this is a good idea?" It wasn't until she'd touched my hair and clothes to make sure they were dry that she really believed I hadn't tipped over again. I still don't think she's fully convinced I survived that night's dunking unscathed, and tonight's bedtime chat included a lengthy interrogation to make sure I hadn't held back any news from today concerning an unexpected immersion and a pack of ravenous White Pointers. After which she gave a fabulous demonstration of how to "be more careful in your kayak". Apparently hammerheads need to be simultaneously banged on the nose with one's paddle and tickled under their fins. So now we're all prepared... ;-)

Remembrance Day 2008: Lest We Forget.

The Pelicans and I were in a shopping centre at 11am this morning: I’d hoped to be somewhere a little more respectful by then, but getting anything done with two small children and two crazy dogs always takes three times as long as you expect. which is why we found ourselves walking through the foodcourt when a voice came over the public address system calling for one minute’s silence.

It was wonderful to see how everyone stopped what they were doing, and turned their thoughts to that day 90 years ago when the war to end wars itself ended. I’ve no doubt each one of the more than 60,000 Australians killed would have been more than a little touched to see a world that they couldn’t have imagined stop in their honour – but I’m also pretty certain they’d rather have lived to grow old; to take their own children and grandchildren shopping.

To put the carnage in perspective: about 1 in 80 Australians was killed. Another 270,000 were injured: that’s about one for every eighteen men, women and children living here in 1914. By the end of the war it was impossible to walk more than 100 metres along any street of any town in country and not pass a home struck by tragedy.

Miss Madam was intrigued by the silence, which was followed by the Last Post and the Ode. Toddlers have never been famous for their discretion, but she managed to not ask the inevitable questions too loudly. I explained about the daddies and uncles who never came home, and how their one comfort had been the hope that they were making the world a better place for children like her.


Later in the afternoon we went to a memorial on the edge of the bushland not far from our home. It’s a 1/8th size carving of the Sphinx made in the 1920’s by a patient of the returned servicemen’s convalescent hospital which was once nearby.


A relatively isolated place, there’s a strange spirituality that probably means it isn’t somewhere parents normally take children as young as ours – but I think the diggers would have enjoyed the sound of their laughter.


And together we said "thank you", and remembered what they fought to achieve for us all...

Fr. John Hope

In the comments of a recent post Brian mentioned the late Fr. John Hope of Christ Church St. Laurence, one of my greatest heroes. Under his leadership from 1926 to 1964 his church - one of Sydney’s few Anglo-Catholic parishes, and probably the best known - grew spectacularly, despite blatant attempts by the diocesan hierarchy to close it and distribute the assets to congregations toeing the party line. At a time when indigenous Australians were not even entitled to citizenship, and most church leaders were actively participating in the genocidal Stolen Generation policies, he donated property for the foundation of Australia’s first self-managed Aboriginal educational facility. There’s a great little biography of him on the Christ Church web site here, but my favorite anecdote about him comes from L. C. Rodd’s John Hope of Christ Church St Laurence.

Determined to do something once and for all about the “Popish superstition” at Railway Square, the belligerent Archbishop Mowll decided during a meeting in the 1940’s to attack Fr. Hope directly by asking if he was aware that “certain types” of men comprised a significant part of his congregation. “Most certainly” growled Fr. Hope in reply while looking the Archbishop directly in the eyes, “And is it not a good thing that these people so dear to our Lord have somewhere they can go?”

Priests don’t come much tougher than that. God bless him.

No, Beijing. We have not forgotten.

"Greater love has no one than this:
that a person lay down their life for their friends."
(John 15:13)

How I Spent a Winter Weekend.

Mrs. Caliban and the two smallest Duck Noodles were in NZ visiting family last weekend, so the four-legged members of the Gang and I went camping near Hill End, an old gold-mining town about 4 hours driver west of Sydney.



The Australian gold rush began in the 1850s, on the heels of the great 19th century Californian rush, and was no less fervent: in the 20 years from 1850 to 1870 Australia’s population increased by more than 400%. At its peak in 1870 the Hill End area had a population of over 30,000: 51 hotels, 8 churches, 5 schools and 3 newspapers. Today fewer than 100 people live in Hill End and the entire town is classified as a protected historical site.



There were two main reasons for the trip: I wanted to see the Golden Gully – an alluvial goldfield primarily worked by Chinese (whose mines can be identified from the Caucasians' sites by their rounded shape) at the start of the rush, and to (I know how much of a redneck this makes me sound) try out our new SUV (it’s only a small one, so I’m not that much of an enviro-vandal – honest!) on some real 4WD tracks.


The Golden Gully, which was in a now non-existent neighbouring township called Tambaroora is amazing. The temperature was hovering around freezing (hence Fiver’s jacket) as we climbed through the long-abandoned diggings: seeking the gold which had filtered down to the bedrock several thousand miners dug down over fifty feet along about a mile of the river’s course. In the 1850s there’d been gold-panners from every country on earth; now it was silent – we clambered around for several hours and saw nobody.



We did, however, find a mob of large kangaroos – or rather the dogs did. There’s no pictures because I was too busy giving chase: while the ‘roos could easily outrun two inner-city canine warriors the senior male saw no reason to abandon his ground, and was getting ready give a certain Dachshund-Labrador the kick of a lifetime when I managed to catch up. Seeing me the boomer fled, leaving two small heroes convinced they’d defeated a foe the likes of which they’d never imagined existed.






Soon afterwards they found a wombat burrow (with grumbling resident inside) and I unsportingly decided it was time for leads to go back on.










And then the drive home along the old road; a 4WD-only track that needed low-ratio for most of the way: lots of mud, hills and a spectacular drop-off with no guard-rail.






Sorry, but I was too busy watching the road (white-knuckle stuff by my standards;-) to take any pictures during the really scenic stretches: I grabbed these during one of the river crossings.






Finally a late lunch and photograph at the track’s end: I suspect if Mrs. Caliban had seen all the warnings there’s no way she’d have let us go…






… but I know a funny-looking black dog and his little mate (who was too excited to stand still and pose) enjoyed themselves so much that they're not telling anyone.

Walpurgisnacht 2008

Walpurgisnacht is that point in the year’s cycle when the fabric stretching between these Shadowlands and That Which Is To Come was traditionally believed to be at its thinnest. In our bright shining world of IPhones and HDTV most Christians dismiss all this as superstition, and maybe they’re right. But if they turned off the lights for a few hours tonight and went for a walk somewhere beyond their comfort zones, who knows? Perhaps even the most certain might just for a moment reconsider...

It’s also the evening on which Hitler, Goebbels and a few other loathsome and cowardly toads killed themselves and their families. Which not just signifies the terrible end of a terrible chapter, but also points to something far greater. Something that should give us all courage: no matter how invincible any dictator may appear, or how insurmountable and overwhelming the bureaucracy, or even just how monocultural, nepotistic and unchallengeable the Family Firm; only God lives forever.

Flowers will always break through cracks in the pavement,
and only Love endureth.

Anzac Day 2008.

For those not familiar with the Australian calendar, April 25 is Anzac Day. It’s a public holiday; our Veteran’s Day or Armistice Day.

That’s because today in 1915 was the first time members of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps - the ANZACS - saw action in WWI. They’d landed on the Gallipoli Peninsula in the Dardanelles as part of a naïve Allied plan to gain control of the Black Sea and capture Istanbul, thereby knocking Turkey out of the war and opening an attack on Germany from the east. Understandably the Turks had other ideas, and being better equipped and militarily far more astute than their Anglo-centric invaders could imagine, the attacking Anzacs were slaughtered. By the end of 1915 they had withdrawn. The Gallipoli campaign was abandoned as a failure.

The following years brought Australian troops death in the Western European mud, but April 25 had already been established as our day of commemoration. And so it continues today, as the Australian media wax lyrical about the “Anzac spirit” being “forged in blood and fire.”

Yet the popularity of Anzac Day as a time of national remembrance by those not having served in the Armed Forces is a relatively recent phenomena mostly resulting from the Howard years’ facile jingoism. During the 1970s popular opinion was that the commemoration, which features street marches in every major town, would soon disappear due to lack of interest and the inevitable aging of veterans. Not so: today children parade on behalf place of long deceased ancestors, and any display of enthusiasm which appears less than vigorous runs the risk of public shaming as ‘unAustralian’.

But in 1925 mainstream Australia wanted little to do with those who’d fought for God, King and Empire. The surviving Anzacs weren’t eulogized as they are today; letters to the letters pages of local papers were filled with complaints about anti-social returned servicemen “refusing to get on with life” and “expecting the country owes them a living.” Much as Vietnam veterans were viewed in the 80’s, returned Anzacs in the 1920s and 30s were commonly regarded as misfits, not heroes.

It’s hardly surprising that men who had experienced places like Gallipoli and the Western Front developed problems. The horrors they’d endured were quite literally beyond the comprehension of their friends, family, neighbours and employers who’d stayed behind. Some returned soldiers tried to cope with the nightmares by embracing extremist political groups such as the New Guard or Wobblies: few sought any comfort in Sydney Anglicanism - working class inner-city parishes never regained their pre-war congregation sizes. Other men simply drank till they went insane, and many subsequently took their own life. Still others simply came home crazy and stayed that way.


In which case they usually ended up here: B Ward in Callan Park: a sprawling Victorian psychiatric hospital now partly occupied by Sydney College of the Arts, partly by health related groups, and partly, like B Ward, being slowly demolished by neglect.

There are no foundation stones on the buildings of B Ward, no plaques proudly declaring an opening on such and such a date by Major General Sir So-and-So in the presence of Bishop Longtoss and a raft of similar worthies.


The truth is people were ashamed of the incontinent screaming wrecks sheltered inside. Wards were thrown up as needed, and now these men have lived out however many years they were cursed to endure after losing their minds in a cloud of cordite and barbed wire it’s as if society wishes this remaining evidence of war’s obscenity would just disappear.





For me the most haunting reminder of these forgotten casualties of Archduke Ferdinand’s assassination is a miniature Sydney Harbour Bridge constructed in 1931 by the patients in memory of their fallen comrades. They beat the real bridge’s completion, which wasn’t opened until 1932, but the real feat is that few if any of the men who built the memorial had ever seen the real thing’s construction. Nor did they later cross it regularly; as military patients they were confined to the ward and, if they ‘behaved themselves’, the grounds. For most this was the template for however many fragile decades remained of their haunted lives.


In reading this you’ve helped ensure they are not forgotten; thank you. I’ve no doubt the men would also be touched to know we remember them, even though ours is a world beyond their comprehension. They would, however, undoubtedly recoil in horror from the war in which many of our countries are currently embroiled. We should be ashamed by how they would feel we have learned nothing at all from the past.

May we at least pray that those whose minds are indelibly terrified by our leaders’ ‘war on terror’ will be treated with greater compassion and grace than these men were. May these little ones at least be loved by the Church in a way that the men of B Ward never knew.

HMAS Sydney: Lest We Forget.

Today in St. Andrew’s Cathedral a memorial service was held for the crew of HMAS Sydney. Recently discovered where she sunk after engaging the German Maritime Raider Kormoran in 1941, the loss of the Sydney and all 645 men on board has been Australia’s most enduring wartime mystery.

Not solved however, is my own small HMAS Sydney mystery. Let me explain:

At the start of 1987 I had a job painting buildings belonging to the Good Samaritan Sisters in Tempe, an old industrial suburb in Sydney’s inner south. It was a complex which had once been a “place for penitent girls and women”- the Sister’s description, not mine: I can’t be that cruel. There were endless corridors, a chilly dormitory everyone found positively creepy once the late afternoon shadows grew long, and a gloomy dining room/assembly hall in which we were all convinced someone (or something) watched us. Worse though, was the old abandoned commercial laundry.

A few years back there was a movie made about one of Magdalene Laundries in Ireland. I honestly don’t know if the place I hosed and scraped and painted had been as evil as the institution featured in that film, but I’d swear you could hear screaming if you pressed your ear to the wall. And the air hung thick with tears.



Sadly I didn’t think to take pictures at the time, and this is all I’ve been able to find. Taken a few years after I worked on the site; it shows the destruction caused by a fire which resulted in the complex’s demolition, but it doesn’t convey how I remember the place: in my mind it's always cold, grey and damp. The building in the centre housed a kitchen and offices added in the early 50’s, more than half a century after the laundry just showing on the right was constructed.

Inside the far end of the laundry was a sunken passageway leading to the dormitories. Over the years this had become a dumping ground for old laundry baskets and broken machines; for several days my task was to clean this out, replace the lighting, and paint the walls. Judging by the age of the detritus it had not been an official route for a very, very long time: after the day's work it was no doubt deemed more edifying to march the young inmates outside and across the quadrangle (perhaps via the chapel) than to permit them taking the easier direct passage.

Yet don’t think the passageway was unused. The junk was riddled with tunnels leading to small hidden clearings just big enough to let a few girls hide from the Sisters for a few minutes and rest. Or maybe read a contraband movie magazine and dream of film stars and Hollywood and anywhere on earth other than a reformatory for "immoral and uncontrollable girls" claiming to redeem it's captives by forcing them to wash soiled hospital linen. The passage had been regularly occupied for decades, but only furtively so; and the secret kept hidden from the Nuns must have passed down through generations of inmates.

The walls of these hiding places were covered with graffiti scratched into the grubby institutional duck-egg-blue plaster. Most of it was the usual timeless stuff: “Sue Loves Tom Forever” and “Mother Dorcas is a Bitch” (there’s absolutely no doubt in my mind she was a bitch - sadly there’s people like that to be found in the administration of every institution, in every age). But one etching shall live in my mind forever, and it’s the reason for this post.

It was of a crudely drawn ship, with two funnels, two masts and a prominent bridge. Underneath was written “HMAS SYDNEY” followed by two boy’s names, each clearly carved by a different hand, and each surrounded by hearts. At the bottom was the date 27 February 1941 – the date the ship last sailed from her home port, the city after which she had been named. The city in which the girls now imprisoned had loved their handsome young sailors.

The girls who’d created this never saw their young men again, for they spent the rest of 1941 patrolling the Indian Ocean. Until 19 November; after then they were listed as missing presumed dead. Fate unknown. That the graffiti predated their death I have no doubt: the date was of their departure – not their disappearance – and besides it just seemed so cheerful, so optimistic in a place where there was no joy at all.

As I’ve said, I didn’t have a camera to record what I found. I tried explaining to my boss its importance, but his idea of what’s important was different to mine. Being much younger and sillier in those days I shut up and did what he told me: I sanded the wall back and painted over this precious fragment of the past. Nowadays I can’t believe I didn’t even think to record the names listed, but that was a different time and place, and why I was there is another story.



This picture of Sydney crewmen was taken in 1940: perhaps two of these boys (I can’t bring myself to think of such hairless chests, and faces barely needing to be shaved as belonging to men) were the girl’s sweethearts. If not then there’s no doubt they were just as handsome, just as cheeky, just as sure that nothing , but nothing, could overcome them.

The girls, if still alive, must be quite old now: if so I dearly hope life came to bring them more than what they found during their dark days in the Tempe Magdalene Laundry. Somehow though, I suspect they may also have now moved on to the world beyond these Shadowlands. I’ve no evidence for this, and so it’s only my foolish heart dreaming, but while listening as the Sydney memorial service was broadcast on the radio today, I’d swear I could also hear a couple of young girls flirting; they were laughing with two sailors only a year or two older than themselves. You couldn’t quite catch what they were saying, but you could be certain the Sisters wouldn’t have approved.

Then again, the Sisters have probably also found forgiveness now. As, dare I say, so shall we. But today, however, belongs to a couple of kids. May the Lord tonight and always give them the joy which was their birthright, but which was stolen from them by others, by war, and by bitterness itself.

On Anglican Unity, Evangelicalism, and Conversion.

At Evangelicalism’s heart is not a belief system shaped by the Bible (or to be more accurate, a late 19th century Anglo-American interpretation of the Bible), regardless of how loudly its adherents may profess otherwise. Evangelicals don’t want people to believe their exclusivist dogmata per se: they want people to 'be born again' – to experience Conversion as Evangelicalism has defined it.

Thus when the 16 year old Peter Jensen came forward with his dearly loved younger brother at Billy Graham’s 1959 Sydney crusade, the two weren’t embracing a way of understanding Scripture which seeks to shape conservative white upper-middle class contemporary society without in any way challenging the fundamental injustices, inequalities and systemic evils of that society: in all probability the two had both as children done that quite unconsciously years before. Rather they simply wanted to be 'saved' in response to the evangelist’s call. Their’s had been a childhood in a church which sung Amazing Grace, with the triumphant lines “I once was lost, but now am found” celebrating this moment of transition. They, like the countless others alongside them, now wanted such an experience for themselves. They had believed, but what their belief had lacked up until this chilly autumn evening was this one cathartic moment to which they could point and cry “My conversion!”.

In reality it’s highly doubtful the Jensen brothers were “lost” in any sense but the most intangibly metaphoric. Barely adolescent boys from old money suburbs in Sydney’s east, enrolled in one of the Australia’s most exclusive (and expensive) boys’ schools, and having attended Sunday school and youth fellowship classes since infancy, rarely wander too far until at least a few years later in life. Occasional cheekiness, certainly, perhaps even a day’s truancy and a covert cigarette behind the cricket stadium (although in the case of the Jensens I find even this much very hard to believe), but Hell’s Angels they weren’t.

“Yet aahh” cry the Evangelicals, “that’s just the point! Whoever has sinned in only the least of ways has broken the whole law, and stands justly condemned before God. Childhood mischief or serial murder – they’re all sins which leave us irrevocably separated from the Father, but for the atoning sacrifice of Christ…” Which is exactly why the Evangelical need to feel 'converted' is so powerful: what some of us might laughingly dismiss as naughtiness is, in the Evangelical's understanding, viewed by God exactly as if it were multiple homicide, or pack rape. It’s all the same, and their consequent relief at having left the weight of this guilt behind is understandably overwhelming – albeit incomprehensible to anyone whose faith is outside Evangelical traditions.

As an attempt to transcend ecclesiastical persuasions GAFCON shall ultimately fail for exactly the same reason that all previous attempts to establish union between Evangelical hard-liners and those with different understandings of the process by which we express our faith have failed: the soteriological gulf is invariably too vast for the Evangelicals to accommodate. Any common ground – even that as poisonous as the currently shared misogyny and homophobia - is powerless in the face of the greater, more primeval, difference in soteriology. “I have been born again” (ie. ‘I have had a defining conversion experience’) “and you have not. I therefore am a sheep, and you a goat.”

And how long does anyone think the tough boys in colourful chasubles are going to accept a few chaps from Australia (where????) in business suits telling them that they’re not really Christians?

... to be continued ;-)

First day of the Billy Graham Crusade,
Sydney Showground, April 12, 1959.

Sorry.

Sorry

We are sorry, Arabanoo. Please pray for our forgiveness.

Two hundred and nineteen years ago today marines acting on orders from Governor Arthur Phillip unlawfully imprisoned a member of the Cannalgal people, the original owners of Sydney Harbour’s northernmost arm.

The man had committed no crime; he was captured so that he might assist those ruling the eleven month old colony to learn more about the people whose communities had occupied Sydney for the preceding sixty thousand years – give or take a few dozen millennia.

Contemporary accounts of his capture and subsequent life are heart-breaking: he “was now fastened by ropes to the thwarts of the boat; and when he saw himself irretrievably disparted from his countrymen, set up the most piercing and lamentable cries of distress.”. Later that day he was given what he thought was an ornament to wear upon his wrist, which cheered him up. But it was actually a handcuff, and he was again enraged and distraught when its purpose was revealed.

There are no known portraits of the man, whose name was Arabanoo (although since this was considered too foreign and “primitive” he was commonly referred to by the place of his capture). One account says he was aged around 24, but another suggests he was older; about 30. He was not tall, but 'robustly made', with a thoughtful face and a soft, musical voice; his disposition was mild and gentle, but 'the independence of his mind never forsook him'. It’s recorded that he was horrified by the brutality of a public flogging, an everyday sight in the gulag that was European Sydney in 1788.

Shortly after his imprisonment a severe smallpox epidemic broke out among the indigenous communities, who had no prior exposure (and thus no immunity) to the disease. Arabanoo nursed two sick children named Nabaree and Abaroo, who had been found ill and possibly orphaned: they recovered, but he then fell victim himself and died on 18 May 1789. One year and four months after the invaders arrival: one year and four months after what must have seemed like the unleashing of hell itself.
As I’ve already said, there are no known pictures of Arabanoo., so the best picture I can find is this one taken with my cell phone from a spot now known as “Arabanoo’s Lookout”. The hills, beaches and bays shown once belonged to him and his people and, coincidentally, they’re also where I grew up. Where I learned to sail, and dive, to surf and to ride a bicycle. To read, and to make love, and to believe.

It was a wonderful place in which to be a child, and Arabanoo, and countless of his ancestors before him, doubtless loved it just as much I did. The difference, however, is that my joy was their loss: blissful ignorance is no excuse for the fact that all - absolutely everything - they loved, cherished and held sacred was taken from them just as brutally as Arabanoo was himself dragged away. He and his fellow Cannalgal people were gone for more than 150 years before I was born, but the places in which I played were still rightfully theirs. With friends I’d find their carvings in the bushland, and in the sandstone caves at the water’s edge, and I’d wonder about the people who’d created them. Now I am old enough to know: the artists were killed by my people, by members of my Church.

Instead of bringing Christ, my predecessors brought death. Instead of law, they brought injustice; injustice as epitomised by what was done to Arabanoo on this day so long ago. Lord God, forgive us, for the blood of our father’s sins stains our hands. Arabanoo, we remember. Too late for you and those whom you loved, but we remember. Our barbarous past kneels in shame before the dignity of your own.

And we are sorry.

The 7:40am to Harris Park

In the 19th century trains were symbols of liberation, promising a shining new world to come. What went wrong?

And will information technology go the same way?

Yes!

As I write this the Rodent who has torn Australia apart is conceding defeat: John Howard's grubby regime has been soundly thrashed in today's election.

It's still debatable, but it's even looking as though Howard has lost his own seat, which makes him only the second Australian PM in history to sufffer the ultimate electoral ignominy.

The first, in 1929, was this charming creature, Viscount Stanley Bruce. He probably wasn't quite as dismal as he looked, but that's also debatable.

Beyond debate, however, is the fact that the past eleven and a half years of lies, human rights abuse, racism and environmental vandalism are over.

Thanks to everyone around the world for your prayers!

John Howard: Slimy since 1955.

John Howard is the most loathsome Prime Minister in Australian history. This dubious honour was once unassailably held by Sir Robert “Pig-Iron” Menzies*; the “Queen & Country” jingoist who resigned his commission at the start of the First World War to avoid the horrors of the Front.



As is all too often the case with his type, Menzies' cowardice didn't prevent him enthusiastically supporting Australia's participation in the carnage of WWI, and as a student he actively (but unsuccessfully, thank God) campaigned for the introduction of conscription. Not that Menzies ever forgot the issue: fifty years later he was able to bypass the messy democratic niceties observed in the years before he seized power. Instead of holding a public referendum, as occurred in 1916 & 17, Pig-iron Bob simply rammed the National Service Act (1964) through parliament and conscripted young Australian men to their deaths in Vietnam.

No, Menzies takes some beating when it comes to the prize for worst Australian PM, but John Winston Howard more than meets the challenge. Viewed on their own, the Children Overboard Affair; the Australian Wheat Board scandal, in which bribes of around $AUD290 million ($US258 million) were paid to Saddam Hussein’s regime in blatant contravention of UN sanctions; or ignoring expert advice on weapons of mass destruction in order to drag Australia into war as George W. Bush’s “deputy sheriff” (we were later magnanimously promoted to the rank of fully fledged sheriff) - are each enough to at least earn Howard the prize as runner-up, but when combined, and then added to his appalling mismanagement of the environment, human rights, the economy (why have interest rates risen six times since he promised his government’s economic prowess would ensure no further increases?) and workplace relations… I won’t go on, but I could. Howard is the worst. Indisputably.

Fortunately all the polls indicate he’ll be gone after Saturday 24 November. If only the damage he’s caused could go with him, but instead we’ll be paying the price of that for decades to come. Yet the writing was on the wall concerning Howard years ago: in 1955 he appeared as a 16 year old contestant on Jack Davey's top-rating radio show "Give it a Go". Here’s a brief excerpt:

All the tell-traits of the man known to his fellow party members as “the Rodent” (and to one former PM as “the unflushable turd”) are there; the smarmy arrogance, the smirking ignorance, and the cock-sure disregard for others. In little Johnny’s world not much has changed since 1955: his religion has shifted from Methodism to Sydney Anglicanism (yep – he’s also one of them), but that’s about it.


John Howard won 100 bars of soap for his efforts on radio that day. Obviously none of it was ever used to wash his mouth out for lying. Pity; we all might have been spared a lot of heartache and bloodshed if someone had just taught him that telling the truth does matter.


*Menzies is Howard's hero. Google and see for yourself.

The Past is a Foreign Country...

... they do things diferently there.*

The Victorians were fascinating. Ostensibly revolted by all things concerning sex, yet they could erect a fountain like this in Sydney's Botanic Gardens.

The lady here is named "Agriculture", but I suspect the man (there's no way this was made by anyone with breasts of their own) responsible didn't really know too much about rural life in general, and sheep in particular. Or he'd spent wwwwwaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyyy too much time alone with them, but that's a thought better not pursued.

Either way, am I the only one to think that this sheep looks uncannily like Hugh Hefner? And that this is all more than just a tad creepy?

*L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between, London 1953

Remembrance Day 2007: Lest We Forget.

It’s rained everyday this past week. We need the rain, but the two dogs who’ve missed their walks are of a different opinion. Since it’s clearing today we’ve seized this opportunity to get out, and because the dog park doesn’t become a leash-free zone until 5pm we’re in our local church yard: an old and very overgrown cemetery surrounding a pseudo-gothic Victorian fantasy. It’s an interesting place for both dogs and humans alike, they dig holes, chase lizards and wonder, while we read the tombstones, tap our blogs on laptops, and wonder.

The church itself is somewhere I know well; long ago, in what seems like a previous lifetime, I served here as Catechist. It was my final year of study prior to Ordination, and my Rector was a brilliant Priest; a God-sent antidote to the bravura of my fellow Ordinands and our lecturers during the rest of the week. Do I need to mention he also no longer serves in Sydney?

On the vestry wall there is, or was – it’s been many years since I was inside – a picture of the 1912 parish cricket team. Undefeated at the end of the season, the players grin with the confidence of young men who, having proved themselves unbeatable at their favourite sport, are now certain of victory in everything else life may offer.

Further inside the church, on the bare sandstone walls (this is a Sydney church, after all), in a dark and forgotten corner (ditto) is a simple war memorial, erected in 1919. Made in wrought iron at one of local foundries then dominating the suburb, it lists those parishioners who enlisted in the Great War. Nearly all of the cricket team is named: three quarters were killed, and several more wounded. Only a few appear to have returned home unharmed, but who knows what screams ravished their minds in the night? Post-traumatic stress disorder was a diagnosis more than half a century away, and shattered men-boys were urged to simply “put the past behind them and get on with things.”

Perhaps some did, but facilties at a nearby psychiatric hospital were massively expanded during the 1920s to house the appalling number of returned volunteers whose minds were no longer their own.

The horror that was the “War to End all Wars” is something I can’t even begin to comprehend, but how those survivors felt when they saw the world plunge into conflict time and again during the decades which followed is incomprehensible. Kipling rightly worried that it rendered his own son’s death meaningless, but then Kipling was a man who learned the truth in the bitterest of ways possible, and then had the courage to admit his errors:

“If any question why we died,
Tell them, because our fathers lied”

If only today's leaders were as honest.

Private Joseph Henry Miller, 56th Battallion of Newtown, New South Wales.
A groom prior to his enlistment on 19 October 1915, he embarked from Sydney on board HMAT Runic on 20 November 1916 and returned to Australia on 23 July 1919.

The Homecoming
by Joseph Lee

When this blast is over-blown,
And the beacon fires shall burn
And in the street
Is the sound of feet -
They also shall return.

When the bells shall rock and ring,
When the flags shall flutter free,
And the choirs shall sing, -
"God save our King"
They shall be there to see.

When the brazen bands shall play,
And the silver trumpets blow,
And the soldiers come
To the tuck of drum -
They shall be there also.

When that which was lost is found;
When each shall have claimed his kin,
Fear not they shall miss
Mother's clasp, maiden's kiss -
For no strange soil might hold them in.

When Te Deums seek the skies,
When the Organ shakes the Dome,
A dead man shall stand
At each live man's hand -
For they also have come home.

Sorry.

European settlement of Australia didn’t really begin until 1788, and was founded upon a lie; the legal fiction of terra nullius (a Latin term meaning “nobody’s land”) - even though there were as many as 750,000 people already living here - maybe more. Their communities, beliefs, and cultures varied greatly, and there were approximately 700 different languages spoken. Yet no matter what they believed, or however they talked, they were all people. Like you and I they hoped, wept, and dreamed of making love in the warm afternoon sunshine. They had children, and dogs, and enjoyed chasing sticks together.


This picture was probably taken sometime during the 1920s. It’s a fountain erected in Sydney’s Royal Botanic Gardens in 1897 to celebrate Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, a sixty year period which witnessed the Aboriginal nations’ decimation by a combination of disease, loss of land (causing starvation), and outright murder. An estimated 90% of the indigenous population died during this time, and it was widely held, even among those sympathetic to the Aboriginals’ plight, that Australia’s indigenous peoples would soon become extinct.

The fountain is still standing, and last weekend we strolled around it just like the people in this picture. In the base are bronze panels of Aboriginals, who are depicted as demurely (and oh-so obediently) underpinning the civilization above. There’s no record of who the models were; I doubt that their names were considered worth recording by the socialites who commissioned the fountain. These survivors of a century-long attempt at genocide were nothing more than the vestiges of a superseded race, about to vanish into history forever.

But they didn't, and I’ve grown haunted by their faces.
Especially this man:



Rest in peace, mighty warrior. Your people have survived, and your land still sings the story of your blood. Pray for us, the descendants of those who brought your people death, that we might be cleansed from our sin. Forgive us, for we are sorry.

Not all sermons are boring.

Elizabeth Kaeton, who is the Rector and Pastor of The Episcopal Church of St. Paul in Chatham, New Jersey, has posted a sermon preached in 1922 by Harry Emerson Fosdick.

Called Shall the Fundamentalists Win? it's as inspiring as it is relevant to the present.

Go there. Read it. Please.