Author: Paul Hemphill

Thinking globally, acting locally – how landowners can protect koalas

Paul Hemphill 4 Comments

It is generally acknowledged that we in Australia, as elsewhere on Earth, are facing an extinction crisis brought on by climate change and environmental destruction. We see in our own little part of the planet the crisis in microcosm, with accelerated clear fell logging operations in the state forests immediately adjacent to our towns and villages, and in close proximity to our rivers and flood plains with most of the timber extracted from these forests destined for chipping on the wharfs of Port Brisbane for shipping to Asia, or to feed the ostensibly “green” bio-mass power plant at Broadwater, near Byron Bay.

Such harvesting is highly aggressive. It is clear-fell by highly sophisticated and costly harvesters rather than selectively harvest by chains saws as in the past, followed by burning of what cannot be sold off in windrows or in power stations, and ground-spraying of the naked land with a cocktail of toxic chemicals. There is then plantation re-establishment with highly flammable eucalyptus monoculture. All this on moist forest escarpments and lowlands bordering large rivers, where, with heavy rains and frequent flooding, everything – soil, ash, and poison, flows downhill. Ongoing clear-felling in the state forest plantations closely rounding Bellingen and its peri-urban areas adds to the cumulative impact of similarly aggressive harvesting operations in other forests in the Coffs Harbour and Bellingen region in recent years.

Here in Bellingen Shire, people report refugee koalas, many sick, injured and starving, koalas on roadways, in backyards, and on bush properties like our own that border the logging areas. And it is not just our iconic koalas who are threatened by what is in all but name a highly mechanised and relatively unregulated extractive industry. For residents close to and adjacent to these areas, it is equivalent to living next to a open-cut coal mine.

Sitting on the edge of the wilderness
An injured koala beside the clearfell

There are many other protected and endangered species living in the understory and old habitat trees in plantations that are “waiting for the chop”. These include koalas, quolls, sooty and powerful owls, great barred frogs, and fruit doves where forty years of native forest ingrowth and state plantation neglect have ensured the development of a biodiverse ecosystem. But the fragmentation of forest, logging in both state and private forests is destroying the connectivity of healthy koala populations, and koalas are increasingly forced forced to survive on the fringes of the state forests in private landholdings.

So, what can we who live on these borderlands do?

As habitats come increasingly under threat, and as reform and remediation take time, private landholders must do all they can for themselves and for the environment. One option available to them is a legally binding agreement between the landholder and the Biodiversity Conservation Trust under the NSW Biodiversity Conservation Act of 2016

Local Land Services NSW also offers partnerships concentrating specifically on the protection of koalas. It has successfully delivered a koala project, funded by the Australian Government, that focused on recovery actions that protect, enhance and restore Koala habitat on private land in four key Areas of Regional Koala Significance (ARKS) between Port Macquarie and Coffs Harbour. Below is a short video presented by LLS officer Asheley Goodwills about the project, focussing on Bellingen Shire.

LLS’ website notes:

“Koalas are uniquely Australian. They are one of our most loved and iconic animals and people come from all over the world to see them. Koalas, like all native animals, are culturally significant to the Indigenous People of the lands in which they live. Unfortunately, koala populations are more and more at risk of decline for a variety of reasons.

A growing human population, particularly in areas along Australia’s east coast, has led to large-scale clearing of better-quality koala habitats with many koala populations struggling within smaller, fragmented patches of poorer quality habitat. Other threats, such as drought, fire, climate change, disease, vehicle strike and dog attack are further impacting koala populations.

Creating ‘habitat refuges’ in areas remote from, and resilient to, such threats is extremely important for long-term koala persistence”.

What are Conservation Agreements? 

They are designed  and financed by NSW government’s department of environment and heritage, it is available to landholders who demonstrate that their property or part of has conservation value in flora or fauna or both and who wish to preserve its environmental integrity and biodiversity through an agreement creating a Wildlife Refuge or a Conservation Area.

What do they mean?

• The landholder establishes legal protection over a specific part of their property, effectively safeguarding it from logging and from development that might compromise its ecological integrity.

• Conservation agreements are entered on the property’s certificate of title.

• There are a range of options through the BCT or also private covenants that can be on title. Some conservation agreements are in perpetuity; others can be terminated by a future owner.

• In return for preserving part of the property, the landholder can obtain practical and financial help to preserve, protect and enhance its biodiversity.

What are the drawbacks to a conservation agreement?

• Landholders may be worried about an affectation on title and may therefore be reticent about entering into an agreement for perpetuity.

• Prospective buyers may also be reluctant to undertake the obligations under the agreement.

• But times are a’changin’ and increasingly, landholders and potential purchasers of properties in areas of ecological value are interested in conserving and enhancing our natural environment and are willing to do play their own part.

• Real estate agents, valuers and banks are becoming more and more accustomed to dealing with properties containing Wildlife Refuges and Conservation Areas.

What are the landholder’s obligations?

• To maintain the property and keep it in good order.

• To take practical steps to improve its conservation values and prevent harm to its biodiversity.

• To carrying out work where necessary to protect flora and fauna and soil and drainage, and to control invasive weeds and feral animals.

• To permit inspections by BCT to ensure compliance, review work, and undertake surveys and research.

What are the benefits to the landholder?

• The individual landholder can make an important contribution to the long-term conservation of biodiversity in NSW.

• An important incentive of the Conservation Partners Programme is that owners can apply for a conservation partner’s grant. Grants available for Conservation Areas are larger than those available for Wildlife Refuges. They are utilized to maintain and enhance the ecological integrity and biodiversity of the land.

• They can be applied to a range of activities, e.g. revegetation, weed and feral animal control, and infrastructural repairs and maintenance, including access trails, drainage and fencing.

• BCT provides advice and guidance throughout the process, including how to complete the application, recommending contractors, and assessing their quotations.

What is the agreement process?

• The landholder contacts BCT and submits an “expression of interest” in making an agreement. BCT arranges a site visit to explain the process and undertake a preliminary inspection.

• The landholder decides whether the agreement is for a Wildlife Refuge or a Conservation Area.

•An application is submitted providing property details, the area/areas proposed to be conserved, and the landholder’s assessment of the ecological values.

• BCT engages a professional ecologist to provide an expert opinion, make an assessment, draft supporting maps, and recommend whether an agreement should proceed after which BCT decides to make the agreement and commences its preparation.

• The landholder provides supplementary information and schedules, including maps showing what areas are included and which are excluded, e.g. buildings and infrastructure.

Who do you call?

• Bct.nsw.gov.au; info@bct.nsw.gov.nat; 1300 992 688

• You can also reach out to North Coast Local Land Services about natural resource management and funding opportunities. Call 1300 795 299 or emailadmin.northcoast@lls.nsw.gov.au”

What are we doing in our Conservation Area?

• We are in year one of a three-year grant cycle with a grant of $15000 a year. and have engaged an experienced local regenerator recommended by BCT.

• The team is engaged in extensive vine and weed control (particularly lantana which may attract invasive bell myna).

• We are very pleased with its work, particularly as it provided good feedback on species present and has identified rare flora that we had not expected to find.

• BCT has been fabulous throughout the process, providing advice and encouragement.

Further posts in In That Howling Infinite: The agony and extinction of Blinky Bill; Paradise Regained – back to nature in Queensland; The Bonfire of the Insanities – the biofuel greenwash

Koala Detection dogs

We have encountered two koalas on our property over the last two years, including a breeding female with a joey, and we’ve had the good fortune to have been assisted by Canines for Wildlife. 

Here is a lovely film of the detection dogs in action made by our friend Sarah George. They also feature in the LLS film featured above.

Scat hunting on our conservation area

Scats of a female koala and it’s joey found by Canines for Wildlife in our conservation area

Our latest koala high up in a tallowood

Author’s note

We live in heart of the Tarkeeth Forest, some ten kilometers from the seaside town of Urunga on the mid north coast of New South Wales.

The forest rises on Fernmount Range from the Bellinger River to the north and Kalang River to the south forming a watershed and providing a vital connecting forested corridor for koalas between the habitats of the hinterland and coastal lowlands. Above and between the two rivers, the forest is an important rain-harvesting, filtration, and stabilization ecosystem vital to the wetlands and rivers. The lower estuary is formed where the two rivers converge, creating a large and dynamic system which flows into the Pacific Ocean at Urunga.

It is an important habitat for bird, reptilian, mammalian and marsupial wildlife, including koalas, quolls. wallabies, echidnas, goannas, owls, fruit doves, and cockatoos.

The east-west Fernmount Range Trail is an ancient highway from the plains to Urunga, known to the Gumbaynggirr nation as a “place of plenty”. The forest contains areas of significant indigenous culture, recalling song lines and stories of the Dreamtime, places of ceremony, of birth and burial, and of atrocity.

This land was rainforest once. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, much of it was cleared manually and laboriously for dairy farming, and in the late sixties, most of the landowners sold their farms to Australian Pulp Mills. APM cleared the farmland and established the flooded gum plantation that is now Tarkeeth State Forest to supply a paper mill that was to be built just south of Coffs Harbour. This never happened – the project’s planners had inexplicably overlooked the lack of a massive water supply. Eventually, the plantations were sold to the government-owned Forestry Commission of New South Wales – now Forestry Corporation NSW. The plantation has now been harvested – clear felled, actually, burned, sprayed, and replanted with a highly flammable eucalyptus monoculture. – a matter of considerable concern to us forest neighbours and to many in the Shire.

Getting back to the garden – Tom Holland’s Dominion

Paul Hemphill 2 Comments
The Battle of Basildon 2011

There’s a whisper in our souls – the world has suffered long.
Beneath these skies have rolled two thousand years of wrong.
Bless This Day, Paul Hemphill
(after Edward Sears’ carol It Came Upon A Midnight Clear)

There’s a memorable scene towards the end of Martin Scorsese’s masterful adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis’ historical novel The Last Temptation of Christ (he also wrote Zorba the Greek) in which the peregrinating proselytizer Saint Paul meets a raised and reluctant Jesus who has sought domestic anonymity in contented cohabitation with reformed hooker Mary Magdalene – or so we are led to believe, for there is more than meets the eye in this iconoclastic film (the soundtrack alone, Passion, by Peter Gabriel, is more than worth the price of admission). “I am so glad that I’ve met you”, says the pompously dismissive Paul, “and now, I can forget you”.

I thought of this scene often whilst reading British historian Tom Holland’s revelatory and wide-ranging Dominion (2019), recounting the origins and the transformative and disruptive influence of the world’s biggest faith. Saint Paul, a central character in the drama, has a lot to answer for – though the Persians, Greeks, Romans, Jews and Muslims are significant supporting actors.

Tom Holland is an erudite British historian, specializing in classical and early medieval history. I’ve read many of his books. His Roman trilogy, Rubicon, Dynasty and his recent Pax read like thrillers, as does In the Shadow of the Sword which chronicles the rise of Islam. He’s also written on Greek and Persian classical history. Together with fellow historian Dominic Sandbrook,, he writes and broadcasts The Rest is History, an excellent podcast [Sandbrook is an informative and entertaining authority on postwar British history and society, and his quad of books on the fifties to the early eighties are wide-ranging and highly entertaining and informative – particularly so as I actually grew from boy to man in these dynamic decades.

In an earlier book, Dynasty, the saga of the Augustan caesars, Holland wrote: “The age was a rotten one: diseased, debased and degraded”. But to us, two thousand years on, it seems like it was always thus. He doesn’t shy away from criticism. All over Europe and the New World, Holland writes, “in church after church, we encounter the same fascinating admixture of the salacious, the sexual, the sadistic, and the sacred”.

We of the western world are heirs to a civilization that has for two millennia endeavoured to get back to the garden – in a continual cycle of striving for perfection and falling into to evil ways. 

Holland argues that all “western” moral and social norms are the product of what he defines as the Christian revolution, a revolution that continues to shape the modern world. Even if churches across the West continue to empty, Christian values continue to define who we are and the battles we choose to fight. In a recent interview in The Australian occasioned by the imminent arrival DownUnder of The Rest is History podcast’s roadshow, Holland refers to instincts and muscle memories that derive from 2000 years of Christianity.

Though Christianity’s spiritual roots go deeper than year one of the Christian era, it had to actually begin as it did – with believers. As American author EC Morgan wrote in her magnificent Deep South epic The Sport of Kings, “Our stories about life and death are meaningless if they aren’t shared. Community is what religious faith is all about. Believers are persistent. They refuse to forget. Without believers, the sacrifice of Jesus Christ would have been forgotten, a lost relic of history, just the story of a wandering radical with a vision for a new kingdom. It was only the witness of a community through storytelling that transformed Jesus’ tragic death into God’s ultimate sacrifice. In their rebelling, he was no longer a political dissident put to death by the state, but a hero”.

Holland is not a nostalgic Christian who reads history. At the time of Dominion’s publication, he confessed to being an atheist. Like atheists, including myself, he sways to the rhythm of a spiritual drum. He is, rather, a historian observing the influence of Christianity without making moral judgments. He says large swathes of Western modernity are having arguments within a Christian framework, often without realising it.

Even those who reject religion – those who hold to atheism, humanism, scientism, secularism, egalitarianism, feminism, and many other ‘isms, find their beliefs ineradicably shaped by Christian preconceptions, prejudices, and, indeed, superstitions. Holland writes that Christianity continues to infuse people’s morals and presumptions “so utterly that many failed even to detect their presence. Like dust particles so fine as to be invisible to the naked eye, they were breathed in equally by everyone: believers, atheists and those who never paused so much as to think about religion … perhaps the most compelling point is the way Christianity defines even its opponents. Even as the woke generation condemns Christian history as oppressive, patriarchal, racist and all the other now-standard derelictions, the standards of justice and equality by which they judge these shortcomings remain ineradicably Christian. In that sense, Holland concludes, Christendom will remain with us a while yet”.

Our conservatism, our fear of change, our contempt for “the other”, our atavistic hopes and fears, our yearning for renewal and revolution, and in the contemporary argot, our political correctness and value signaling, even – our love for our neighbour and our intolerance of his and her resistance and reticence, doubt and difference, our hostility and our hubris, our ethnocentrism and our ecumenism, all spring from the same source: that lowly stable in a satellite suburb of Jerusalem, in the Roman colony of Judea two millennia ago. O Little Town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie…

In his interview with The Australian, Holland said that at the centre of social movements of the ’60s and onwards, from civil and gay rights to the more recent Black Lives Matters and #MeToo is “Christ’s great promise that the last should be first”.

“The 1960s will come to be seen as a decade as significant for Christendom as the 1520s. We are living through a process of moral and ethical and, indeed, theological change comparable to the Reformation in the 16th century. And the idea of reformation, the idea of casting off superstition, idols, opening yourself to the spirit. You get that in the 1520s, and you get that in the 1960s. The difference in the 1960s is that what is being cast off is essentially what you might call a conservative Christian understanding of how society should function, going to church, experiencing liturgies, Sunday schools, familiarity with the Bible.”

There is, he continues, “a kind of Christ-shaped hole in our public culture. And George Floyd kind of filled that gap for that summer of 2020 … Two thousand years of Christian sexual morality had resulted in men and women widely taking this for granted. Had it not, then #MeToo would have had no force”.

Again, Holland makes no judgment about this. He is simply observing that Christianity explains “woke­ism”, whatever that portmanteau word might mean to the mind of the beholder. Not to mention our polarized and argumentative modernity.

Whatever Holland’s own spiritual beliefs – in Dominion he is quite discreet – there is a curious dualism, disconnect even, in the manner in which Dominion has been presented to its prospective readership. On the one hand, it is offered as an essentially humanistic tract linking the rise and rise of Christianity with humankind’s eternal striving for perfection of a sort. When I bought the book, it this aspect that drew me to it after reading the reviews I republish below. And yet, as illustrated by its two distinctively different covers, it has also been deliberately targeting a Christian market. here they are, the opaquely secular and the transparently sacred.

But, back to Dominion.

The reviews below provide an excellent overview of the scale and achievement of Holland’s project. I see no reason to compete with them. but I must add that I was mightily impressed by the literal cast of thousands he assembled to tell his story. There are many surprising and entertaining but always pertinent segues, from Adam to Zarathustra (of Nietzsche fame), with cameo appearances from a long-dead famous white men, iconic persons of colour like Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, some most impressive women, and contemporaries as diverse as Harvey Weinstein, Margaret Atwood and Angela Merkel. There is a cornucopia of texts from Job’s tears to John Lennon’s Imagine, a connecting of movements and zeitgeists from crusaders to slavery abolitionists to #MeToo, from the protestant reformation to revolutions political and social, and a globetrotting, time-shifting odyssey from Megiddo to Mordor, the Crucifixion to California Dreaming.

Surprisingly, the Bard of Avon doesn’t earn a guernsey. You won’t find him in the glossary. It was after all he who held up a mirror to our humanity, and who is in his turn held most highly in the canon of our Anglosphere. Is it because there was no room at the inn? Because that rundown inn in that little town of Bethlehem, is the alpha and omega, the hopes and fears all our years, and they abide with us still.

And by us, I also include myself. My father was an Orangeman from Ulster, and my mother, a Catholic from County Wexford. I was born in Birmingham, England, baptized as a Catholic, and raised as a Catholic. I was educated in the British cultural milieu, with Roman Catholic teaching and thinking, but received prodigious input from a British upbringing and an education in an English grammar school grounded in the Church of England and replete with the history of invasions, civil wars, reformation, revolution and empire.

 All these laid the bedrock of my spiritual and cultural identity. Much of this was inherited from “priest-ridden Ireland” and its centuries of resistance to the Sassenach (Saxon, that is) overlord, from whence I acquired most of my DNA and to which I ascribe to myself (a subjective thing and not for others to judge) a Celtic soul and a rebel heart.

“Once a Catholic, always a Catholic” they used to say to me when I’d declare that I’d given up practicing when I was good enough. That was not long after my confirmation by the Archbishop of Birmingham in St Chad’s Cathedral. There was no great epiphany. No revelation from the sea of unknowing. I remained in a Catholic scout troop and participated in church parades and attended mass of a Sunday to pleased my mother. I just kind of slip slided away, and then came the sixties with its Marx and music, and all the rest: the sights, sounds, sensibilities and substances of that generous decade …

But, as my songs and stories and politics attest, like Holland, I’ve not ventured all that far from the mother ship.

As a parting disclaimer, I am named not for Saint Paul but for the acclaimed American socialist and singer Paul Robeson.

Lord of the starfields
Ancient of Days
Universe Maker
Here’s a song in your praise
Bruce Cockburn

We are stardust
Billion year old carbon
We are golden
Caught in the devil’s bargain
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden
Joni Mitchell, Woodstock

Featured picture: Dale Farm – The Battle of Basildon 2011

© Paul Hemphill 2023 All rights reserved

Postscript

By 2025, Tom Holland has openly returned to the Christian fold, as have many prominent intellectuals, including historian Niall Ferguson, or converted like and his wife, activist and author Ayaan Hirsi Ali who was formerly a Muslim. The reasons why such thinkers seek the transcendent in their later years is beyond the remit of this review, though Holland admits to having been wrong about Christianity, that his spiritual quest led him to Dominion. now come to see Christianity as the story of power willingly spent on behalf of the vulnerable; strength deployed to protect the weak, power that is used to take the vulnerable off of crosses, rather than put them there. https://theopolisinstitute.com/tom-holland-and-the-liberating-power-of-christianity/

As for myself, I still hear the thrum of that spiritual drum, but even though I head for that inevitable final exit and the “great unknown”, I do not hear the call of the numinous. I was unexpectedly presented with an opportunity to contemplate this recently when old friend of my own age shared with me the story of how he’d taken the hallucinatory drug mescaline for the first time in a bucolic Welsh setting in 1972:

“I had an experience of enlightenment, of self-discovery, that transformed my understanding of the world. I realised that all is one, and that this One is what ‘I’ am – an unborn, undying, eternal, formless Reality – that is all that exists and all that has ever existed – and that this world of form that we perceive is nothing other than this formless Reality. This experience led me down the path of spiritual search from that moment on. Scriptural writings like the Upanishads which had previously seemed obscure and impenetrable suddenly became dazzlingly clear to me as I realised that their writers were describing the experience I had just had myself. I found numerous teachers who were describing the same experience and showing a path to discover it. I felt a particular affinity for the teaching of the South Indian guru Ramana Maharshi, but also found my experience reflected in the teachings of the Sufis and the Zen masters”.

Though I too had taken mescaline and acid in the late sixties, I did not travel down such paths. “For whatever reasons”, I wrote him back, “nature, nurture or narcotics, I’ve never experienced anything like what you describe, nor, for good or ill, have I sought it. Transcendence is something I read about but have never encountered, although I might’ve got a hint of it momentarily in the Taj Mahal when I was high on speed (to keep me awake on overnight train Indian journeys). Maybe that might explain my perspective on history, politics, society and culture, and life, even. Matter of fact. Hard-boiled. Blunt. Brutal even. Quizzical, yes. Cynical, certainly. Your favourite song of the seventies is probably John Lennon’s Imagine. Mine is more like David Bowie’s Life on Mars”.

See also in In That Howling Infinite: The Rest is History – a gift that keeps on giving ; O Little Town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie…

Christianity still shapes modern Western mortality

Barney Zwartz, Sydney Morning Herald November 15, 2019
Caravaggio's The Crowning with Thorns.

Caravaggio’s The Crowning with Thorns.

This huge and sweeping account of the past 2500 years has a similarly large-scale ambition: “to explore how we in the West came to be what we are and to think the way that we do.” And his argument is compelling: even those who reject religion – those who hold to atheism, humanism, scientism, secularism – find their beliefs ineradicably shaped by Christian presuppositions.

Holland writes that Christianity continues to infuse people’s morals and presumptions “so utterly that many failed even to detect their presence. Like dust particles so fine as to be invisible to the naked eye, they were breathed in equally by everyone: believers, atheists and those who never paused so much as to think about religion.”

Holland explores the influence of the world’s biggest faith.
Holland manages to traverse Western history from the Persian invasion of Greece in 480BC to Donald Trump by the technique of taking some often-obscure figure or event and expanding from that to social transformation. So he leaps from the Apostle Paul, herald of a new beginning, to church fathers Irenaeus and the development of the canon, Origen and the invention of theology, the council of Nicaea, Martin of Tours and the exaltation of poverty, and Bede and a calendar based on the birth of Christ.

Perhaps Holland’s most important contribution is to lay waste the secularist founding myth that reason, empiricism, evidence, humanism and the like emerged in the Enlightenment fully formed like Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, not only owing nothing to the preceding centuries but indeed in contrast to them.

Holland, an atheist, is no apologist for Christianity but is honest enough to acknowledge that his values and world view emerged from Christianity rather than pagan antiquity.

Take human rights, a key concept in modern law and ethics. Rights are by no means self-evident or inalienable, as the US Declaration of Independence states, and would have attracted contempt in pre-Christian societies such as ancient Rome or China.

Rights’ essential precondition is the Genesis teaching of humans made in God’s image, and therefore endowed with dignity and worth. It led Gregory of Nyssa in the fourth century to rail against slavery and abandoning unwanted infants on rubbish heaps and was made explicit by 11th-century canon lawyer Gratian, who pronounced that everyone was equal in the sight of God. Anything in the legal system obstructing this idea had to go.

“Much flowed from this formulation that earlier ages would have struggled to comprehend. Age-old presumptions were being decisively overturned: that custom was the ultimate authority; that the great were owed a different justice from the humble; that inequality was something natural, to be taken for granted,” Holland writes. In 1550 Bartolome de las Casas demanded justice for South American Indians, using the term “derechos humanos”, human rights. The genius of the authors of the US Constitution 200 years later was to garb in the robes of the Enlightenment the radical Protestantism that shaped the fledgling nation.

Darwin, in contrast, pointed out how unnatural such a concept is in the light of evolution, observing that “philanthropy and care for the poor must be highly injurious to the race of man”.

And today the insistence of the United Nations and others on the antiquity and broad acceptance of human rights is a fiction to allow it to be a global rather than merely a Western understanding. Secularism, in an identical manner, depended on the care with which it covered its tracks, Holland says.

The idea of the secular, contrasted with the religious, is an important theme of the great fourth-century theologian Augustine, in The City of God, and reaches fulfilment in the humiliation of Henry IV before Pope Gregory in 1076, which divided the religious and secular realms (giving the Church great power in both).

So embedded is it that nearly a millennium later German chancellor Angela Merkel appealed to it in 2014 to claim that Islam belongs as much as Christianity in modern Germany. So it may, but not because traditional Islam admits the idea of the secular, a notion born purely from Christian history. To Islam, it is an artificial divide. But, as Holland notes, the West has become skilled in repackaging Christian concepts for non-Christian audiences.

The idea that science needed to set itself free of dogma and superstition, possible only in the Enlightenment, is another fiction that can be believed only by those ignorant of history. Holland turns to Abelard – the ill-fated lover of Heloise – who devoted his post-castration life to promoting the idea that God’s order was rational and governed by rules that humans could seek to comprehend. His conviction that identifying the laws that governed nature would honour the God who made them led to the founding of universities in the 12th century.

Similarly, humanism has smuggled in Christian assumptions unacknowledged. Without the biblical story of creation in God’s image, the reverence of humanists for their own species “risks seeming mawkish and shallow”. Indeed, philosophers such as Peter Singer have attacked such notions as “speciesism”.

And the claim in the Humanist Manifesto that morals can be developed from science is another fantasy. “The primary dogma of humanism – that morality is an intrinsic part of human nature based on understanding and a concern for others – found no more corroboration in science than did the dogma of the Nazis that anyone not fit for life should be exterminated,” Holland writes. “The wellspring of humanist values lay not in reason, not in evidence-based thinking, but in history.”

An interesting thesis is that those who most truly understood Christianity’s radical role were those who most despised it, and here Holland cites Nietzsche, the Marquis de Sade, Thomas Huxley and Heinrich Himmler. Nietzsche thought Christianity a slave morality, a way for the weak to bind the strong, but also recognized its values could not survive without the God who sanctioned them. Himmler, who had a 50-year plan to eradicate Christianity, believed the strong had both a duty and obligation to eliminate the weak.

Holland acknowledges that the course of Christianity has been a mixed blessing. Christians have indeed been oppressors and exploiters, although the backlash against that has also been Christian. He details many embarrassing aspects, from crusades to corruption, and especially the totalitarian idea of truth that justifies persecuting those who differ. The heresy hunters of the inquisition survive today in the self-righteous “woke” fanatics, who no longer have the power to burn people at the stake but try to end careers, ruin reputations and close down discussions.

This is an astounding book, not only for its scope – cultural, political, social, intellectual, historical – and its originality, but for its masterly writing. Holland has a knack for the colourful twist. Writing of the summer of love, 1967, he notes: “Preachers, seen through the marijuana haze of a squat in San Francisco, had the look of bigots. Where was the love in short-haired men jabbing their fingers and going puce?”

He also has an eye for fascinating detail. For example, we owe capital letters and question marks to the abbot Alcuin of Tours, adviser to Charlemagne in the eighth century, who did a vast amount to popularize the Bible as a single source of revelation.

But sometimes Holland is a bit too graphic to be comfortable. His detailed discussion of death by crucifixion is stomach-churning; still more so the Persian punishment of the scaphe, in which the victim is trapped inside a log but for his extremities, covered in honey, and devoured over days by insects and maggots from within. Believe me, Holland’s account is horrifically more detailed.

In an enterprise as vast as Dominion, there are inevitably lacunae. Critics have observed that Holland underplays the role of Eastern Orthodox Christianity and the rise of trade, but the book is already nearly 600 pages. Another occasional weakness is that Holland’s narrative style means that he may pass over contested aspects of history to stick with his main line, though footnotes can redeem him.

For me, perhaps the most compelling point is the way Christianity defines even its opponents. Even as the woke generation condemns Christian history as oppressive, patriarchal, racist and all the other now-standard derelictions, the standards of justice and equality by which they judge these shortcomings remain ineradicably Christian. In that sense, Holland concludes, Christendom will remain with us a while yet.

Barney Zwartz is a Senior Fellow of the Centre for Public Christianity.

The legacy of Christianity

An absorbing survey of Christianity’s subversive origins and enduring influence is filled with vivid portraits, gruesome deaths and moral debates

Holland might also have pointed out that the ancient Romans reserved crucifixion mostly for political rebels. Jesus may not have been a Lenin, but it might have suited the Jewish leaders to persuade Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor, that he was. He would certainly have knocked around with Zealots, the anticolonial revolutionaries of the day. A few of his disciples were probably paid-up members of the group, as (probably) were the two so-called thieves between whom he hung on the cross. Pilate wouldn’t have needed much convincing to reach for the hammer and nails. Contrary to the gospels’ portrait of him as a kind of Guardian-reading liberal, reluctant to use his power and bemusedly in search of truth, the historical Pilate was a moral monster who would have crucified his own grandmother, and who was finally dismissed from the imperial service for corruption.

Despite these omissions, Dominion packs an astonishing amount of stuff into its 500 pages on Christianity’s enduring influence. Holland has all the talents of an accomplished novelist: a gift for narrative, a lively sense of drama and a fine ear for the rhythm of a sentence. He also has an intense, sometimes rather grisly feel for the physical: the book is resonant with the cracking of bones, flaying of flesh and shrieks of small children tossed into fires. Some of this was inflicted on Christians, and some of it inflicted by them.

Rather than unpack complex theological debates, the book gives us a series of vivid portraits of some key figures in Christian history: St Paul, St Augustine, Peter Abelard, Catherine of Siena, a former playboy known as Francis of Assisi and a host of more modern luminaries. Yet this is not just a galaxy of Christian superstars. They are all embedded in their historical contexts, as the book moves from Caesar Augustus to the #MeToo movement. There is even a medieval forerunner of feminism in the figure of the Milanese noblewoman Guglielma, who announced that she was the Holy Spirit made flesh for the redemption of women, and with engaging modesty baptised them in the name of the Father, the Son and herself.

Other intriguing details abound. When Notre Dame was being built in medieval Paris, a collective of prostitutes offered to pay for one of its windows and dedicate it to the Virgin Mary. Followers of Satan around the same time were obliged to suck on the tongue of a giant toad and lick the anus of a black cat. Galileo had a craving for celebrity and was an inveterate social climber. Yet, though the book is full of such titbits, there is a seriousness at its heart. Holland argues that all “western” moral and social norms are the product of the Christian revolution. He is haunted by St Paul’s claim that God chose the weak and foolish things of the world to shame the strong, and to drive the point home he might have looked at the beginning of Luke’s gospel. We encounter there an obscure young Jewish woman called Mary who is pregnant with Jesus, and Luke puts into her mouth a cry of praise that some scholars believe is a Zealot chant. It speaks of how you will know who God is when you see the poor coming to power and the rich sent empty away. It is this which must be weighed in the balance against the killing fields of Christendom.

Louis IX en route to Egypt, leading the Seventh Crusade.
Louis IX en route to Egypt, leading the Seventh Crusade. Photograph: Alamy

So, too, must the notion of love. This book is full of saints and martyrs selflessly devoted to others. Yet what distinguishes the Judeo-Christian idea of love from the romantic, erotic, touchy-feely sense it has acquired in modern times is that it has nothing to do with feeling. Love for the New Testament is a social practice, not a sentiment. How you feel about the person whose place you take in the queue for the gas chambers is neither here nor there. You don’t even have to know him. Only a love of this ruthlessly impersonal kind, which couldn’t care less about the gender, rank, skin colour or personality of whoever needs your help, could prove equal to what St John darkly calls the powers of this world: Trump, Putin, Bolsonaro and their lackeys.

You can, however, make a fetish or idol out of anything, as Freud instructs us. Such false gods fill every chapter of this illuminating study. Yet Holland is surely right to argue that when we condemn the moral obscenities committed in the name of Christ, it is hard to do so without implicitly invoking his own teaching.

Terry Eagleton is a literary critic, writer and chair in English literature in Lancaster University’s department of English and creative writing. His latest book is The Event of Literature

The Rest is History – a gift that keeps on giving

Paul Hemphill 9 Comments

… the past is always trickling under the soil, a slow leak you can’t trace. Often meaning is only revealed retrospectively. Hilary Mantel, The Mirror and the Light

You think that you can forget the past; you can’t. The past is a living thing, you own it, owe it.”Montrose’s letter to Atticus, Lovecraft Country

The past is never dead. It is not even past.  William Faulkner

Remembering …comes in flashbacks and echoes. Taylor Swift’s Red

The past beats inside me like a second heart. John Banville, The Sea

We watch history, we make history, and then one day, we become it. Kendall Roy, Succession

I have little affection for News Corp commentator Janet Albrechtsen – a right wing culture warrior who cloaks her predictable positions with a patina of legal erudition (she does have a legal background, but a barrister friend who once worked with her described her as less clever than she thought she was). But I recently discovered that she and I actually have one thing in common. We are both big fans of The Rest is History, an excellent podcast created and broadcast by British historians Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland. And so, for the first, and probably the last time, I not only enjoyed one of her opinions pieces, but I am actually republishing it here in In That Howling Infinite.

Tom Holland specializes in classical and early medieval history, and Dominic Sandbrook is an informative and entertaining chronicler of postwar British history and society. I’ve read many of their books. Holland’s Roman trilogy, Rubicon, Dynasty and his recent Pax read like thrillers, and he’s also written on Persian and Islamic history. Sandbrook’s quad of books on Britain are wide-ranging and highly entertaining, covering the social and political history from the fifties though to the the early eighties.

The Rest is History is both highly entertaining and illuminating with this unlikely but erudite dynamic duo presentng wide-ranging and well-researched stories from history’s back pages served up with bad accents and impersonations and humorous irreverence regarding assorted shibboleths and sacred cows. They have fun with history and at each other’s expense – though more often it is Dom taking the piss out of Tom.

Since the first episode on Greatness aired in October 2020 during Britain’s draconian Covid lockdown, there have now been almost four hundred more – about important events and personalities, cities and countries,  political and cultural movements, and wars and revolutions metaphorical and actual. There’s counterfactuals, predictions and projections, culture wars and conspiracy theories. Some multi-episode podcasts are particularly enthralling. The story of Irish independence is one. The rise of British Fascism is another. The two part British Fashion in the Sixties is a hoot. Stand-alone episodes on JRR Tolkien, Rider Haggard and JK Rowling are likewise entertaining whilst others, like the sad story of Lady Jane Grey, “the Nine Day Queen”, are tragic. The Rest is History is a gift that keeps on giving.

Whilst Tom and Dom are certainly small “c” conservatives, I’m glad that they do not go all out partisan for the “anti-woke” brigade – there are lots of jibes at readers of The Guardian. They do, however, have no time for history and culture wars nor identity politics. We have to take our history, the good and the bad, as it comes. Many of the things we learnt at school or in our national narratives have retrospectively proven false or distorted.

When telling their tales, be they long, tall or small, they demonstrate that not all history has to be important so long as it is interesting. It’s the stories that enthrall children when they are first taught history – that is how I became passionate about it and remain so.

In the early sixties, we were introduced to the romantic, exciting, and often sugar-coated basics, and only later on did we learn that the Boer War and the Indian Mutiny for example were not that noble and glorious at all but nasty scraps with atrocities committed on all sides. Recall that corny old chestnut 1066 And All That, which I read as a lad and still dip into now and then for its perspective on what we were taught back in the day as “good kings” and “good things”. “Bad kings” were more often than not the stuff of Shakespeare, whilst there were remarkably few “bad things”, and if there were, it’s wasn’t us wot did it. As a nipper, I came across the ‘He Went With …’ books of American author Louse Andrews Kent in which a young lad (always a chap) accompanied famous explorers on their journeying. Columbus, Magellan and Vasco de Gama got a gig, as did landlubbers Champlain and Marco Polo. Ladybird Books introduced starry-eyed youngsters to those intrepid Brits Captains Cook and Scott, Drake and Raleigh. Back then, of course, we were not to know what came next: the European mission civilatrice.

In time, like St Paul, “I put off childish things”, but believe still that history can and should be fun as well as serious, and not just the bailiwick of crusty academics, history snobs and culture warriors. There’s a Canadian writer who tells stories from world history called “Sweary History” or The Day Shit Went Down – I’m sure you get the drift.

I don’t regard myself as a “historian” but rather as a longtime and eternal student, and have been thus since. I’ve degrees in history and politics. I’ve been studying history since first form, back in 1960. I’ve been filling in the gaps ever since, learning new things every day from books, journals, television, and media both mainstream and social. Today, I read history books more than any other books and always have a few on the go.  I’ll never made history, not will I make it in the time I have left on this fascinating planet, but I write about history and endeavour to increase other’s interest in and awareness of history and its importance to us all. Just like The Rest is History, indeed.

Albrechtsen’s piece coincides with the pair’s imminent visit to Australia and New Zealand to “perform” The Rest is History live. Doubtlessly, they will give us their narrative on Australian history. I look forward to hearing what they have to say about our British inheritance, the colonial legacy, and our very own history wars. Sandbrook tells her:

“Seeing history as a mirror for our own concerns  patronizes the past because it turns the past into a plaything for our own prejudices and predilections. People do get bored of these things. History, including our own of British colonialism, is more complicated, more capacious, more interesting than a black-and-white morality tale. The story of the British Empire, of Australia, they’re really complicated stories involving generations of very different people who had different motives.”

Says Holland: “Captain Cook – a goodie, or a baddie? I’m opposed to that view of history because I don’t think it’s history. It could be philosophy, it could be theology … it could be all kinds of disciplines,” but he says it is not the role of historians to make moral judgments about the past. “We’re The Rest is History, we are not The Rest is Morality”.

Sandbrook is asked what on earth  he could say that would get them cancelled in Australia.  “Maybe the big mistake was for the British to give any degree of self-government to Australia at all.” He’s joking.

See history posts in In That Howling Infinite: Foggy Ruins of Time – from history’s backpages

The Rest is History hosts say stop moralising about the past

The Weekend Australian, 30th September 2023
The Rest is History podcast hosts Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook.

Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook.

How often do you think about the Roman Empire? It turns out lots of men do, and often. Or at least many say they do.

Last month, this random question began circulating on social media, with women doing the asking. The similarity of the responses made headlines around the world in the same week I was speaking with British historian Tom Holland. Surely Holland would think a lot about the ancient world?

I try out the question over pizza and wine with a group of four men on a sunny spring day on the Mornington Peninsula. One asks if Rome is code for sex. No, fellas, I mean Rome as in Augustus, bloodshed, the Colosseum, concrete, the Julian calendar and all that stuff.

All four men say, one way or another, that they think about ancient Rome most days. Seriously? The closest I come to musing regularly about ancient history is Brad Pitt circa AD2004 as Achilles. Yes, he’s a Greek, not real. Whatever.

Holland and fellow Brit Dominic Sandbrook have become superstars of history. Their podcast, The Rest is History, attracted a cult following after the first episode, released in London during the Covid lockdown in 2020. Its popularity has soared, along with the profiles of its hosts. Today the show attracts more than 10 million downloads a month, half by people under 35.

It’s not hard to see why. The two popular historians bring something different and remarkable to the telling of history. Holland, who hails from Broad Chalke near Salisbury in southern England, taught himself Greek to write a new translation of Herodotus’s The Histories. Sandbrook, from the West Midlands, is a modern historian and author of numerous books on Britain from the 1960s to the ’80s, including Who Dares Wins and a host of history books for children.

Holland immerses us in ancient stories – all magnificently foreign, rousing and grisly. As he explores the lives of Nero and eunuchs, Theodora, the Empress of Byzantium, Thermopylae and Salamis and everything else about ancient Rome or Greece, it’s thrilling.

His latest book, Pax, the third in a series, covers Roman power under emperors such as Vespasian, Titus, Domitian and Hadrian. On the last page, Holland records a scrawl of graffiti on a rock face in the wilds beyond Palestine: “The Romans always win.”

To be honest, his excitement about the subject is so palpable I wasn’t game enough to ask how often he thinks about ancient Rome. It really would have been the equivalent of asking a man how often he thinks about sex.

When I catch up with his colleague Sandbrook a week later, he teases that “the imbalance in how often Tom thinks about those two things is very, very unhealthy”.

Such is the elation in Sandbrook’s voice during his podcasts on Watergate, could it be that he thinks about Richard Nixon as often as Holland thinks about Rome? Sandbrook taught a twice-weekly year-long course on Nixon at Sheffield University. That’s a lot of Nixon. He tells me that by the end of the course many of his students empathised with the awkward, flawed man who struggled with the fact he could never be as cool as the Kennedys. But who is?

The absence of politics in their telling of history is a tonic in this exhaustingly moralising era. Those who want to corral history to suit their politics by expunging bits or rewriting parts will get a fright: neither man will have a bar of this modern obsession to overlay the past with modern filters of sex, gender, race and so on.

During Pride Week in Britain, the pair released a podcast on the intriguing story of Hadrian and his lover Antinous. Holland points out that though the alluring Antinous has become a modern-day gay icon, calling the young Greek gay doesn’t capture the time; it’s like saying Julius Caesar conquered France. The correct word is Gaul.

Similarly, in writing Pax, Holland is trying to see that world through Roman eyes. “I deliber­ately say in my introduction that I’m not going to judge the Romans by our standards,” he tells Inquirer from his home in London.

Though we might regard some of the actions of the Romans as unspeakable crimes, let’s try to understand why they didn’t see them as crimes, he says. This is the study of history.

Sandbrook predicts a younger generation will kick out the po-faced cultural curators of the aching wokeness that has imbued history. Or it will burn itself out.

“Seeing history as a mirror for our own concerns … patronises the past because it turns the past into a plaything for our own prejudices and predilections,” Sandbrook says. “People do get bored of these things.” History, including our own of British colonialism, is more complicated, more capacious, more interesting than a black-and-white morality tale.

“The story of the British Empire, of Australia, they’re really complicated stories involving generations of very different people who had different motives.”

Holland agrees. “Captain Cook – a goodie, or a baddie? I’m opposed to that view of history because I don’t think it’s history. It could be philosophy, it could be theology … it could be all kinds of disciplines,” but he says it is not the role of historians to make moral judgments about the past. “We’re The Rest is History, we are not The Rest is Morality,” he says.

If society is applying modern filters of sex, gender and race to the past, that tells us something about our own time; it says nothing about that period in history.

“One of the things that has happened since the ’60s with the collapse of the traditional biblical narratives that sustained our cultural and intellectual discourses is that people need new stories. History has come to serve people as a quarry for moral stories, it’s come to replace religious studies,” Holland says.

Speaking from his home in Chipping Norton in West Oxfordshire, Sandbrook says the worst kind of history is “the history that makes you feel smug about yourself … It smacks of smug narcissism about our own virtue.”

History should give us a sense of our own “cosmic insignificance” and an understanding that what we believe is contingent on our circumstances. “You read about all these people who lived before, who had lives of such tremendous richness and colour, and they’re all gone. And one day that will be us.

“Just as people before us believed lots of things that we now think are demented, the things that we value so highly may seem unreasonable to our successors. What history should give us is a sense of humility.”

In a similar vein, Holland says history has left him with a “nagging sense of nihilism, a sense that perhaps there is no absolute morality”.

“People across the world and throughout time have believed an incredible array of things about how you should behave, what it is to be good, what sexuality morality should be, how you should treat your fellow human beings, all kinds of things, what gender relations should be. There is no absolute right way of structuring your society. If I’d grown up as a Spartan or an Assyrian, would I believe in human rights? I would not.”

That brings us to Dominion, Holland’s 2019 book about how the Christian revolution continues to shape the modern world. Even if churches across the West continue to empty, Christian values continue to define who we are and the battles we choose to fight.

Holland tells Inquirer that at the centre of social movements of the ’60s, from civil and gay rights to the more recent Black Lives Matters, is “Christ’s great promise that the last should be first”.

“The 1960s will come to be seen as a decade as significant for Christendom as the 1520s. We are living through a process of moral and ethical and, indeed, theological change comparable to the Reformation in the 16th century. And the idea of reformation, the idea of casting off superstition, idols, opening yourself to the spirit. You get that in the 1520s, and you get that in the 1960s.

“The difference in the 1960s is that what is being cast off is essentially what you might call a conservative Christian understanding of how society should function, going to church, experiencing liturgies, Sunday schools, familiarity with the Bible.”

What remains, says Holland, are instincts and muscle memories that derive from 2000 years of Christianity. Why, he asks, did the killing of an innocent man – George Floyd – by the security apparatus of an imperial power have the impact that it did across the world? It seems odd, he says, until you remember that the foundational figure of Christ was an innocent man put to death by the security apparatus of an earlier imperial power.

There is “a kind of Christ-shaped hole in our public culture. And George Floyd kind of filled that gap for that summer of 2020.”

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_SrIk6W0Ig

Holland is not a nostalgic Christian who reads history. He is a historian observing the influence of Christianity without making moral judgments. He says large swaths of Western modernity are having arguments within a Christian framework, often without realising it. Should sodomy be condemned, or monogamy be encouraged with same-sex marriage? These are Christian values, and people, by the democratic process in many countries, have settled on the latter.

Holland says the #MeToo movement is an extension of the Christian value that “the human body is not an object, not a commodity to be used by the rich and powerful as and when they pleased”.

“Two thousand years of Christian sexual morality had resulted in men and women widely taking this for granted. Had it not, then #MeToo would have had no force,” Holland writes in Dominion. He says the same “last shall be first” kind of “hyper-Protestantism push” also has infused the trans movement. With no formal church framework to arbitrate arguments, it has become “a free-for-all” where everyone is understandably trying to do it for themselves.

He adds that often these debates – not just about trans issues – become vitriolic because there is a modern revulsion against the doctrine of original sin – a tremendously democratising idea.

Once you reject that even the greatest saint is a sinner then some people will see themselves as perfect. They will be more prone to casting out those they see as not perfect. Without original sin, there is a peculiar virtue in being last, in being a victim, and there is less room for redemption as people set down their own unyielding boundaries about who is good and who is bad.

Again, Holland makes no judgment about this; he is simply observing that Christianity explains woke­ism. Not to mention our polarised modernity.

Sandbrook, the modern historian, is concerned that the “hysterical polarisation of American politics” is turning the US into a dysfunctional society as the tectonic plates of power are shifting towards a dominant Asia. It is, he says, a return to the older pattern of geopolitical rivalries involving China, India, Turkey, Iran. “These would have seemed very familiar to people 2000 years ago.” And this is happening when the centre ground of politics is disappearing in the US.

'The Rest is History' podcast with Tom Holland & Dominic Sandbrook.

‘He says once you treat your domestic political enemies as a genuine threat to the republic, when you say they are not merely wrong, they are treacherous, and we must do everything we can to stop them, then “it’s really difficult to see how you turn back without some major crisis”.

The two historians will be in Australia in late November, performing their Rest is History live show soon after the referendum about changing our Constitution has been decided. That’s right. History sells tickets at the box office, too. So how will these historians answer questions about British colon­ialism?

“Tom is so jittery,” says Sandbrook. “He said to me, ‘Please don’t say anything that will get us cancelled in Australia. Also, don’t tell the journalist that I told you this.’ ”

That Sandbrook wants me to print this tells you that the dynamic between these two men is as vibrant as the content of their podcasts. They have fun with history and at each other’s expense. Though more often it is Sandbrook taking the piss out of Holland.

I ask Sandbrook what on earth he could say that would get them cancelled in Australia. “Maybe the big mistake was for the British to give any degree of self-government to Australia at all.” He’s joking.

On a more serious note, the pair will delve into Australian history late next month when they release two episodes on Captain James Cook.

Neither Holland nor Sandbrook knew in 2020 how successful their podcast would become. Sandbrook recounts that Holland wanted the “worst title ever” for their new venture: Podpast. “It was such a terrible title,” he says, laughing. They settled on The Rest is History. And, well, the rest is history.

Though it’s also possible that a lame title would not have stopped these men becoming rock stars of history

Silencing The Voice – the Anatomy of a No voter

Paul Hemphill 7 Comments

It takes love over gold
And mind over matter
To do what you do that you must
When the things that you hold
Can fall and be shattered
Or run through your fingers like dust
Mark Knopfler, Dire Straits

The vibe in Bellingen town on the mid north coast of New South Wales during our months of campaigning for Yes and right up to 6pm on Saturday was such that you’d think we’d brought it home. But that was our hearts and hopes speaking – our heads were well aware that we were in trouble. The Yes vote in the two Bellingen booths was at the last count 66% – much like inner city Sydney and Melbourne – but alas we were just a cork bobbing in a rough sea of No. The overall national count was 60% No, an almost mirror image, whilst our federal electorate Cowper, with 67% No, was one of the highest in the country. In 1967, it recorded the lowest Yes vote. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose

Like the campaign and media coverage leading up to 14 October, the poll reflected and exposed pre-existing divisions in our society, economy and politics, each melding into each other: Inner city versus outer suburbs, cities versus the regions, younger versus older, affluent versus the less well-off, educated versus less educated, black versus white (and even, black versus black) and the the so-called black armband and the white blindfold narratives of our history. Aboriginal communities wanted the Voice, but suburban and regional Australia rejected it. Even a large number of Labor and Green Party supporters cast No votes. The further one got from the cities, the more Australia said No.

Are we a nervous, frightened nation unwilling to look back, and unable to look forward? Perhaps a less accusatory explanation is that most Aussies are not feeling too generous right now, and that they don’t want to give our First Nation fellow-citizens what they perceive is more than anybody else gets. And we allowed politics and politicians’ interests to erode Australians’ inherent goodwill. We were, it seems easy prey. As Peter Hartcher wrote in Sunday’s online Sydney Morning Herald:

“The giant Gulliver of Australian goodwill allowed itself to be immobilized by a hundred petty Lilliputian doubts and fears, turning five years of Yes into a decisive No. Most Australian adults were unable to sustain their natural big-heartedness when it was beset by an unrelenting storm of hostility and suspicion. John Howard, for instance, urged people to vote No because of the need to “maintain the rage”. What on earth does the former prime minister have to be so angry about? What is it about a disadvantaged minority comprising 3 per cent of the population that demands a sustained national rage? … Political combat overtakes rationality and, regrettably, it easily overwhelms innate human goodwill. The No campaign will be very pleased with itself for so easily frightening and befuddling the electorate out of its inherent good intentions. Australia could be forgiven for being embarrassed.”

Bernard Keane of Crikey was less constrained:

“The Voice, according to the No campaign, is a threat to white Australians – a threat mostly unarticulated, but some particularly racist No campaigners have gone there, saying it will impose reparations, or dispossess Australians of their property. The message of the No campaign, from Peter Dutton and former Liberal leaders like Howard and Abbott, is: be scared. There is always someone out to get you, to take something of yours, to get something you don’t have. You’re the victim. Indigenous peoples are just the latest in a long line of people trying to do you over, with the help of an “elite” that hates you. Live in fear, and huddle in resentment”.

Spruiking the Voice at market stalls over the last three months and visiting many booths in our shire, copping shouts of both encouragement and expletive laden opprobrium, and reading-up on a variety of media, here are some observations by myself and others. Each can apply to one or to many No voters, though not necessary to all.

There were, after all, many, many fair-minded, thoughtful and well-meaning voters who sincerely believed that the Voice was not the way to go, and they would most likely have voted for the constitutional recognition of our First Nations people if it had stood alone as the referendum question – notwithstanding that symbolic recognition by itself was not what the 250 delegates to the First Nations National Constitutional Convention of Australia Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leaders asked for in the Uluṟu Statement from the Heart six long years ago.

But all reflect in some way the mindset of a change-averse, suspicious and nervous nation.

Many No voters …
  1. Thought that the Voice went too far and was too powerful – some arguing that it would be litigious and would grind government to a standstill whilst others claimed it would invite indigenous intervention in all areas of policy
  2. Thought that the Voice didn’t go far enough and wasn’t powerful enough – that it was potentially impotent
  3. Thought that it would threaten their property ownership – the cry  “they’ll come after our homes!” echoed claims raised during the Mabo days
  4. Thought that it would take away native title rights from aboriginals (with help from the UN, one person told us)
  5. Thought that a mere 3.5% of the population would control our government (some people actually think the percentage is much greater than that)
  6. Thought that a Voice would lead to a treaty, “pay the rent” and reparations – a bridge too far
  7. Thought a Voice would “divide us” and render one group “more equal than others” – as if we weren’t divided and unequal already as anyone with a skerrick of awareness of Australian history, politics and society would know (but pundits believe that in the end, this was the prime factor in the No victory)
  8. Didn’t understand what they were voting for and didn’t care – lack of knowledge and interest in our political system among so many people is quite worrying.
  9. Didn’t get the Voice model – there were many who didn’t understand it and also many who did and had valid questions on detail and proces
  10. Had little or no knowledge or interest in Australia’s history since 1788
  11. Didn’t have any idea of the process First Nations people went through to arrive at the Statement from the Heart
  12. Were disgruntled with and don’t trust governments, and are basically anti any and everything.- some, like the International Socialists urged a boycott arguing that each side represented a capitalist plot
  13. Thought compulsory voting is a chore and a bore – and is seen by some as anti democraticWe’re rusted on LNP voters who like Dutton, want to take paint off the Labor government
  14. Were PHON, PUP and UAP people; antipodean Trumpistas and Putinophiles, RWNJs, QAnon, anti vaxxers and other conspiritualists; and sovereign citizens (who do not recognize the Australian state at all – “we are all individuals!”, and each man “is an island unto himself”, to reverse the John Donne aphorism
  15. Were Blak Sovereignty indigenous and their white supporters who do not recognize what they see as the colonialist state and demand sovereignty of their own – and ironically, these now claim the outcome as a victory as it will have established their credentials and even attract disappointed and disillusioned Yes voters to their cause. What might have seemed like a cul de sac may one day become a reality
  16. Were misinformed, gullible, naive and easily misled by opportunists, misinformation and downright lies, and came up with the most fantastical scenarios and ridiculous assumptions
  17. Were selfishly thinking that by depriving others of something they’d be better off, that aboriginals get too much already, that they get more than everybody else, and if they get more, they’ll waste it
  18. Were more concerned about money than anything else – we are going through straightened economic times right now with seemingly insolvable cost of living, health  and housing crises – and that it will negatively affect themselves
  19. Weren’t impressed when their rock idols Farnsey, Barnsey and the Oils supported the Voice in song and statement. As left wing columnist Julie Szego noted in a nuanced piece in my favourite  e-zine Unherd, the use of You’re the Voice “was intended to rouse the already converted into evangelical fervour — nostalgic Gen X’ers like me dutifully blubbered – but talkback callers expressed their displeasure at the soundtrack to their youth enlisted in the service of a partisan cause”
  20. Weren’t influenced by our indigenous sports icons Cathy Freeman, Nova Peris, Ash Barty and Yvonne Goolagong Cawley advocating for a Yes vote – and weren’t impressed that the major sporting codes all signed up to Yes
  21. Certainly weren’t impressed when banks and other large corporations put their shareholders’ money into the Yes  campaign – though large donors to No, including Gina Rhinehart, Australia’s richest person, kept their largesse out of the public eye (taking advantage of our lax laws on political donations)
  22. Weren’t put off by the company they had been keeping, including the likes of old Tory warhorses like John Howard and Tony Abbot, the discredited Scott Morrison, the aforementioned Gina, Rupert Murdoch, Pauline Hanson, Alan Jones, Peta Credlin, and an almost unanimous coven of Sky at Night opinionistas
  23. Didn’t have any idea of the process First Nations people went through in 2017 to arrive at the Uluṟu Statement from the Heart (see our prior article The Uluru Statement from the Heart‘)
  24. Believed that The Voice was cooked up by the Albanese Labor government and Aboriginal elites (whoever they are) otherwise know as the so-called “Canberra Voice” – these same people probably deride aboriginals for being uneducated and that when they do get an education, deride them as elites
  25. Were smug and paternalistic, thinking they know exactly what First Nations people need – and that is certainly not A Voice – even though they haven’t been within cooee of or spoken to an aboriginal in their lives
  26. Labor and Green supporters who subscribed to some but not all of the above

What next?

As the indigenous leaders of the Yes23 campaign take time out for refection and grieving, I guess we can now all go back to feeling good about ourselves and our nation, or, as former PM John Howard described it a couple of decades ago, “relaxed and comfortable”.

Questions will most certainly be asked. How did the high levels of support for the Voice slide so far? Why wasn’t there a better response to misinformation? Why couldn’t the falsehoods be sufficiently countered? Why were so many still unsure about this simple proposition? As for some other form of constitutional recognition, as suggested by Dutton, that seems far-fetched without the support of Indigenous Australians. And Labor is in no mood right now to bowl up another referendum on anything, either this term or next. So, while the political caravan moves on, the problems for Indigenous Australians will remain.

This will probably be my last word on the Indigenous Voice to Parliament in In That Howling Infinite (though, of course, never say never!). I’ll leave you with these words of the late Margaret Thatcher on the night she became prime minister of the United Kingdom in May 1979:

“I would just like to remember some words of St. Francis of Assisi which I think are really just particularly apt at the moment. ‘Where there is discord, may we bring harmony. Where there is error, may we bring truth. Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair, may we bring hope’ …  . and to all …. people – howsoever they voted – may I say this. Now that the election is over, may we get together and strive to serve and strengthen the country of which we’re so proud to be a part … There is now work to be done’.

We know what happened next …

Relaxed and Comfortable

© Paul Hemphill 2023 All rights reserved

See also other articles on the Voice to Parliament in In That Howling Infinite, including The Uluru Statement from the Heart, Hopes and fears – the morning after the referendum for The Voice, and A Voice crying in the wilderness

Postscript: on referendums

“Until Saturday, we had not had a referendum for 24 years, and since Saturday, no successful referendum for 45 years. They have become sport for opposition governments to gain political points and a petri dish for propagating misinformation and conspiracy theories. In a hyper-partisan and post-truth world, the prospects of referendum success now depend more than ever on an elusive spirit of bipartisan cooperation”.
Anne Twoomey, constitutional lawyer, SMH 17th October 2023

 

Hopes and fears – the morning after the referendum for The Voice

Paul Hemphill 7 Comments

“We remember emotions … long after the details have faded. For the potency of emotion is barnacled on memory … and I know I’ll remember forever how I will feel when the vote for an Indigenous voice to parliament is declared. Win or lose”. Nikki Gemmell, The Weekend Australian, 23rd September 2023

“At a time when surveys tell us our sense of national pride is falling to alarming levels, we need to ask whether rejecting a voice would help us feel proud of our nation or fuel the growing sense of disconnection”. Chris Kenny, The Weekend Australian, 23rd September 2023

In July, I wrote in A Voice crying in the wilderness:

“Peter Dutton declared  that “the Prime Minister is saying to Australians ‘just vote for this on the vibe”. And yet, it is the “vibe” that will get The Voice over the line. Perhaps the good heart will prevail Australia-wide on polling day and those “better angels of our nature” will engender trust in our indigenous and also political leaders to deliver an outcome that dispels the prevailing doubt, distrust and divisiveness, and exorcise the dark heart that endures still in our history, our culture and our society. Because if the referendum goes down, none of us will feel too good the morning after …

The divisiveness of this referendum will probably be felt for years to come. The polarization it has brought into the open (for some would argue that it has already been there as illustrated by our perennialcukrure and history wars) is a path from which it is notoriously hard to turn back. Whether you were  “Yes” or  “No” may well will be a key marker of political identity? Will it also some to symbolize Australia’s great continental divide?

Sky after Dark and News Corp opinionista Chris Kenny, who is almost alone among his colleagues in speaking out in support of the Indigenous and Torres Strait Islander Voice to Parliament, wrote today of the daunting prospect of a No vote on October 14th, and what it might mean for our country and how we feel about it, and also, about ourselves as Australians. To help readers scale The Australian’s pay-wall, I republish it below.

Here are some cogent points from his article:

“When we wake on Sunday, October 15, it will be too late to reconsider …

First and foremost, a No victory would have repudiated Indigenous aspiration, rejecting a proposal for constitutional recognition and non-binding representation formulated after decades of consideration and consultation. This would not so much be a setback for reconciliation but a roadblock that will take many years to get around …

Would a No vote resolve a single issue or merely delay our attempts to resolve them? Would it make us a better nation, or anchor us to unflattering elements of our past?

Would a Yes victory give us a sense of accomplishment and set us on a course for improvement? Would a Yes vote rejuvenate reconciliation and wrap our arms around Indigenous Australians and their challenges?

Would a Yes victory display a bigger, more optimistic and accepting country? Would a No vote confirm us as a frightened, insular and small-minded nation?

While the No leadership would presumably counsel against celebrations in favour of making sober pronouncements about preventing a constitutional mistake, there would likely be outbreaks of triumphalism from many No supporters if they defeat the referendum proposal.

This would create a harrowing contrast with a mournful Yes camp and the reality of Indigenous Australians feeling rejected in their own country.

Where Yes would have provided a path forward, with immediate work to be done to legislate, construct and implement the voice, defeat will lead to nothing. The task ahead will be simply a return to the status quo, the failed status quo.

Indigenous people, communities and organisations understandably would feel dispirited. Whatever the merits of the respective campaigns, negative politics again would have proven more effective than positive advocacy – a misleading scare campaign would have thwarted a carefully devised and constitutionally conservative reform.

A nation that has been talking the talk on reconciliation would have been revealed as too timid to walk the walk.

We would have spent decades of consideration and consultation to come up with the desired constitutional amendment, and then strangely rejected it.

A country in which all sides of politics say they want reconciliation, representation and recognition would have deliberately refused to give Indigenous people a guaranteed say on matters affecting them. We would have become, for a time at least, the scared weird little country”.

Read the full article below, but first, Back to Gemmell:

“Once upon a time I was tremendously naive. I assumed the Voice would bring Australia together, in joy and healing; that it would mark a new waypoint of maturity in the evolution of our nation. In simpler times I dreamed that the vision of an advisory body on Indigenous affairs, painstakingly devised over 15 long years, would be agreed to, and a new era of nationhood would be ushered in.

The proposal felt necessary, suturing, for all of us. It felt like a proposal that went some way towards lifting the corrosive weight of past wrongs. Considered and careful, it seemed a simple request: for an Indigenous committee to be able to advise parliament on Indigenous issues, without being able to make laws or control funding. Yet what a sour-spirited campaign we’ve seen from the forces determined to scupper this vision …

More than 80 per cent of Indigenous people support this voice proposal. The idea came directly from Aboriginal communities, not politicians. I cannot imagine the broken hearts among many of them if this proposal isn’t carried; it would feel like a soul blow, along with all the other soul blows over generations, that would reverberate for years to come.

Once I dreamt of a feeling of great national pride, and relief, following a successful vote for the Voice. Now I worry there’ll be despair and disbelief among many, that in the end it came to this. And anger. Towards one of its scupperers-in-chief most of all. I feel certain Mr Dutton will never become prime minister if the No vote prevails. Be careful what you wish for, sir. The feeling towards you will linger, long after the specifics have faded”.

Press Gallery journalist of the year David Crow observed in the Sydney Morning Herald on 19th June, “The Voice is more than recognition because Indigenous leaders wanted practical change. The terrible suffering of First Australians over 235 years gave those leaders good cause to demand a right to consult on federal decisions, even at the risk of a tragic setback for reconciliation if the referendum fails. Practical change is ultimately about power, and the polls suggest many Australians do not want to give Indigenous people more power. It is too soon to be sure”.

A gloomy prospect, eh?

See other related stories in In That Howling Infinite: 

No vote would confirm us as a frightened, insular nation

The Weekend Australian, 23rd September 2023
If Australia votes No, the task ahead will be simply a return to the status quo, the failed status quo, writes Chris Kenny. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Morgan Sette

A morning is looming for this nation, just three weeks away, that warrants attention from all voters entrusted with a historic choice.

My worry is that, instead of Ron­ald Reagan’s Morning in America, the dawn after the voice referendum will herald Kris Kristofferson’s Sunday Morning Coming Down. We owe it to ourselves to think carefully about what a No vote would say and do in this country. When we wake on Sunday, October 15, it will be too late to reconsider.

First and foremost, a No victory would have repudiated Indigenous aspiration, rejecting a proposal for constitutional recognition and non-binding representation formulated after decades of consideration and consultation. This would not so much be a setback for reconciliation but a roadblock that will take many years to get around.

Similar to how the same-sex marriage plebiscite overwhelmed the gay and lesbian communities with a sense of acceptance and inclusion, a No victory would represent a fend-off to our Indigenous population. They were promised recognition, engaged in good faith to find a suitable path, made their considered request to the nation, and their fellow citizens will have slammed a door in their face.

And why? To save the nation from the risk of entrenched racial division? Or to deliver an ephemeral partisan win?

After a No victory (the phrase seems like an oxymoron) we would face a vacuum, with Labor, Greens and Liberal voice supporters left defeated and impotent, and the Coalition leadership promising more of the same – although weirdly, a vague promise of some kind of legislated voice in the future. If the referendum is defeated, we would be a discombobulated, dispirited and divided federation for some time to come.

Offers of a second referendum would be seen as a cruel joke. The option of bipartisan support for purely symbolic recognition in the preamble would be the epitome of condescension – telling Indigenous Australians we have rejected their voice but propose, instead, something less, something we are prepared to give, not because it is worthy but because it is easy.

Beads and trinkets.

This strikes to the heart of the reconciliation bargain. Reconciliation is about making good and restoring friendly relations – it is about compromise. Just as apologies require acceptance, reconciliation demands concession from all sides.

Indigenous people have provided a road map to put the sins and trauma of the past behind us and forge a future together. The No campaign rejects this because they believe they will lose something, or risk losing something. This seems selfish and paranoid given we are talking about only a constitutional guarantee to have some kind of body giving Indigenous people a non-binding say on issues that affect them.

What the No campaign is saying is that they want reconciliation without compromise or cost. They want reconciliation where the aggrieved party is given nothing, not even a constitutional protection that injustices cannot easily be perpetrated against them again.

This represents a shrivelled view of this nation’s history and future. The No campaign wants our political architecture to curl up like an echidna under attack, remaining defensive and prickly until the Indigenous issues go away.

If we put aside the deceptive scare campaigns from the No side, which pretends the voice will have real power rather than merely an advisory platform, there is an even uglier aspect to the voice opposition. The campaign has increasingly morphed into an opportunity to vent grievances against any aspect of Indigenous people’s place in our society.

The No advocates now argue that if you do not like welcomes to country, you should vote No to a voice. If you think a lot of money is wasted on Indigenous programs, vote No. If you think Indigenous people should not be given additional opportunities for university, jobs or contracts, vote No. If you think we hear too much about Indigenous culture and history, vote No. If you oppose treaties, Vote No. And if you do not want to shift the date of Australia Day, vote No.

This has become a grab-bag of anti-Indigenous grievance, which makes it the worst manifestation of politics this nation has seen in living memory.

But it is also a collection of issues that will continue to be debated and tackled, whether we have an Indigenous voice or not – which makes the argument inane.

There is a harsh, resentful and divisive element in the debate. And we must be able to call it out without the shrill cries that we are accusing others of racism or demonising people for their views.

It is clear many voters do not want to be troubled by Indigenous issues or aspirations. They might have little or no contact with Indigenous people or problems and want it all to go away. That is a benign and plausible interpretation of what seems to be a visceral rejection of the voice proposition.

These sentiments are not reason enough to vote No. And it should be beneath the No campaign to attempt to exploit them.

Voting No will not make anything go away, except a voice.

Nyunggai Warren Mundine. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Morgan Sette
Nyunggai Warren Mundine. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Morgan Sette

Prominent No campaigner Nyunggai Warren Mundine, for instance, wants to shift the date of Australia Day and supports treaties and other agreements between Indigenous groups and governments. And state governments are negotiating treaties and establishing voices regardless.

Yet the No campaign creates irrational fear about treaties and Australia Day. If the No case wins, Mundine and others still will advocate for treaties and shifting Australia Day. So, what is the scare campaign about?

The lead No campaigner, opposition Indigenous Australians spokeswoman Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, is a brave advocate. I have helped to platform her determined efforts to give voice to grassroots Indigenous people for many years, helping her to become a national voice.

Price began speaking up for Indigenous Australians, for her community, as an Alice Springs councillor and entered federal politics to become a voice for the “silent victims” in Indigenous communities. So it is paradoxical that her robust politicking is probably the most influential factor in threatening a permanent Indigenous voice.

Her good intentions are beyond question; Price, her family and supporters believe a voice will amplify the views of the wrong people – the same Indigenous leadership she and her family have battled for years.

This novice senator and rising political star is campaigning against the possibility of a bad voice – yet the Coalition promises to legislate a voice, go figure.

The alternative was for the Coalition to throw in their lot with the voice and ensure it is effective and driven by grassroots concerns – practical rather than ideological. We will never know what might have been.

Taken to its logical conclusion, this fear of the voice running astray is a surrender that would have thwarted the creation of our Federation in the 1890s. Any representative or governance model requires constant engagement and vigilance to protect the complacent mainstream from the activism of the ideologues.

The Coalition decided instead to make this a partisan contest. While Anthony Albanese must wear his share of blame for the failure of bipartisanship, it is rich indeed for the Coalition to blame Labor for the division when it deliberately chose to make this a defining debate between the major parties.

If it is successful, the No campaigners would have done nothing but preserve a situation that the entire nation knows is grossly unsatisfactory. How would history judge them?

We should consider what this does to our sense of worth as a nation. At a time when surveys tell us our sense of national pride is falling to alarming levels, we need to ask whether rejecting a voice would help us feel proud of our nation or fuel the growing sense of disconnection.

Would a No vote resolve a single issue or merely delay our attempts to resolve them? Would it make us a better nation, or anchor us to unflattering elements of our past?

Would a Yes victory give us a sense of accomplishment and set us on a course for improvement? Would a Yes vote rejuvenate reconciliation and wrap our arms around Indigenous Australians and their challenges?

Would a Yes victory display a bigger, more optimistic and accepting country? Would a No vote confirm us as a frightened, insular and small-minded nation?

While the No leadership would presumably counsel against celebrations in favour of making sober pronouncements about preventing a constitutional mistake, there would likely be outbreaks of triumphalism from many No supporters if they defeat the referendum proposal.

This would create a harrowing contrast with a mournful Yes camp and the reality of Indigenous Australians feeling rejected in their own country.

Where Yes would have provided a path forward, with immediate work to be done to legislate, construct and implement the voice, defeat will lead to nothing. The task ahead will be simply a return to the status quo, the failed status quo.

Indigenous people, communities and organisations understandably would feel dispirited. Whatever the merits of the respective campaigns, negative politics again would have proven more effective than positive advocacy – a misleading scare campaign would have thwarted a carefully devised and constitutionally conservative reform.

A nation that has been talking the talk on reconciliation would have been revealed as too timid to walk the walk.

We would have spent decades of consideration and consultation to come up with the desired constitutional amendment, and then strangely rejected it.

A country in which all sides of politics say they want reconciliation, representation and recognition would have deliberately refused to give Indigenous people a guaranteed say on matters affecting them. We would have become, for a time at least, the scared weird little country.

Outlander – if I didna hae bad luck, I’d hae no luck at all …

Paul Hemphill 1 Comment

History can’t be trusted
Brianna Randall

It’s good I’m Scottish. I’m Scottish. I am Scottish.
I can complain about things, I can really complain about things.
Peter Capaldi, the Twelfth Doctor, discovers he has a Scottish accent

The pipes, the pipes are calling …

Well, after nearly a decade, we heard them at last and surrendered to Outlander  

The promise of exotic Celtic locations, steamy sex scenes, and graphic violence was too irresistible – all this and the fact that we’d run out of tempting things to watch on Foxtel, SBS and Netflix … And so we settled down to what would be eight  seasons of the celebrated time-shifting highland fling (before bingeing on Game of Thrones for the umpteenth time. By happenstance, the final episodes dropped on Netflix on the same day as GoT’s imaginative prequel The House of the Dragons – a fine time for fantasy fans. 

If you’re into stories with eye-candy, period costume, great music, loads of gratuitous violence and soft porn garnished with some history, this one’s for you. It’s a bit like reading Playboy for the stories.

And, of course, there’s time-travel, a perennial fantasy and science fiction trope. Nor is time travel involving Scotland original. The many incarnations of Doctor Who have made many visits to Scotland during their adventures. Way back in 1966 The Highlanders saw Patrick Troughton’s Second Doctor arrive in the Scottish Highlands in 1746 just after the Battle of Culloden. It was here that The Doctor met Jamie McCrimmon (actually, Yorkshire actor, Frazer Hines), a piper of the Clan MacLeod who would go on to be a regular and popular companion to the Doctor. Since then, there have been four Scottish Doctors and many Scottish lead characters. American author Diana Gabaldon says she created the Outlander stories (on which the series is based – there are nine of them) after watching Hines in Doctor Who and based her leading man on him. Hines actually has a role in the 21st century Doctor,  Season 1, episode 11.

Fraser Hines as Jamie, 1966

The Whovian Paradox

So, here we were, time-hopping back and forth between 1745 and 1945, the ‘45 Scottish Highland rising and the end of WWII, and then, the American colonies before and during the American War of Independence, the late nineteen sixties and early eighties. The traffic at the magical stone rings of Craigh na Dun, somewhere near Inverness (they’re actually on Lewis in the Outer Hebrides) and North Carolina (apparently, they’re styrofoam) reaches rush hour proportions as one, two, one again, three and four, family members and other sundry “travelers” pass to and fro’.

The title of this piece, as everybody ought to know, is borrowed from the old blues song Born Under A  Bad Sign, immortalised, of course by the best rock trio ever, Cream. It describes a narrative arc which follows a “Groundhog Day” formula. The heroine Clare Fraser late of 1945, a former WWII battlefield nurse, after landing in the Scottish Highlands in 1744, is over ensuing years captured by British Army Redcoats, press-ganged by the Royal Navy, arrested by colonial vigilantes, almost burnt for a witch by superstitious puritans, has sex with Bonnie Prince Charlie, and is serially rescued in the nick of time by her husband, rebellious and handsome highlander Jamie Fraser. Jamie is captured, arrested, flogged, enslaved, kidnapped and worse, and is rescued, in the nick of time by his resilient spouse. This happens numerous times, with sundry villains outwitted, overcome and served their just desserts – with plenty of time to spare for many interminable sex-scenes (why take five minutes of screen time when you’ve seven seasons to fill), and one excruciatingly graphic and gratuitous episode of sexual violence which, counting flashbacks, must’ve taken up to a hour or more of screen time. It must have caused consumer conniptions because by series seven, the show runners had seriously toned down the adult content.

Their ill-starred son in law Roger Mackenzie endures a similar helter-skelter ride as he embarks on a literal “hero’s journey” from academic and folksinger to preacher to late twentieth century “househusband” – his adventures including being press-ganged by pirates, “sold” to native Americans, and fighting successively for the British army and the insurgent Continental Army. 

For all the back and forth, the melodramatic fol-de-rol, the surfeit of rumpy-pumpy and violence, and the gorgeous highland and American scenery, as a historical and well-costumed drama, it presents a well-researched and historically accurate – if simplified – portrayal of society and politics leading up to the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745-46, including a brutal reenactment of the Battle of Culloden, the last battle fought on British soil, and the American Revolutionary War, of the French court at Versailles, of medical techniques in the 18th Century (Clare is an experienced battlefield nurse and qualified twentieth century doctor), and of the original sins that still haunt the United States today: the institution of slavery and the fate of the indigenous Americans. There are many historical characters including an unflattering portrayal of Bonnie Prince Charlie, the leader of the Jacobite forces, and a more sympathetic George Washington (but not his alleged wooden teeth). There is also a brief cameo for the not yet treasonous Benedict Arnold. 

There was an original and to my mind amusing walk-on role which may have gone over the heads of most viewers, particularly as no reference is made to her back story. When Charles Stewart was on the run after Culloden, he was aided in his flight by minor aristocrat Flora MacDonald who was subsequently arrested for her role and consigned to the Tower of London, but later amnestied. She married an army captain also named McDonald, and they emigrated to the American colonies, where she is fleetingly introduced to our Jamie at a society soirée. Her captain actually served with the British forces during the American War of Independence, and as a result, their property was confiscated. They relocated to Canada and soon, after, returned to Scotland. 

One early criticism I had of Outlander was that the highlanders all spoke Scottish Gaelic. Not that I’ve a problem with the tongue because it’s a beautiful language and I wish I could’ve learned Gaelic in the past – it was my Irish mother’s native tongue, though she lost it after years of living in England. But because there were no subtitles. I realized very soon that this was intentional as it emphasised just how alien the whole scene must’ve been to English Claire, now dependent upon Jamie, who, like Mel Gibson’s William Wallace, was multilingual, and a handful of bilingual clansmen to understand what was being said around and about her. Jamie’s pet name for her is Sassenach, meaning foreigner or, indeed, Outlander, derived from the English saxonīs or saxons, and used by Catholic highlanders for protestants of the Anglican persuasion. By the second season, to borrow from Jamie, I “dinnae fash”.

Many books and films of the fantasy genre have endeavoured to resolve what one could call the Whovian Paradox – the desire to go back and change history for the better. But, as the ever-regenerating Doctor himself always cautioned his constantly changing and ever-enthusiastic companions, you can’t just go back and alter history.  We’ve seen it often in films like Terminator, 12 Monkeys and Looper.  For all its melodrama and conjecture, Outlander manages to weave, at times clumsily, through the conundrums and contradictions. But no spoilers here … 

Songs of Rebellion 

Now, let’s talk about the music. The Outlander books by Diana Gabaldon make constant references to songs and music from the periods in which the stories are set, be these eighteenth century Scotland and America or the twentieth century. The series’ soundtrack created by American composer and musician Bear McCreary works well in providing a sense of place and time. As an old folkie of Celtic blood, I enjoyed hearing snippets of songs and tunes that I’ve known since childhood, including Marie’s Wedding and Johnny Cope.

The main theme, in the opening TikTok’s, and as a leitmotif throughout story  is the ersatz Jacobite song Over The Sea to Skye. It’s a grand old song, and I’ve written about it before:

There are many folk songs that we are convinced are authentically “traditional”, composed in the days gone by an unknown hand and passed down to us by word of mouth and then, perhaps, by broadsheets and handbills, rustic kitchens and Victorian parlours, until finally pressed into vinyl during the mid-twentieth century folk revival. And yet many such songs were indeed written by poets and songwriters of variable fame. One such is The Skye Boat Song. 

This famous song is one of many inspired by the Scottish Jacobite Rising against Protestant England’s rule in 1745. It recalls the journey of Prince Charles Edward Stuart, “Bonny Prince Charlie”, from Benbecula to the Isle of Skye as he evaded capture by government troops after his defeat at the Battle of Culloden in 1746. The Jacobite Rebellion was sparked by many political, cultural and economic factors. but essentially, it was a dynastic civil war. 

Songwriter and philanthropist Sir Harold Boulton, 2nd Baronet composed the lyrics to an air collected by Anne Campbelle MacLeod in the 1870s. According to Andrew Kuntz, a collector of folk music lore, MacLeod was on a trip to the isle of Skye and was being rowed over Loch Coruisk (Coire Uisg, the “Cauldron of Waters”) when the rowers broke into a Gaelic rowing song “Cuachag nan Craobh” (“The Cuckoo in the Grove”). MacLeod set down what she remembered of the air, with the intention of using it later in a book she was to co-author with Boulton.

It was first published in 1884 Around 1885 the famed author Robert Louis Stevenson, considering Boulton’s lyrics words “ unworthy”, composed verses “more in harmony with the plaintive tune”. Purged of Jacobite content, these mentioned neither Charlie nor Culloden.

Boulton’s is the one that endured, along with the sentimental perspective Bonny Prince Charlie

But historical fact has never dimmed the popularity of the song. It is often played as a slow lullaby or waltz in many and varied contexts including soundtracks, including Outlander (adapting the text of the text Robert Lewis Stevenson’s poem “Sing Me a Song of a Lad That Is Gone” (1892).

Billow and breeze, islands and seas,
Mountains of rain and sun,
All that was good, all that was fair,
All that was me is gone.

The rendering of the song changes through the seasons, with female and male solos, a capella and choral. The most poignant is that of season 7, featuring as it does Irish singer Sinéad O’Connor, who passed away this July , not long after the season aired fir the first time. Listen to it below. 

There was another piece that was used to excellent and atmospheric effect in the lead up to the Battle of Culloden. Bear McCreary has written: “To properly underscore these episodes, I needed a song that was written during the Jacobite uprising as opposed to after it, a song that makes no comment about loss, only promises of victory.
 I turned to famed Scottish composer and music historian John Purser, who was gracious with his time and assembled a collection a historically-accurate songs for me. I was immediately drawn to the soaring melody in Moch Sa Mhadainn, song composed by Scottish Gaelic poet Alasdair mac Mghaighstir Alasdair (known in English as Alexander MacDonald), a member of Clan MacDonald of Clanranald). A celebrated poet of the Jacobite era, Alasdair composed this song upon hearing the news that Prince Charles Edward Stuart had landed at Glenfinnan. That was perfect!  When Jamie opens the letter in “The Fox’s Lair” and learns he has been roped into the revolution, this song was actually being composed somewhere in Scotland at that very moment.“ Moch sa Mhadainn ‘s Mi a’ Dùsgadh (Early As I Awaken), also known as Oran Eile Don Phrionnsa (Song to the Prince) or Clan Ranald’s Welcome. I have published it at the end of this post.

A Scottish footnote

The two Scottish rebellions of the 18th century were as much civil wars as insurrections against the English Crown. Lowland Scots of the south were against the highlanders of the north. Catholics fought Presbyterians – but many Protestants fought the Crown, a legacy perhaps of the English Civil War, Cromwell’s Commonwealth, the Restoration in the previous century. Clan chiefs allied themselves to the Crown or to the Jacobite cause based upon family ties and self interest. The Crown’s forces at Culloden contained many Scottish soldiers, including senior commanders. Irish Catholic forces who had no love for protestant England fought on the side of the Jacobites. The forces who tracked down the rebels after the battle were often Scots, as were the soldiers and officers carrying out the reprisals and infamous Highland Clearances that followed – the latter being dictated by economics as much as politics, often in the interests of Glasgow and Edinburgh landowners who wanted the land cleared of residents so they could run lucrative sheep farms. A larger than life character like the celebrated Rob Roy MacGregor was very much a charming scoundrel who always had some sort of scheme going, and like most clan leaders, he had contacts in the highest places, including the palace.

I recently rewatched a televisual recreation of the battle of Culloden that I’d first seen in 1964 by British film maker Peter Watkins. For its time, it was a well-balanced account, featuring “interviews” with the principal protagonists on both sides, an engrossing narrative, and some pretty harrowing scenes of the carnage inflicted on the Highland forces by the well-armed and well-trained Redcoats. There is a link to the full film below. 

The Jacobite Rebellion itself was sparked by many political, cultural and economic factors. but essentially, it was a dynastic civil war. The battle on Culloden Moor dashed for two and a half centuries the Scots’ dreams of independence. Charles Edward Stuart, the “Young Pretender” to the Protestant Hanoverian English throne that once belonged to the Roman Catholic Stuart clan, fled into exile in France. And that’s where he remained, although his last resting place is in the crypt of Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome – an ironic ending for this could’ve been champion of Catholic hopes. Bonny Prince Charlie had many romantic and rousing songs written about him. But in reality he wasn’t the dashing, gallant leader that the songs portrayed and that the Scots and their Celtic Irish allies yearned for. He was an indecisive and vacillating leader who thought himself much cleverer and popular than he actually was. portrayal in Outlander is most unflattering. When the going got rough, he got going – and left the the Scots and Irish who supported him with blood and treasure to the tender mercies of the Sassenach foe”.

And yet, the songs live on to this day, most notably in The Skye Boat Song, Mo Gile Mear, Will Ye No Come Back Again. The old and well-recorded favourite Óró sé do bheatha ‘bhaile has also been associated with the Jacobite cause as Séarlas Óg (“Young Charles” in Gaelic). The poet Padraig Pearse, leader of the doomed intifada we know as the Easter Rising of 1916, added new verses, and so the song entered the rebel canon.

Thou art the choicest of all rulers
Here’s a health to thy returning,
Charlie His the royal blood unmingled
Great the modesty in his visage
Moch Sa Mhadainn (Song to the Prince)

The Jacobites: ‘Don’t let romanticism obscure the threat they posed

Alison Campsie, 19th Nov 2020

 
The Battle of Culloden as depicted by Swiss painter David Morier, who was paid a pension by the Duke of Cumberland, the commander of the British Army at the battle. PIC: Creative Commons.
The Battle of Culloden, David Morier, who was paid a pension by the Duke of Cumberland, the commander of the British Army at the battle. PIC: Creative Commons.

The romanticism of Jacobites should not obscure the threat they posed to the British Army in the years following the Battle of Culloden, a leading historian has said.

Professor Murray Pittock, Pro Vice Principal at Glasgow University, said that Jacobites had to be contained “so extensively, and so completely” after the battle in April 1746 with some 12,000 British Army soldiers remaining in Scotland – around 25 per cent of the regular army’s strength at the time.

They soldiers were stationed in 400 cantonment camps – from forts to staging posts – from Lerwick to the Western Isles and from Aberdeen to Gretna, with 60 patrols remaining in Scotland a decade after the battle.

 
Professor Pittock, in an online lecture hosted by History Scotland magazine, said: “Although Jacobitism became romanticized, that romanticism should not be obscured by its reality.
 
“Its reality was that it had to be contained so extensively in such a prolonged way and so completely.”
 
He added: “Although the Jacobites became romanticised the romanticisation was itself a reaction to the seriousness of the threat it was seen as posing at the time.

“Romanticism kept the Jacobites alive but it also kept it at a safe distance.”

Prof Pittock noted that around 1,000 Jacobites died at Culloden with another 2,000 killed in the days that followed given the army’s ‘licence to kill’ supporters of the cause.

Soldiers were paid 16 guineas for the capture of Jacobite colours and 2s and 6d for every Jacobite musket or broadsword seized, Prof Pittock said.

He added that Cumberland and his commanders rotated their soldiers every three months in order to prevent connections being forged with local people.

 

Their longer term role was to police ‘Highland dress’, protect the collection of taxes and “overawe the local population”.

But residents chose not to help the soldiers in some cases with a report from Glen Dessary noting that ‘the people are unwilling to part with any provisions’ for the forces.

Desertions were not uncommon, with two deserters from Pulteney’s Regiment sentenced to death. However, it was decided that one should be spared, with a roll of a dice determining who should live, research by Prof Pittock found.

He pointed to the building of Fort George at Arderseir, which served as a British Army garrison from 1757, which cost around £2m to build at a time when Britain was heading into the Seven Years War while servicing a massive national debt.

“What that should tell us that whatever people might think about the Jacobite cause being romanticised, or it being wrong, it was not what their enemies thought at the time,” Prof Pittock added.

“That is extremely important. You cannot understand Jacobitism by looking down the wrong end of a telescope,” he said.

Details of the British Army occupation of Scotland following Culloden have also been brought to light by the Stennis Historical Society, which has researched and digitised hundreds of records of cantonment camps set up across the country post-Culloden.

The Jacobites who fought on after Culloden

The Scotsman, 16th Apr 2019

The battle was lost, the rising was over, and the rebels were told by their leader to go home. But for hundreds of Jacobites, the fight was still on, despite their defeat at the Battle of Culloden, with many remaining armed and engaged long after Bonnie Prince Charlie went on the run on April 16, 1746.

Around 1000 Jacobites ­gathered the following day at Ruthven ­Barracks, where a written order from Prince Charles Edward Stuart told them to “seek their own safety” and disband,

But, for many, surrendering was too dangerous an option, according to Professor Murray ­Pittock, ­historian and pro-vice principal of Glasgow University.

As time went on, the risks of Jacobites handing themselves in became clear.

Prof Pittock said: “The mood of the Ruthven meetings was downcast. Many fought on to avoid capture or because the risk of surrendering was high.

“To see how the British Army is dealing with people, there is not really a lot of incentive to go home. They think they will be at more risk.

“In June, a number of Jacobites went into Fort William after the British government ­promised six weeks’ immunity. Captain Scott drowned them in a salmon net.”

Jacobites engaged in low-level disruption, raiding and ­protection of vulnerable tenantry as well as recruitment to the Irish Brigade and probably Scottish regiments in French service, including Ecossais Royales.

Assassinations of unpopular ­government officers or sympathizers were also recorded. The British government still considered the Jacobite threat to be “major” at this time with around 12,000 to 13,000 soldiers deployed across the entire country – from Berwick and Stranraer to Elgin, Forres, Stonehaven, Inverbervie and Montrose – by the end of August 1746.

As government forces mobilized, significant units of armed Jacobites continued to appear in the field, said Prof Pittock, who is due to publish a book on the British Army between 1746 and 1760.

At the end of April, 120 armed MacGregor men were recorded in Balqhuidder after marching home ‘colours flying and pipes playing’ with the Army unwilling to tackle or pursue Jacobite units that maintained discipline, Prof Pittock said.

One battalion of Lochiel’s ­regiment was still operational in May – as were 500 men under ­Clanranald. Orkney remained under Jacobite control until late that month and, despite British attacks, four local Jacobite lairds remained successfully hidden.

Clans made concerted attempts to resist Cumberland and his men with around a dozen chiefs meeting at Mortlaig in early May.

“At the meeting… they entered into a bond for their mutual defence and agreed never to lay down their arms, or make a general peace without the consent of the whole,” according to an 1832 account by James Browne.

“By the bond of association, the chiefs agreed…to raise on behalf of the prince and in defense of their country, as many able-bodied armed men as they could on their respective properties.”

Around 600 men gathered later that month across the north and west but the clans “ultimately did not have the time or morale to raise or retain enough men in the field,” Prof Pittock said.

Although a unified response failed to materialize, Jacobites remained active across Scotland. Jacobite expresses – the non-stop delivery of letters by horse – continued until August. A British regiment was deployed across Banffshire in the summer of 1746 with insurgents reported in Argyll that September.

Arms were surrendered in the Mearns right into the summer of 1748.

“British atrocities may have been carried out against innocent ­victims, but there were plenty of continuing Jacobite threats,” Prof Pittock said.

© Paul Hemphill 2023 All rights reserved

Over the sea to Skye

Mo Ghile Mear – Irish myth and melody

Mo Ghile Mear – Irish myth and melody

بيان أولورو من القلب – أساس الصوت في البرلمان

Paul Hemphill Leave a comment
إن بيان أولورو من القلب هو وثيقة جميلة، وهي نتيجة مداولات ٢٥٠ مندوبًا إلى المؤتمر الدستوري الوطني للأمم الأولى لزعماء السكان
الأصليين في أستراليا وسكان جزر مضيق توريس الذي عقد على مدى أربعة أيام بالقرب من أولورو في وسط أستراليا في مايو ٢٠١٧.
وبعد عقود من الإعداد، كانت هذه دعوة من هذه المجموعة من شعوب الأمم الأولى إلى الأستراليين من غير السكان الأصليين للدعوة إلى إصلاح جوهري للمساعدة في تحقيق حقوق السكان الأصليين، من خلال إنشاء صوت للسكان الأصليين في البرلمان ولجنة ماكاراتا. “ماكاراتا” هي كلمة يلنو متعددة الطبقات تُفهم على أنها الالتقاء بعد صراع. وينص البيان على أن لجنة ماكاراتا ستتولى عمليات صنع الاتفاق (المعاهدة) وقول الحقيقة بين الحكومات والأمم الأولى.
وتدعو إلى إجراء إصلاحات هيكلية، سواء اعترافًا بالسيادة المستمرة للشعوب الأصلية أو لمعالجة “العجز” الهيكلي الذي أدى إلى تفاوتات حادة بين الأستراليين الأصليين وغير الأصليين. ويدعو إلى إنشاء مؤسستين جديدتين؛ صوت الأمم الأولى المحمي دستوريًا ولجنة ماكاراتا، للإشراف على صنع الاتفاقات وقول الحقيقة بين الحكومات والأمم الأولى.
ويمكن تلخيص هذه الإصلاحات في الصوت والمعاهدة والحقيقة.
الصوت – آلية تمثيلية منصوص عليها دستوريًا لتقديم مشورة الخبراء إلى البرلمان حول القوانين والسياسات التي تؤثر على السكان الأصليين وسكان جزر مضيق توريس.
المعاهدة – عملية صنع اتفاق بين الحكومات وشعوب الأمم الأولى تعترف بالحقوق والمصالح الثقافية التاريخية والمعاصرة للشعوب الأولى من خلال الاعتراف رسميًا بالسيادة، ولم يتم التنازل عن تلك الأرض أبدًا.
الحقيقة – عملية شاملة لكشف المدى الكامل للظلم الذي يعاني منه السكان الأصليون وسكان جزر مضيق توريس، لتمكين الفهم المشترك لتاريخ أستراليا الاستعماري وتأثيراته المعاصرة.

بيان أولورو من القلب

لقد اجتمعنا في المؤتمر الوطني الدستوري ٢٠١٧، قادمين من كل سماء الجنوب، لنصدر هذا البيان من القلب:

كانت قبائلنا من السكان الأصليين وسكان جزر مضيق توريس هي أولى الدول ذات السيادة في القارة الأسترالية والجزر المجاورة لها، وقد امتلكتها بموجب قوانيننا وعاداتنا. لقد فعل أسلافنا ذلك، وفقًا لتقدير ثقافتنا، منذ الخلق، ووفقًا للقانون العام منذ “الأزل”، ووفقًا للعلم منذ أكثر من ٦٠ ألف عام.

هذه السيادة هي فكرة روحية: وبالتالي فإن رابطة الأجداد بين الأرض، أو “الطبيعة الأم”، والسكان الأصليين وسكان جزر مضيق توريس المولودين تظل مرتبطة بها، ويجب أن تعود إلى هناك يومًا ما لتتحد مع أسلافنا. وهذا الارتباط هو أساس ملكية الأرض، أو بالأحرى السيادة. ولا يتم التخلي عنه أو إخماده، ويتعايش مع سيادة التاج.

كيف يمكن أن يكون خلاف ذلك؟ أن الشعوب امتلكت الأرض منذ ستين ألف سنة، وهذا الرابط المقدس اختفى من تاريخ العالم في مائتي عام فقط؟

ومع التغيير الدستوري الأساسي والإصلاح الهيكلي، نعتقد أن هذه السيادة القديمة يمكن أن تتألق كتعبير أكمل عن القومية الأسترالية.

وبالمقارنة، نحن أكثر الناس سجنا على هذا الكوكب. نحن لسنا شعبًا إجراميًا بالفطرة. يتم عزل أطفالنا عن عائلاتهم بمعدل غير مسبوق. لا يمكن أن يكون هذا لأننا لا نحبهم. شبابنا يقبعون في المعتقلات بأعداد فاحشة. ويجب أن يكونوا أملنا في المستقبل.

إن هذه الأبعاد لأزمتنا توضح الطبيعة الهيكلية لمشكلتنا. هذا هو عذاب كوننا بلا قوة

ونسعى إلى إجراء إصلاحات دستورية لتمكين شعبنا واحتلال مكانه الصحيح في بلدنا. عندما يكون لدينا القدرة على تحديد مصيرنا، سوف يزدهر أطفالنا. سيسيرون في عالمين وستكون ثقافتهم هدية لبلدهم.

نحن ندعو إلى إنشاء صوت للأمم الأولى المنصوص عليه في الدستور.

المكاراتا تتويج لأجندتنا: التقارب بعد النضال. إنه يجسد تطلعاتنا لعلاقة عادلة وصادقة مع شعب أستراليا ومستقبل أفضل لأطفالنا على أساس العدالة وتقرير المصير.

نسعى إلى تشكيل لجنة ماكاراتا للإشراف على إبرام الاتفاقات بين الحكومات والأمم الأولى وقول الحقيقة حول تاريخنا.

في عام ١٩٦٧ تم إحصائنا، وفي عام ٢٠١٧ نسعى إلى أن يُسمع صوتنا. نترك المعسكر الأساسي ونبدأ رحلتنا عبر هذا البلد الشاسع. ندعوكم للسير معنا في حركة الشعب الأسترالي من أجل مستقبل أفضل

Read the original English version of The Uluru Statement from the Heart:   https://howlinginfinite.com/2023/09/04/the-uluru-statement-from-the-heart/

See other related stories in In That Howling Infinite: 

Continue reading →

The dark nights of a restless soul – a Sri Lankan ghost story

Paul Hemphill 2 Comments

Hear the cry in the tropic night
Should be the cry of love but it’s a cry of fright
Some people never see the light
‘Til it shines through bullet holes
Bruce Cockburn, Tropic Moon

Ceylon  was a beautiful country until it filled up with savages.
Shehan Karunatilaka

You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.
Cormac McCarthy, The Road

Reading The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, the 2022 Booker Prize winning second novel by Sri Lankan author Shehan Karunatilaka, one can appreciate why thousands of his compatriots have taken to the sea in small boats and braved the Indian Ocean to reach Australia. It is the story of a dissolute war photographer and gambler set in the early years of the civil war which raged across the island of Sri Lanka from 1983 to 2009 claiming up to 100,000 lives with untold missing and injured, most of them ethic Tamils like those desperate seafarers who head our way only to be turned back or else incarcerated in offshore detention camps.

The war in Sri Lanka in which the Sri Lankan  government, dominated by the Buddhist Sinhalese , aided by India “peacekeepers” fought brutal Marxist insurgents and ethnic Tamil Hindu separatists, lasted for 26 years, ending in 2009 with the defeat and lasting bitterness of the separatist Tamil Tigers.

The book is set in 1989, which Karunatilaka has described as “the darkest year in my memory, when there was an ethnic war, a Marxist uprising, a foreign military presence and state counter-terror squads”.

Only a few years earlier there had been a wave of state sponsored pogroms of Tamils in the north and east of the island, but terror took many forms. The character of Maali was inspired by Richard de Zoysa, a gay middle-class activist whose murder in 1990 has never been solved. Many journalists also went missing; one editor was gunned down in the street.

War memorial, Puthukkudiyiruppu, Sri Lanka. 1 June 24. Eranga Jayawardena/AP

The Seven Moons is a war-story told with a mordant humour reminiscent of Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five and in many ways, Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Others have likened it to the writing if Gabriell Garcia Marquez and Salman Rushdie, whilst Karunatilaka indeed acknowledges an “uncle Kurt”, and Kurt Vonnegut’s MO, the methodical chaos, is a constant.

But it is more than a war story. It is in fact a ghost story, yet, it is just as much a political satire, a love story and a steamy wallow in the slums and fleshpots of Sri Lanka’s capital Colombo: the fetid streets of the city, where the death squads roam … a stinking city, where deeds go unpunished and ghosts walk unseen. And all is framed within a murder mystery. And to my mind, an idiosyncratic treatise about reincarnation. I don’t want to go back. Don’t want to be reborn. Don’t want to be anything. Can I just be nothing?

Sinhalese Maali Almeida, beautiful, smart, gay and arrogant, and an incorrigible libertine, suddenly wakes up dead, presumed murdered – one of thousands who perished at the hands of others during those years – and is not too clear about the circumstances. He finds himself in a kind half world populated by the ghosts of the departed, ghouls and demons, and has seven “moons” or nights to decide whether he wishes to enter “into the light “, a peaceful and memory-free afterlife, or remain earthbound for eternity as a ghost who is “blown on the winds” or a sentient ghoul who rides them. Accompanied by a mentor who resembles a grotesque disneyesque guide, all street wisdom and wisecracks, he resolves to guide the two people he loves, his boyfriend and his platonic girlfriend, to the secrets that will unmask his killers and exact revenge for the carnage that they have wreaked upon their country.

The novel is simultaneously harrowing and mordantly humorous, written with such lyrical panache that I couldn’t resist writing down a swag of memorable lines. Apart from those quoted above, here are others. 

Some are are philosophical and existential:

Do animals get an afterlife. Or is their punishment to be reborn as human

Every soul is allowed seven moons to wander the In Between. To recall past lives. And then to forget. They want you to forget. Because, when you forget, nothing changes …

Nothing is forgotten. We just don’t know where we put it.

Why are we born, why do we die, why anything has to be.and all the universe has to say in reply is: I don’t know, asshole, stop asking.

You have one response for those who believe Colombo to be overcrowded: wait till you see it with ghosts

You know the trouble with karma, boss? The assumption is that everything is in its right place. So we do nothing abd let karma takes its course. It’s as pointless as saying “Inshallah”

You believed that no harm would reach you , because you were protected, not by angels, but by the law’s of probability, which states that really bad things happened not very often, except when they did.

Others could be described as socio-political:

Evil is not what we should fear, Creatures with power in their own interest: that is what should make a us shudder. How else to explain the worlds madness?

Everyone is proud and greedy and no one can decide things without money changing hands or fists being raised.

The World will not correct itself. Revenge is your right.

Even do-gooders have their agendas.

I make what most of the world’s millionaires do not … Enough.

Why is Sri Lanka number one in suicides? … Are we that much more sadder or violent than the rest of the world? It’s because we have just the right amount of education to understand that the world is cruel. And just enough corruption in equality, to feel powerless against it.

You look up at the giant chimney, spewing black smog towards the heavens, where the stars look away and the gods refuse to hear.

… dismissed as yet another lost cause that began with good intentions.

… you … wonder if one day they will invent a bomb that knew whom to spare. The one good thing you can say about a bomb is that it isn’t racist or sexist or concerned about class.

© Paul Hemphill 2023 All rights reserved

See also in In That Howling Infinite, Better Read Than Dead – books and reading

It’s obvious why this novel won the Booker Prize

What if the Afterlife were a bureaucracy? What if you had to stand in line with all those other ghosts, aka The Dead, and had to fill in forms and have various checks on your body – assuming you have an intact body – before you can move on to the Eternal Light.

Shehan Karunatilaka sets his 2022 Booker-winning The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida exactly here. He said recently that Sri Lankans are used to living in a bureaucracy that extends into most details of their lives so why not in the Afterlife as well? The witty Ministry of The Afterlife both carries and demonstrates the humour of the entire novel.

Not that there is anything novelistically new about this holding pen; George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo, Steve Toltz’s Here Goes Nothing and, my choice, Elif Shafik’s Ten Minutes, Thirty Eight Seconds in this Strange World, laid some groundwork. “Bardo” is the most useable, less-cliched version of this world. It is the Tibetan word for an interim, provisional world where the dead must wait before rebirth, so there’s a bit of movement between worlds possible. Karunatilaka has acknowledged Saunders’ brilliant novel as an influence, but his bureaucracy is his own brilliant invention. Karunatilaka also acknowledges an “uncle Kurt”, and Kurt Vonnegut’s MO, the methodical chaos, is a constant.

There is a plot: it is 1989, the height of the complex and brutal civil war in Sri Lanka and Maali, beautiful, smart, arrogant finds himself dead, in line with other recent dead, waiting to be moved on. He is only 34. In life, he is a photojournalist, well-connected and keen to report to the world everything he knows and how he has seen it. He is not an idealist, but he is open to new ideas and often “in the wrong place holding a camera”. He is also gay and closeted at the height of the HIV-AIDS epidemic.

At first, he doesn’t believe he’s dead, he has taken too many “silly” drugs and just has to let them wear off, and besides, he cannot remember dying. If he can’t remember that in this gruesome dream then his death can’t be true. The purgatorial scenes alone would win Karunatilaka the Booker.

When Maali understands that this pandemonium is not a dream he decides he has to find out what happened to him and the novel becomes a murder mystery fully lined with political and social comment/satire. His main thought is that he has a box of photographs under a bed that political people on every side would want. Was he murdered for these images? He has one week to find out.

He also has other reasons to return to the upper world: “You listen to the wind and think of all the things you never understood. ‘My friends. My mother. I have to see them’.” He particularly needs to tell the young man who loves him “that he is sorry”. Sorry for what turns out to be a terrible thread. It is this poignancy, the ability Maali has to reflect on the beauty of life, that elevates the writing.

“Over a short and useless existence, you examined evidence and drew conclusions. We are a flicker of light between two long sleeps. Forget the fairy tales of gods and hells and previous births. Believe in odds and in fairness and in stacking decks that are already stacked, in playing your hand as best you can for as long as you can. You were led to believe that death was sweet oblivion and you were wrong on both counts.”

This is Karunatilaka’s second novel, although it was previously published under a different title and in a different form in India. During the pandemic he has been working on this re-titled version with his wider audience in mind. These alterations and insertions mean that the chaos and bastardy of the times that were esoterically Sri Lankan are explained in moments of drawing breath between the hurtling story. It is told entirely in the second person, a difficult stylistic device.

It has the bleak power of Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. And unlike that great book it is relentlessly, shockingly funny. Apparently, Sri Lankans are renowned for their magnificent grim humour. This novel explains why they need it. The dead are speaking here and there is nothing they cannot say

Life after death in Sri Lanka

Tomiwa Owolade, The Guardian 9 Aug 2022

Shehan Karunatilaka made a splash a decade ago with his debut novel Chinaman. Winner of the 2012 Commonwealth book prize and hailed as one of the great Sri Lankan novels, it recounts the alcohol-soaked life of a retired sports journalist who sets out on a zany quest to track down a great cricketer of the 1980s who has mysteriously gone missing.

His Booker-longlisted state-of-the-nation satire, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, returns to 1980s Sri Lanka, and similarly has a debauched protagonist. Maali, the son of a Sinhalese father and a burgher mother, is an itinerant photographer who loves his trusted Nikon camera; a gambler in high-stakes poker; a gay man and an atheist. And at the start of the novel, he wakes up dead.

He thinks he has swallowed “silly pills” given to him by a friend and is hallucinating. But no: he really is dead, and seemingly locked in an underworld. It’s no Miltonian pandemonium; for him, “the afterlife is a tax office and everyone wants their rebate”. Other souls surround him, with dismembered limbs and blood-stained clothes; and they are incapable of forming an orderly queue to get their forms filled in. Many of the people he meets in this bleakly quotidian landscape are victims of the violence that plagued Sri Lanka in the 80s, including a Tamil university lecturer who was gunned down for criticising militant separatist group the Tamil Tigers. The novel also depicts the victims of Marxist group the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna , or People’s Liberation party, who similarly waged an insurrection against the Sri Lankan government, and killed many leftwing and working-class civilians who got in their way.

Maali is a witness to the brutality of the insurrections in Sri Lanka. Working for newspapers and magazines, his ambition is to take photographs “that will bring down governments. Photos that could stop wars.” He has shot “the government minister who looked on while the savages of ’83 torched Tamil homes and slaughtered the occupants”, and taken “portraits of disappeared journalists and vanished activists, bound and gagged and dead in custody”.

Those photos are stored underneath a bed in his family home. Now, stuck in the underworld, he has only seven moons – one week – to get in contact with his friend Jaki and her cousin, persuade them to retrieve the stash of photos, and share them throughout Colombo, Sri Lanka’s largest city, in order to expose the profoundly violent nature of the conflict. It’s explained to Maali that “every soul is allowed seven moons to wander the In Between. To recall past lives. And then, to forget. They want you to forget. Because, when you forget, nothing changes.” Maali doesn’t want his contribution as a witness to be consigned to oblivion. His own death has viscerally exposed to him the fragility of life, and the photos constitute his legacy for his country and a defence against collective amnesia.

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is written in the second person, which gives the narrative a slightly distancing effect, but it’s compensated for by the sardonic humour. In one passage, the narrator muses: “You have one response for those who believe Colombo to be overcrowded: wait till you see it with ghosts.” Another asks: “Do animals get an afterlife? Or is their punishment to be reborn as human?” Another compelling feature is the vivid use of similes: one man’s battered body is described as having ribs caved in “like a broken coconut”.

The obvious literary comparisons are with the magical realism of Salman Rushdie and Gabriel García Márquez. But the novel also recalls the mordant wit and surrealism of Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls or Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. The scenarios are often absurd – dead bodies bicker with each other – but executed with a humour and pathos that ground the reader. Beneath the literary flourishes is a true and terrifying reality: the carnage of Sri Lanka’s civil wars. Karunatilaka has done artistic justice to a terrible period in his country’s history.

The Uluru Statement from the Heart

Paul Hemphill 8 Comments

The Uluru Statement from the Heart, the foundation of the Indigenous and Torres Strait Islander Voice to Parliament is a beautiful thing. Whatever the outcome of Australia’s referendum on August 14th 2023, it will take its place as one if our nation’s iconic documents.

It is brief and written in plain, lyrical and, in my opinion, very moving English. It speaks of the past, the present and the future, of our history and our national story, and of our land, our ‘country’, ancient and modern – how we see ourselves as Australians, and how we’d like to see ourselves as viewed by outsiders. It allows us to reflect on our nation’s colonial past and our future.

Reading it closely and carefully – it is less than an A4 page in length – a reasonable person of good heart and good will can find therein answers to most of the questions that are being raised by warring sides of the Voice debate in a fog of hyperbole, disinformation, ignorance and recrimination. But the reader must first clear his or her head of the sturm und drang (literally storm and stress), fear and loathing and partisan positions that have been established over the last six months. I do not intend to engage in further polemics here – the media, mainstream, social and anti-social are covering this already – but rather, I’ll refer you to the internet links listed at the end of this post.

Slow train coming … 

The Statement from the Heart  is the outcome of the deliberations of 250 delegates to the First Nations National Constitutional Convention of Australia Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leaders held over four days near Uluru in Central Australia in May 2017. It forms the basis for the question that will be out to The Australian electorate on Saturday 14th November 2023 – just six weeks away:

A Proposed Law: to alter the Constitution to recognise the First Peoples of Australia by establishing an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice.

Do you approve this proposed alteration?

Professor Henry Reynolds, an Australian historian whose primary work has focused on the frontier conflict between European settlers and Indigenous Australians, wrote yesterday:

“To seek the source of the twin pillars of the 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart – a Voice to Parliament and a makarrata, or treaty – we need to go back to the referendum of 1967 and the assumption of federal powers over Indigenous policy … The Voice to Parliament, which now meets ignorance and misunderstanding, has been with us for more than 50 years, although the bodies varied in name, structure and longevity, The only difference was the desire for entrenchment in the Constitution”.

Decades in the making, coming after two centuries of struggle for recognition and justice, The Statement from the Heart is an invitation from this group of First Nations people to non-Indigenous Australians calling for substantive reform to help realise Indigenous rights, through the establishment of an Indigenous Voice to Parliament and a Makarrata Commission.

Makarrata is a multi-layered Yolngu word describing a process of conflict resolution, peacemaking and justice, or a coming together after a struggle”, and delegates said that it “captures our aspirations for a fair and truthful relationship with the people of Australia”, and that the Makarrata Commission would supervise a process of agreement-making (treaty)  and truth telling between governments and First Nations.

Reynolds reminds us that “the authors of the Uluru statement declared a makarrata was the “culmination of our agenda”, a proposal likely to be far more controversial than The Voice. But it, too, is an idea that has been seriously considered for more than 40 years. The Aboriginal Treaty Committee was founded in April 1979 and led by a group of prominent figures including Dr H C Coombs, Judith Wright and Charles Rowley. Launching it in an address on ABC radio, Coombs called for compensation for the loss of traditional land and disruption of traditional ways of life and the right of Indigenous people to “control their own affairs”.

The Statement from the Heart calls for structural reforms, both in recognition of the continuing sovereignty of Indigenous peoples and to address structural “powerlessness” that has led to severe disparities between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. It calls for the creation of two new institutions; a constitutionally protected First Nations Voice and a Makarrata Commission, to oversee agreement-making and truth-telling between governments and First Nations.

These reforms can be summarized as Voice, Treaty and Truth.

Voice – a constitutionally enshrined representative mechanism to provide expert advice to Parliament about laws and policies that affect Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

Treaty – a process of agreement-making between governments and First Nations peoples that acknowledges the historical and contemporary cultural rights and interests of First Peoples by formally recognizing sovereignty, and that land was never ceded.

Truth – a comprehensive process to expose the full extent of injustices experienced by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, to enable shared understanding of Australia’s colonial history and its contemporary impacts.

The Uluru Statement from the Heart

We, gathered at the 2017 National Constitutional Convention, coming from all points of the southern sky, make this statement from the heart:
 
Our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander tribes were the first sovereign Nations of the Australian continent and its adjacent islands, and possessed it under our own laws and customs. This our ancestors did, according to the reckoning of our culture, from the Creation, according to the common law from ‘time immemorial’, and according to science more than 60,000 years ago.
 
This sovereignty is a spiritual notion: the ancestral tie between the land, or ‘mother nature’, and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who were born therefrom, remain attached thereto, and must one day return thither to be united with our ancestors. This link is the basis of the ownership of the soil, or better, of sovereignty. It has never been ceded or extinguished, and co-exists with the sovereignty of the Crown.
 
How could it be otherwise? That peoples possessed a land for sixty millennia and this sacred link disappears from world history in merely the last two hundred years?
 
With substantive constitutional change and structural reform, we believe this ancient sovereignty can shine through as a fuller expression of Australia’s nationhood.
 
Proportionally, we are the most incarcerated people on the planet. We are not an innately criminal people. Our children are aliened from their families at unprecedented rates. This cannot be because we have no love for them. And our youth languish in detention in obscene numbers. They should be our hope for the future.
 
These dimensions of our crisis tell plainly the structural nature of our problem. This is the torment of our powerlessness.
 
We seek constitutional reforms to empower our people and take a rightful place in our own country. When we have power over our destiny our children will flourish. They will walk in two worlds and their culture will be a gift to their country.
 
We call for the establishment of a First Nations Voice enshrined in the Constitution.
Makarrata is the culmination of our agenda: the coming together after a struggle. It captures our aspirations for a fair and truthful relationship with the people of Australia and a better future for our children based on justice and self-determination.
 
We seek a Makarrata Commission to supervise a process of agreement-making between governments and First Nations and truth-telling about our history.
 
In 1967 we were counted, in 2017 we seek to be heard. We leave base camp and start our trek across this vast country. We invite you to walk with us in a movement of the Australian people for a better future.

The Makarrata Project 

The Makarrata Project is the twelfth studio album by Australian band Midnight Oil, released on 30 October 2020. The track Uluru Statement from the Heart / Come on Down” features the band and well-known indigenous Australians Pat Anderson, Stan Grant, Adam Goodes, Ursula Yovich and Troy Cassar-Daley. 

See other related stories in In That Howling Infinite: 

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken … the emptiness of “No”

Paul Hemphill 6 Comments

This is a critical group of voters, whose natural generosity may be undermined by the dog-whistle of division. Their votes will deliver or doom the referendum. Greg Craven.

This referendum is a genuine, good idea to simply get it right. Bill Shorten

The title of this piece is borrowed from the poem by Rudyard Kipling that has served as the source of inspirational manuals, mottos and memes for over a century. It has inspired songs, stories, plays and films – my favourite being Lindsay Anderson’s 1968 anarchist fantasy set in a tyrannical English public school.

Sky after Dark and News Corp opinionista Chris Kenny is almost alone among his colleagues in speaking out in support of the Indigenous and Torres Strait Islander Voice to Parliament. To help readers scale The Australian’s pay-wall, I republish here his advice not to be fooled by the No campaign’s shallow and disingenuous scare tactics. To paraphrase Kipling’s poem, the words of both the referendum and the Uluru Statement from The Heart from which it sprang are “twisted by knaves to make a trap” for the ill-informed and disinterested.

This comes as in the same weekend edition Janet Albrechtsen, one of News’ several No camp tricoteuses * recycles her customary legal arguments (she was a lawyer after all in a past life, though according to a friend of mine who actually worked with her back then, “she thinks she’s much cleverer than she is”). She wrote, disingenuously riffing on the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s seminal “I have a dream” speech – how even the martyred MLK spoke of a land in which there was no distinction between black and white (with the benefi of hindsight, we know how well that dream worked out):

“Australians, without a scintilla of legal training, understand we are inserting into our Constitution brand-new special rights given to a group of people simply because of their race. It is something entirely different to anything in the Constitution right now. By placing this squarely in the Constitution, many Australians understand the High Court will be the ultimate determinant of those rights, not the parliament”.

A dog-whistle if ever I heard one, dressed up in lawyer-speak. Most Australians know sweet FA about our constitution, and their knowledge of our political institutions and the laws which govern them is likewise limited. Moreover, the Voice will not impinge on the lives of most Australians, and yet it’ll mean an enormous amount to First Australians.

Kenny is not alone in The Australian’s pages, however. Conservative expert in constitutional law, Greg Craven, whom I have featured several times in this blog’,  provides a cogent rebuttal of many of the No campaign’s claimsprovides a cogent rebuttal of many of the No campaign’s claims, explaining how the High Court will cleave to constitutional realities and not to conservative fears and fantasies:

“… it is a constitutional principle that powers of the federal parliament should be interpreted broadly. This is a legal fact, rather than the clueless constitutional riffing of senior No campaigners such as Nyunggai Warren Mundine and Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price …constitutional provisions are to be interpreted as a whole, not cut and diced for media opportunities. The proposed amendment does not just give parliament power to make laws about the voice. It gives specific capacity to make laws about its composition, functions, powers and procedures. Every one of these envelopes enables parliament to make laws firmly locating the voice within proper constitutional and political limits … make a law compelling the voice to give priority to practical improvements rather than international frolics.

Worried the voice will be an exclus­ive clan of excessively remunerated, over-budgeted bur­eau­crats? Make laws requiring strong qualifications for members, forcing membership to be turned over at regular intervals, mandating modest remuneration, setting overall budget limits, confining staff numbers and banning business-class flights.

Worried about endless, expensive inquiries that could go anywhere, without focus and evidence? Make laws imposing reporting times and parameters for inquiries, mandating that they be based on documented evidence, and making the whole operation subject to the normal assurance measures for government action: the auditor-general, Freedom of Information, administrative review and the criticism of the person who makes the tea.

The court will give parliament the full extent of its power, but no more. It will give proper constitutional respect to the voice, but nothing extra. This is real adherence to the Constitution, not peddling constitutional zombies”.

Craven wrote in The Australian on 12 August 2023:

“Indigenous citizens will have no new powers or constitutional rights. They will have no differential status. Unlike in Canada and the US, there will be no unique Indigenous privileges. There simply will be a means for ­Indigenous people to express collective views to Canberra …The No case is misleading in maintaining the law never differentiates between groups of people based on disadvantage. Multiple equal opportunity Acts, let alone special laws for disabled people, stand out. Will we repeal them?

…The irony is that there is indeed a dramatic division between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, but it is not constitutional, nor does it favour Indigenous citizens. Indigenous people suffer social and economic disadvantage that would see white Australians rise in armed revolt … Preaching against ­division, it divides by pretending to non-Indigenous Australians that Indigenous Australian are getting a cushy, special deal …

Resentment is always a bad base for policy. Logically, one group loses nothing when it is unaffected by modest change assisting some other, profoundly disadvantaged group. Their gain is nobody’s loss. But as a cynical promotion of division, the politics of grudge is highly attractive. Given encouragement, some proportion of people will feel neglected and disadvantaged by the voice. In practice, these will be Australians most exposed to economic hardship through social background or lack and opportunity. .

… Constitutionally, the greatest division and inequality in Australia is that every state gets the same 12 senators, regardless of population. Tasmania gets more places per ­person than Victoria. This is real power, not a constitutionalised chat. It is irrelevant that it was part of the Federation package. The principle is the same”

Recently, Mark Speakman, NSW Leader of the Opposition, former NSW Attorney General and Solicitor General weighed in:

“I don’t see this amendment as racist because, at the end of the day, it is an advisory body that has no constitutional entitlement to be consulted; is not a third chamber; and has no veto rights over legislation or decisions”.

He is is clear-eyed that the Voice is not a “magic wand”, but after decades of failures to close the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, something has to give.  A Voice enshrined in the Constitution offers a pathway forward, he says. “There’s a real possibility it will make no difference. But you’re not running a criminal trial trying to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the Voice will work. You’re weighing up the pros and cons and probabilities. “And other things being equal, we’ll be better off with a Voice like this than without one.” (Sydney Morning Herald 12 August 2023).

Chris Kenny is convinced that is about the politics.

It is almost a tribal thing. Almost two-thirds of Coalition voters oppose altering the Constitution to establish an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice, according to July’s Resolve poll. Only 17 per cent are in favour. Near one-in-five Coalition voters remain undecided. As recent analyses of election result illustrate, young and even middle-aged voters are deserting the Coalition in droves – and most women overall, parking their votes with Labor, the Grrens abd the Teal independents.

If the coalition introduced a referendum identical to this on it own initiative – an unlikely prospect, I know, given it had a decade to do so, but chose to do nothing- its boosters in the media, including its News Corp enablersand the Sky After Dark cabal, would be standing in its corner. If the Prime Minister decided that he’d replace a constitutional Voice with a legislated one, as indeed as he has “advocated” – though his National Party counterpart begged to differ – the part room would probably oppose it, as it has done with nearly everything the Labor govern has put up.

Kenny writes:

“The historically significant reconciliation project of the Indigenous voice has now been seized as a partisan, political weapon to be used against the federal Labor government – any doubt about that was removed this week. Senior Coalition figures now see defeating the referendum as their primary political priority to inflict political damage on the Prime Minister.

It is that ugly. It is that cynical … Yet think of what the Coalition might willingly trash in its hard-hearted ploy to take some bark off Anthony Albanese. Decades of Indigenous advocacy and consultation, including by Coalition governments, driven by the noblest of intentions, are being dis­respected. Imperilling reconciliation for partisan advantage is hardcore. Yet this week the opposition led question time with scares about the voice and attempted to censure the Prime Minister, accusing him of running a secret agenda to undermine the nation’s future” (The Australian, 5th August 2023)

And so, here we are on the eve of the “actual” Yes campaign, and we are out on the street and at our local markets handing out information and answering questions on The Voice to Parliament. The vibe is good. You’d think we were home and hosed, but we know therein is a lot of wishful thinking. There’s still way t. I’ll leave the last word to Rudyard who is incidentally one of my favourite poets: “If you can fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds’ worth of distance run …”  we certainly shall. But, win or lose, neither those who vote Yes or those who vote No will feel too good on the morning after.

* Tricoteuses is French for a knitting women. The term is most often used in its historical sense as a nickname for the women who supported French Revolution and sat beside the guillotine during public executions of the Reign of Terror, supposedly continuing to knit.

© Paul Hemphill 2023 All rights reserved

See other related stories in In That Howling Infinite: 

Martin Sparrow’s Blues; The Frontier Wars – Australia’s heart of darkness ; Dark Deeds in a Sunny Land – a poet’s memorial to a forgotten crime ; We oughtn’t to fear an Indigenous Voice – but we do; Warrior woman – the trials and triumphs of Marcia Langton 

A Voice crying in the wilderness

 


Indigenous voice to parliament: Busting eight myths of the No campaign

Chris Kenny, The Weekend Australian, August 26, 2023

The No campaign is designed to generate anxiety, writes Chris Kenny. Pictured: prominent No campaigner and Coalition Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price. Picture: Kevin Farmer

No campaigner and Coalition Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price

It was a simple interest in the truth that first entangled me in Indigenous issues almost 30 years ago. Back then I helped to expose the fabrication of the Hindmarsh Island secret women’s business and was scarified by the Keating Labor government, the ABC, Indigenous groups, environmental organisations, activist churches and every other arm of the broader green left.

It was a tough time, but it triggered a royal commission which exposed the episode, vindicated my reporting and endorsed the evidence and integrity of the Ngarrindjeri women who had called out the prostitution of their heritage. “Reconciliation starts with the truth,” said the late Beryl Kropinyeri, one of those courageous and wonderful women back in 1995.

Three decades later, my longstanding support for an Indigenous voice has seen me cross swords with many from the conservative side of the political debate. And again, in a different way, truth is central.

The referendum debate has been toxic at times, on both sides. The aim of the Yes case is to reassure, and the No case aims to heighten fears. I cannot deal with the myriad minor lies and distortions arising day by day but let me outline what I see as some of the major myths of the No campaign:

1 The voice “inserts race” into the Constitution.

This is a blatant mistruth. Race has been in the Constitution since Federation and still exists in two clauses, including under the so-called “race power”. The voice does not mention race (surely an outdated concept) but would ensure that when the government makes special laws or policies ­relating to Indigenous people (ironically, under that existing race power) then Indigenous people will at least have had the opportunity to offer their views.

2 The voice will deliver a treaty, reparations and more.

These claims form the heart of the scare campaign and deliberately ignore the most central ­element of the voice – it will have no legal power, it is advisory only and cannot implement any law or policy. The No campaign persistently raises extreme demands made by activists and pretends they will be delivered through the voice, even though the voice can deliver nothing.

Because it is only advisory, the effectiveness of the voice will be directly linked to the quality of its ideas. If the voice makes wild recommendations, governments will easily ignore it; whereas if it makes sensible recommendations, the voice will carry some weight. Either way, all the power of implementation rests with government and parliament, so the scares are baseless.

3 The Uluru Statement from the Heart is more than one page long.

The Indigenous consensus for a voice is expressed in the 2017 Uluru Statement, which has become the foundational document for political action. Anthony Albanese committed to “implement it in full” – in other words, he has committed to three elements, of voice, truth and Makaratta (a Yolngu word for agreement-making after disputes). The No campaign has used this to raise fears about treaties but then, earlier this month, they suddenly claimed there was a longer, secret version of the statement, explicitly mentioning treaties and reparations, so Labor had signed up to a more radical agenda.

The claim is false. The documents they refer to are background papers and meeting summaries from consultations leading up to Uluru. They have been public all along (including during five years of Coalition government) and no one has signed up to them. The No campaigners have rejected what is obvious from reading the papers, selectively quoting one of the authors, Megan Davis, and ignoring her clarification – Davis had urged people to read these documents to understand the Uluru statement and her choice of words was poor, but so much for secrecy. The “longer” statement claim is a confection aimed at sustaining a scare campaign but, incredibly, some persist with it.

[The Statement From The Heart is published in full at the end of this post]

4 The voice will divide the nation.

The No campaign argues the 1967 referendum ensured Indigenous Australians were “recognised as part of the population” and that a voice will “enshrine division” in the Constitution. This ignores how the main change in 1967 gave the federal government power to make special policies and laws for Indigenous people. Since, we have seen laws, policies, organisations, and government ministers specifically focused on Indigenous Australians – for good or ill. The voice push recognises this power is still required – to manage native title and cultural heritage issues, for instance, and to close the gap. But it proposes that to help ensure these powers are used effectively and not against the interests of Indigenous people, a representative body should provide non-binding advice to government. To characterise this as divisive is to turn practical reality on its head; alternatively, we would remove division by repealing the race power, abolishing native title and cultural heritage laws, scrapping the Indigenous affairs department (NIAA), axing the Indigenous portfolio, and removing every program and project specific to Indigenous communities. The notion is absurd. Given these special provisions must stay, allowing Indigenous people to provide advice on these matters is not divisive but inclusive – nothing more than a fair go.

Yes campaigner Noel Pearson. Picture: Getty Images
Yes campaigner Noel Pearson. 

5 The voice is an elite forum or a “Canberra voice”.

This, too, is the opposite to reality. It accurately describes the Indigenous advisory councils that Labor and Liberal governments appointed in the past – under Tony Abbott such a forum was headed by Warren Mundine. These hand-picked bodies have been the epitome of a “Canberra voice” and Indigenous people have had no say on membership.

The voice proposal aims to provide an advisory body chosen by Indigenous people in communities around the country, so that the federal government hears ideas from grassroots communities. The whole thrust of the voice proposal, including under the detailed work I was involved in under the Morrison Coalition government, is to provide local representatives from disparate communities.

6 The voice is overreach beyond recognition.

A constant refrain from No advocates is that the voice is overreach and they would support a simple statement of recognition in the Constitution. This ignores the fact voters were given this choice in the 1999 republic referendum when a constitutional preamble was put, including the words, “honouring Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, the nation’s first people, for their deep kinship with their lands and for their ancient and continuing cultures which enrich the life of our country”. It was rejected. Bipartisan support for recognition was kicked along again by John Howard in 2007, and subsequent political and Indigenous consultations settled on the voice as the preferred means of constitutional recognition. If the current proposal is defeated it will be a rejection of the only form of recognition on offer, and a repudiation of Indigenous aspiration for recognition.

Reconciliation cannot progress meaningfully if non-Indigenous Australia declares it will offer constitutional recognition only on its own minimalist terms – a modern version of trinkets and beads.

7   The voice allows 3 per cent of the population to hold sway over the rest.

This myth flips power balance and victim status on their heads. The idea that redressing disadvantage and a lack of agency for our most downtrodden cohort is a threat to the more successful majority is a perversion. To begin, the constitutional wording ensures the voice can make representations only on matters relating to Indigenous people, and even if opponents argue this could be liberally interpreted to cover virtually any government decision, nothing changes the fact the voice is advisory only.

So the idea the voice is a threat to the nation is to create resentment where there should be none. The proposal aims to redress imbalance, not create it. The voice could lead to some difficult political debates, so be it, but all power remains with parliament and the executive.

8 The voice will not fix Indigenous traumas or close the gap.

This argument is desperate but common. It sidesteps the important issues of justice, recognition, and future safeguards by feigning an overarching concern for contemporary outcomes. Opponents assert that a voice would not fix law and order problems in Alice Springs or end domestic ­violence trauma in Indigenous communities. None of us knows. What we do know is that these problems exist now, and current policies have failed.

A voice could provide the grassroots insights and ideas to make a difference, or it could fail like everything else. But the critics cannot pretend to know the outcomes of a consultative body that has not yet been tried.

One of the most prospective aspects of the voice, which ­conservatives should embrace, is that it would give Indigenous communities not only some input, but a share of responsibility for delivering outcomes. It takes away the excuse, if you like, of a lack of agency.

There have been failures on both sides of the voice debate. Early on, leading Yes campaigners engaged in personal abuse, and emotional blackmail remains a recurring theme.

The No campaign is designed to generate anxiety. Without fear, they have no persuasive arguments, especially given that the Coalition has long argued a voice is worthwhile (the only proviso that it is not mandated in the Constitution).

It is a tall ask to scare people about mandating the legislation of a voice when you propose to legislate a voice under existing powers anyway. But so far it is working.

The debate has hardly been front of mind for mainstream voters, so the next six weeks will be crucial.

No doubt the myths will still be peddled. Opponents are intent on baring their teeth at a toothless body.

The Uluru Statement From The Heart

We, gathered at the 2017 National Constitutional Convention, coming from all points of the southern sky, make this statement from the heart:

Our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander tribes were the first sovereign Nations of the Australian continent and its adjacent islands, and possessed it under our own laws and customs. This our ancestors did, according to the reckoning of our culture, from the Creation, according to the common law from ‘time immemorial’, and according to science more than 60,000 years ago.

This sovereignty is a spiritual notion: the ancestral tie between the land, or ‘mother nature’, and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who were born therefrom, remain attached thereto, and must one day return thither to be united with our ancestors. This link is the basis of the ownership of the soil, or better, of sovereignty. It has never been ceded or extinguished, and co-exists with the sovereignty of the Crown.

How could it be otherwise? That peoples possessed a land for sixty millennia and this sacred link disappears from world history in merely the last two hundred years?

With substantive constitutional change and structural reform, we believe this ancient sovereignty can shine through as a fuller expression of Australia’s nationhood.

Proportionally, we are the most incarcerated people on the planet. We are not an innately criminal people. Our children are aliened from their families at unprecedented rates. This cannot be because we have no love for them. And our youth languish in detention in obscene numbers. They should be our hope for the future.

These dimensions of our crisis tell plainly the structural nature of our problem. This is the torment of our powerlessness.

We seek constitutional reforms to empower our people and take a rightful place in our own country. When we have power over our destiny our children will flourish. They will walk in two worlds and their culture will be a gift to their country.

We call for the establishment of a First Nations Voice enshrined in the Constitution.
Makarrata is the culmination of our agenda: the coming together after a struggle. It captures our aspirations for a fair and truthful relationship with the people of Australia and a better future for our children based on justice and self-determination.

We seek a Makarrata Commission to supervise a process of agreement-making between governments and First Nations and truth-telling about our history.

In 1967 we were counted, in 2017 we seek to be heard. We leave base camp and start our trek across this vast country. We invite you to walk with us in a movement of the Australian people for a better future