Politics

Tolkien’s Tarkeeth – Images of Isengard

Paul Hemphill 5 Comments

JRR had never heard of the Tarkeeth Forest, but if he had, I am certain he would have had some harsh words for the clear-felling that is razing our forest even as I write.

In 1962, he wrote:

“Every tree has its enemy, few have an advocate. In all my works I take the part of trees against all their enemies”.

In 1972, just over a year before his death, he wrote:

“Dear Sir,

With reference to the Daily Telegraph of June 29th, I feel that it is unfair to use my name as an adjective qualifying ‘gloom’, especially in a context dealing with trees. In all my works I take the part of trees as against all their enemies. Lothlorien is beautiful because there the trees were loved; elsewhere forests are represented as awakening to consciousness of themselves. The Old Forest was hostile to two legged creatures because of the memory of many injuries. Fangorn Forest was old and beautiful, but at the time of the story tense with hostility because it was threatened by a machine-loving enemy. Mirkwood had fallen under the domination of a Power that hated all living things but was restored to beauty and became Greenwood the Great before the end of the story.

It would be unfair to compare the Forestry Commission with Sauron because as you observe it is capable of repentance; but nothing it has done that is stupid compares with the destruction, torture and murder of trees perpetrated by private individuals and minor official bodies. The savage sound of the electric saw is never silent wherever trees are still found growing.”

( JRR Tolkien Letters 241 and 339)

Yes, he really did say “Forestry Commission” – an old British statutory authority that bears no relation to our own government-owned Forestry Corporation, but keep Sauron and also Saruman in mind as you read the following.

Images of Isengard

Images of Isengard

As I survey the desolation of the Tarkeeth, I remember the words of poets long-departed.

Thomas Hardy, in his poignantly uplifting ‘The Darkling Thrush’:

The land’s sharp features seemed to be
The Century’s corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.

And TS Elliot, in ‘The Wasteland’, a title so prophetically apt when I view the impact of clear-felling on what was until barely a week ago was a diverse ecosystem that had prospered in a failed monoculture plantation (See: my post ‘If You Go Down To the Woods Today‘):

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water.

Tarkeeth Burning

Tarkeeth Burning

In posts to this blog, I endeavour as much as I can to maintain balance, and to avoid overly partisan positions. Today, please forgive me as I break my rule, and reproduce an open letter to the people of Bellingen Shire, the place I call my home, by local farmer, counsellor, forest protector, and mother, Susan Weil. It is a detailed but succinct explanation of what is happening right now in the Tarkeeth Forest.

Read on…

Tarkeeth morning, And Tarkeeth evening. What a difference a day makes

Tarkeeth morning, Tarkeeth evening
What a difference a day makes

The Birds are screaming!  Listen!

Tarkeeth Forest – Wrong Method, Wrong Place

There are consistent misconceptions in our community about the Tarkeeth State Forest. One of them is that we (forest community & concerned peoples) don’t want a single tree cut down (a bit silly for anyone to claim this given our appetite for timber products) and that we are making a big fuss about a plantation whose sole purpose for being there is to provide a consistent supply of quality hardwood products for our community, generating jobs and boosting our local economy.

Some facts: There are between two to three harvesting machines on site ( that translates to three employees) the rest of the jobs are for the haulage truck drivers and a few onsite operation managers. If we are talking about jobs perhaps we should be asking many of the out of work loggers that have been here for generations, many of whom would consider themselves conservationists. Perhaps if we have a conversation with any of these men they would take pride in telling you how well they managed our forests for many years prior to mechanisation and without the environmental fallout associated with clear felling.

They logged selectively and if they did their job properly their methodology would actually help stimulate forest re growth, preserve habitat and support forest diversity. None of these men are being employed by forestry, in fact many of them have been replaced by mechanised corporations like forestry and their livelihoods have been made redundant. So if you’re jumping up and down about job security perhaps you’re just talking about haulage drivers and a small handful of operators not the actual loggers themselves, because I can assure you their not benefitting from clear felling. In fact if we stop clear felling and work with best practise which is selective logging and revert back to more traditional methods then our haulage contractors would be employed far more regularly and consistently then they are currently.

If you’re talking about good quality timber, again you’re mistaken, the majority of all of these forests are flooded gum and as such there will be no profits made from this project. Forestry corporation have admitted that our “Jewel in the crown” as they keep referring to our valley is going to be an assett to them in 40 years time, thats an asset for them not us.

Forestry is currently clear felling the Tarkeeth, Kallang, Tuckers Nob, Newry and Pine creek. That’s a massive cumulative effect of aggressive clear felling in a small valley that sits between the Bellingen river, the Kalang and the Never Never Rivers. You don’t need a science degree to understand the effect that cumulative clear felling will have on our waterways and environment long term as the near extinction of our river turtles showed last year.

I’m hard pressed to find a boost to our local economy (Bellingen itself) bar a few employees for a limited period of time. This operation will end in a few years and provide minimal employment for another 40-50 years. Responsibly managed, selective logging would provide far more jobs far more consistently for this community.

In theory, plantations are an excellent idea in helping to preserve our native forests, but like all good theories in the wrong hands and with poor foundations it doesn’t always translate that well into reality. For instance, the current Plantations and Reafforestation Act 1999 was created by the very same governmnet that currently owns Forestry Corporation. The current Act allows Forestry Corporation to conduct their business with minimal community opposition and one has to wonder about the integrity of any business that can operate in whatever manner they choose without any accountability.

Forestry Corporation claims they have consulted closely with local residents to balance the needs of all stakeholders. The true translation of this means they sat down with the community and told them what they were going to do and ignored and rejected all of the residents requests that would impede their project. Thus grossly betraying the community consultation process. But it’s true they did consult with the community.

They told us they worked closely with the local indigenous community to balance their needs. Whilst I can’t and won’t speak for our indigenous community, suffice to say I think this has been grossly miscommunicated and very poorly managed on all fronts.

The Plantation and Reafforestation Act hasn’t been amended since 1999 (other then to change the name to a Corporation in 2012) and as such lacks current environmental and social standards that are being upheld in the private plantation act and native forest act, both of which are far more stringent in their assessment processes. Why hasn’t the Act been updated in 17 years to reflect current world views and environmental standards?

Forestry Corporations Plantation and Reafforestation Act works on a state wide minimum standard, which means that if there is a plantation in an area of high risk such as all of those found in Bellingen ( steep slopes and high rainfall) they do not have to make any special provisions for these deviations to the standard. They can continue to operate under the same standards regardless of the location. How can this be considered best practise?

One of these standard states a 20m buffer zone for riparian zones. This is hardly ample given the amount of chemicals they plan to use and our high rainfall and steep slopes. You don’t need to be a genius to do the math to see the shortfall and the consequences of that insufficient standard.

The harvest and haulage plan stipulates that Forestry Corporation will commence replanting their new seedlings between 12-18 mths after harvesting, now I’m a farmer, and no decent farmer would ever leave 128 hectares fallow with our heavy rainfall, it would be over run by a myriad of fast growing weeds hence their need to use a chemical cocktail of thousands of litres of glyphosate,metsulfurin, liase and pulse penetrant to manage the weed problem. If a methodology adopted creates another environmental problem such as this how can we accept this as best practise when clearly it is in breach of this? This happened in Gladstone State forest two years ago when as a result of the leaving the forest fallow in excess of 18 months they wanted to deal with the weed infestation (they created ) by aerial spraying. Have Forestry Corporation learned nothing from their previous mistakes? Yet the Tarkeeth harvest plans show no amendment to previous errors, which is obviously very concerning for us. Best practise would demand they replant immediately after harvesting thus mitigating the need for the use of any chemicals in the first place.

Forestry Corporation continues to talk about sustainability when it comes to their forest management plan, but in actual fact, they are only referring to the fact that they will be replacing the existing crop with another. That’s not sustainability that’s just called succession cropping. Sustainability should infer methodology.

One of the definitions of sustainability is “The endurance of systems and processes which includes the four interconnected domains: ecology, economics, politics and culture.”

Sustainability should relate to Forestry Corporations capacity to preserve and look after the environment (soils, habitat, wildlife, waterways and communities) to engage in meaningful dialogues with local community members and adopt their ideas and concerns into their plans, to provide long lasting and consistent employment for local community members and to show respect and care for indigenous sacred sites and artefacts.

Forestry Corporation should be using “best sustainable ” practises such as selective logging to minimise soil disturbance and erosion, to promote biodiversity within the forest and to do away with the need to manage weeds via chemical applications which would not be a problem if the earth were not disturbed in the first place.

Sustainability should include ongoing jobs for ethical logging practises and should include a meaningful dialogue with residents that provides outcomes for everyone’s interests not just the agenda of the corporation itself. We call that best practise.

According to the Forestry haulage and harvest plan they are replanting a chemical dependent monoculture plantation of Blackbutt (90%) and tallowood (10%). This is an interesting point. Forestry has claimed there were no koalas residing in this forest despite statutory declarations provided by residents sighting them and including an independent field study conducted by an ecologist for a Tarkeeth resident. Yet forestry plan to plant tallowood for the same koalas they believe aren’t there and then they plan to destroy the habitat and food source in 40 years.

A research study conducted by forestry commission stated that Tallowwood was slow growing and failed to thrive in this region that white mahogany and Black Butt were the preferred species. Given that, why would Forestry choose to plant this species given its poor performance and in doing so attract a threatened species only to have its habitat and food source removed? It doesn’t seem to add up, whichever way you look at it.

Under the inadequate Plantaction and Reafforestation Act Forestry Corporation can legally behave as corporate vandals, their not breaking any laws because they created a document to protect themselves from any community backlash. Why?

Well we now know the answer to all of our concerns. In 1999 when the Act was created on the back of an environmental push from activists to protect native forests and move towards plantations (a move we support) the government did not want to allow any room for communities and environmentalists to challenge or impede their business. They knew that a plantation if left for 40-50 years to mature would build its own ecosystem, that the native forest would compete and a native understory would develop attracting native wildlife making it hard to tell if indeed it was just a plantation or a diverse forest.

So, to ensure there was no opposition they created a guaranteed harvest plan, to ensure that nothing and no one could impede or prevent a harvest from being carried out. Hence the current Plantation and Reafforestation Act 1999. They created an Act that makes it impossible for anyone to legally challenge their methodologies or practises and it prevents them from being sued as the Act is so lax that it’s impossible to hold them accountable as their not breaking any laws. They wrote their own law.

As a community we have the right to say NO this is not okay, this is not best practise and this is not good for our town long term. We understand their running a business but we want them run it better. Is that unreasonable of us to ask for that?

As a community we have a right to protect our “Jewel in the Crown,” we are in fact protecting Gumbaynggirr land, always was always will be. I believe we can do so for the benefit of all the stakeholders involved. I don’t believe that we need to compromise for the sake of a Corporation that legally manages this land on OUR behalf and is not following best practise and is simply serving their own agenda.

This community would support a well run, responsibly managed selective logging business that balances the needs of all. Why would we not demand that they manage OUR land better? Why is this community squabbling over a plantation when what we are really talking about is ending clear felling and adopting better methodologies and best practise that allows us to have our cake and eat it too. What’s not to support here? Am I missing something ?

To remedy this situation we need accountability and responsible governance – but therein lies the root of this problem. To do that we need to change the laws and amend the Act. That is not an easy process in itself and to do that we need community support.

It’s easy to sit on the sidelines and commentate on this issue, it’s clearly divided opinions in our community and that’s always challenging to deal with. But for those whose lives are being directly impacted by this it’s hard to really understand the anxiety, sadness and fear they face on a daily basis. We rarely act on something unless it affects us directly, I guess that’s human nature but please try and have some compassion for the people who are dealing with this day in and day out as they watch a place they love and cherish being torn apart by a corporation that really doesn’t give a damn.

To feel powerless to affect change is a horrible place to live and whilst it’s easy to get caught up in the semantics of this campaign try and remember that people we care about are hurting over this. I don’t know if the community will ever see eye to eye on this for a myriad of reasons but I hope that within this process we can still hang on to our humanity and see beyond the story.

Susan Weil, Bellingen, 17th August 2016.

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Nothing quite prepares you for the devastation of clear felling. Joby, a Gumbaynggirr elder, surveys the Tarkeeth

Nothing quite prepares you for the devastation of clear felling.                                                                 Joby, a Gumbaynggirr elder, surveys the Tarkeeth

 

 

 

 

Living in Interesting Times

Paul Hemphill 1 Comment

“These are the days of miracle and wonder, but don’t cry baby, don’t cry…”  Paul Simon, The Boy in the Bubble

With an election looming in Australia, touted as the most important election since the last election, a critical referendum next week in the UK that could precipitate a frightening leap in the dark, and possibly the most divisive presidential contest in the USA in living memory, I scale the News Corp pay-wall to share Paul Kelly’s thoughts on the “interesting times” that we are living in.

Disruption of Brexit, Trump Loom in Anti-elitist Age

Paul Kelly, The Australian, 15th June, 2016

Our age is defined by hostility towards elites and establishment power — caused by financial abuses, frustration at pressures over incomes, immigration and living standards, polarisation at changing cultural norms and Islamist terror — with the US and Britain now in domestic political turmoil from this phenomenon.

The sense of elite failure is taking hold. It mirrors the belief that established policy is rotten or ineffective. Witness the incessant talk of weak leadership and the demise of political trust. People feel they are losing control — of their suburbs, country and security.

The culture of complaint, partly justified, lurches out of control, fed by public anger, acrimonious social media and a coarsening in public life. In this cauldron, ideas that have governed prosperity and success are now under assault from extremes of Left and Right. This roughly describes the forces at work in the US and Britain today. The once unthinkable — just nine months ago — is now a real prospect.

Donald Trump, Republican nominee for president with a reasonable chance in a two-horse race, constitutes a danger to the US and the world. Britain, according to polls, is 50-50 on whether to vote for Brexit and leave the EU in a delusional national revolt. And Australia, devoid of such epic events, is not devoid of their causes, with an anti-establishment, anti-major party hostility possibly defining the 2016 election.

There are two dominant characteristics of this revolt against the elites — it proves the failure of established political leaders and every sign is that such angry, disillusioned populism is just making matters worse and leaving people worse off.

The Western democracies are sinking into a political and intellectual crisis.

The Trump and Brexit movements are different in form but close in motivation — they are driven by multiple grievance. They feed off the notion of a polity gone wrong and a public scorned for too long. They represent a community alienated by and from the centres of power, from the Republican establishment to an arrogant EU.

In extreme form, people feel the system is rigged against them. They are retaliating: part calculated, part irrational. In an age of economic and technological disruption, large segments of the community have said “you want disruption? OK, we’ll give you disruption”.

Tory PM David Cameron now finds his survival in peril. Barack Obama, the most progressive US president, bequeaths a legacy of public rancour, polarisation and low self-esteem. Is it possible for any leader to succeed in societies that have lost their traditional virtue and much of the civic glue that held them together?

It is a time of false prophets. A generation of different and dangerous populists now moves to centre stage. Some like Trump, are undisguised in their racial, sexist and selfish pitches. Trump knows the key to being a successful fraud is to be a grand fraud. He pledges “to make America great again” with an agenda that will damage America and endanger the world.

Yet he wins wide applause. This is because he is an anti-politician, shaking the system, abusing the established politicians, trashing their ideas. He thrives on shock and extravagance in a culture drunk with mindless celebrity. He stands for economic nationalism, trade protectionism, xenophobic hostility towards Muslims and a US strategic withdrawal from the world and much of its alliance system.

Many of the sentiments Trump champions are embraced, one way or another, by the collection of minor parties and independents running at this election — and receiving little scrutiny — from Nick Xenophon’s extreme protectionism to Pauline Hanson’s extreme attitudes towards Muslims and immigration to the strategic withdrawal advocated by the Greens in their hostility towards the US alliance and delusion of a neutralist and more “independent” Australia.

Because he is an inflated ogre, Trump invites resistance. He lacks the judgment for the US presidency and should be fiercely opposed every step of the way. His policies cannot be excused simply because of establishment blunders.

The situation in Australia is different because our revolt against the elites is conducted in the name of the underdog, the little Aussie battler, the moral crusader or, as the Greens say, against the political equivalent of the Coles/Woolworths duopoly.

It is a climate where Jacqui Lambie, a purveyor of cliches with the common touch, can become a Tassie heroine and Xenophon can exploit rent-seeking provincialism to become SA’s finest son. Australians with their anti-authoritarian instincts are notoriously susceptible to appeals to cut down the tall poppies. It is a national pastime and good fun. The public can elect protest candidates in haste and regret over time. Witness Clive Palmer. Who pray, will Queensland give us this poll?

The educated class is adroit at the game. Clever men, Oxford educated, who write books about Winston Churchill can become slick populists as they seek to repudiate Churchill’s legacy of Britain’s commitment to Europe. Boris Johnson spearheads the Brexit campaign and, if successful, he will be well ­positioned to become PM.

Exploiting the multitude of EU flaws, Johnson makes a big call in Churchill’s style — time to quit Europe altogether — mobilising the sentiments that blame Europe for Britain’s problems, channelling Euroscepticism, overlooking the evidence that exit will hurt Britain economically, hurt the living standards of its people, diminish Britain’s influence and create a series of policy challenges that ­nobody remotely knows how to solve.

Johnson’s is a sophisticated populism. He cannot explain how Brexit will leave Britain more prosperous or safer. But he has invoked Hitler, Napoleon and the glories of the Empire along the road to what he calls a new freedom. He has panache and, exploiting the immigration card, he may win. Malcolm Turnbull, naturally, backs Cameron’s efforts to keep Britain in the EU.

False ideas are powerful in this new populism. People these days are disgusted with transactional politics — deals, trade-offs, compromises. Yet this is how nations are run in the age of fragmentation and diversity. It is what delivers stability, progress and social unity.

The anti-elites have a different view. They are obsessed by the notion of authenticity because they see most politicians as phony. They want politicians to take a purist stand in honouring their obsessions, single issues and self-interest — against the coal industry, for same-sex marriage, free Medicare forever, banning coal-seam gas, escaping the EU, building a wall to keep out Mexicans. It is a long list.

The anti-elites embody a rising intolerance — self-righteous refusal to accept the validity of the opposing argument is pivotal to this mood. These upheavals in the two great democracies, the US and Britain, are moments of great import. To list the sources of this malaise is to recognise its existence in Australia, albeit in different and less intense form. But for how long?

The mood in the Australian election is disengagement and disillusion with the main parties. The principal contest is Coalition versus Labor.

Yet there is another issue at stake: whether this poll sees an unprecedented number of minor party and independent candidates in evidence of a growing revolt against the Australian system.

Once in Royal David’s Citadel

Paul Hemphill 2 Comments

During its long history, Jerusalem has been destroyed at least twice, besieged 23 times, attacked 52 times, and captured and recaptured 44 times.

The Citadel or Tower Museum at the Jaffa Gate, the westernmost entrance to the city, is all the history you can eat in a four hour sitting. It’s a four thousand year old story: from the Canaanites and the Hebrews to the end of the Mandate and the establishment of the State of Israel, via Egyptians, Assyrians, Persians, Greeks, Hasmoneans, Romans, Byzantines, Umayyads, Abbasids, Fatamids, Crusaders, Ayyubids, Tartars, Mongols, Mamluks, Ottomans, British, and even Australians. Each left their mark on Jerusalem, and most planted their brickage upon and within the Citadel.

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There is a long roll-call of famous names who may or may have not resided in the place.

King David didn’t, despite his name being given to the place and the apocryphal story that he once spied on the bathing Bathsheba from its ramparts – indeed, her bathroom is said to be underneath the New Imperial Hotel, just across the way. Nor did his son and heir, Solomon, builder of the First Temple. Conquerors Nebuchadnezzar and Cyrus did not. They just wrecked the joint. Judah Maccabee might have, and those other famous Jewish rebels, the Zealots didn’t, but during Great Revolt, they retreated there and trashed the place. Herod the Great, a psycho with an serious edifice complex, resided here. As did also Procurator Pontius Pilate when he was in town (he preferred the luxuries of Caesaea Maritimus (Latin for “on Sea). Historians now believe that the Citdel was where he actually cast judgement on Jesus, and not in the Antonine Fortress which overlooked the Temple (where the Haram al Sharif now stands) throwing into question the whole basis for the existence of the Via Dolorosa.

Roman general and future emperor Titus would have taken up residence therein after he destroyed the city in 70CE, leaving only the citadel standing. His troops needed somewhere to crash. Constantine didn’t, but his mom Helena most likely did when she “discovered” The True Cross, commissioned the construction of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, and single-handedly invented the Holy Land pilgrim industry that endures to this day. The Muslim conquerors Omar Ibn Khattab, Salah ud-Din, and Baybars may have, but Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the magnificent, who built the city walls we see today, never set foot in Jerusalem, and nor did his successors.

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Ottoman troops occupied it, and General Djemal Pasha would hang Arab Nationalists in the Square before it. General Allenby declared Jerusalem and Palestine liberated on the steps leading to the citadel in 1917, but most likely stayed across the square at our wonderful East New Imperial Hotel (the Kaiser stayed there too when he visited Jerusalem in 1898). British troops garrisoned it during the Mandate years – like the Roman legionaries before them, they’d’ve needed a place to lay their heads. The British-commanded Arab Legion of then Transjordan took control of it in during the the battle for Jerusalem in 1948 and defended it successfully against the new IDF. They did so again in 1967 only to lose it and the Old City.

If the stones could talk, what a tale they would tell. And indeed, the museum now does just that, in content and in form. We sit on the roof garden of our hotel, directly across the street on Omar Ibn Al Khattab Square, and look across at its towers, ramparts and gardens, and sense it’s story in our souls. We watch present generations passing beneath its walls, and the young folk dancing on the ramparts, all part of the passing parade of humanity that has lingered by and upon these ancient walls.

For further reading, you can’t beat Simon Sebag-Montefiore’s Jerusalem : The Biography (Phoenix 2011).

See also in In That Howling Infinite, The Grand Old New Imperial Hotel, and Nova Via Dolorosa. For other posts about Jerusalem see: O Jerusalem

History Lessons

History Lessons

Carnivale

Dancers from the Son et Lumiere promenade

There Rides a Peace Train

Paul Hemphill 1 Comment

“Cause out on the edge of darkness, there rides a peace train.
Oh peace train take this country, come take me home again.”
Cat Stevens, Peace Train

Completed in 2011, the Jerusalem Light Rail unites east and west Jerusalem. This how a light rail should be – small, light, and frequent, on a traffic free Jaffa Road. It links the Jewish suburbs of west and northeast Jerusalem with the Arab suburbs of the north and east of the Old City. The featured picture shows two trains passing at Jaffa Central, underneath a neat mural that shows one weaving down Jaffa Road through vignettes of Israeli urban life. Their destinations are shown sequentially in three languages. Synchronicity determined that in the picture, both were in Arabic, Israel’s semi-official second language.

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It was controversial when first mooted, and extreme elements on both sides of the conflict opposed any such normalization of relations between the Jewish and the Arab communities. There were demonstrations in European countries against the “line that divided a city”, but these petered out when polls showed that Arabs in East Jerusalem found the line to be a blessing. It got dad to work on time; it got mom to the cornucopia that is the Mahane Yehuda fresh food markets, just four stops from the Damascus Gate; and it delivered the kids to school and back safely and punctually. It is said, with some justification, that earlier attacks on the line were perpetrated by thugs incited by Fatah, the political wing of the Palestinian Authority, which is alleged to control the taxi industry of East Jerusalem.

During the recent unrest, the line was often blocked and trains attacked during demonstrations and street fighting, but service was resumed quicksmart. Arab passengers were at times abused by Jews, and stations were the targets of random rammings by cars and heavy vehicles – the so-called “siyarah intifada” – with many Jewish casualties and “neutralized” perpetrators.

But calm appears to have descended, and folk of good will on all sides of the literal and figurative line pass in peace through Arab and Jewish Jerusalem.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerusalem_Light_Rail

“I believe that one fine day all the children of Abraham
Will lay down their swords forever in Jerusalem”
Steve Earl, Jerusalem

Light Rail Mural, Jaffa Road

Light Rail Mural, Jaffa Road

Facebook Postscript from Sarah Tuttle-Singer, 20th February 2023

If you’ve ever ridden the light rail in Jerusalem, then you’ve seen the section with the chairs that go down when you sit on them – each has a wheelchair sign because people in wheelchairs get priority there since there’s space, but if you’re a mom and you’ve got a stroller, you can sit there, too, and that’s where these two women are sitting: I watched them both get in, one wore a hijab and the other wore a sheitel, and they both had their arms and leg covered, and no collarbone, no sir, and I watched the struggle through the crowd on the light rail with their strollers, big and blue and bulky, match match.

They each took a seat on opposite sides of the row where the wheelchairs go, and they put their strollers in the middle. Each woman stared straight ahead out the window as Jeursalem went by in one long smear, looking straight past each other.

Strangers on a light rail, with their matching strollers, but by accident, their strollers faced each other, and the kids met eye to eye — both bundled up in winter coats and hats and shoes, both brown eyed babes with pink cheeks, and curly hair, well fed and well loved, and they could have been brothers. And while their mothers stared straight ahead watching Jerusalem blur by, the two boys smiled at one another, and chatted back and forth as only little babies can, but as everybody should.

Sarah is an author, blogger and photographer who lives in East Jerusalem and writes The Times of Jerusalem. https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/review-of-jerusalem-drawn-and-quartered-by-sarah-tuttle-singer/

Sarah Tuttle Singer, East Jerusalem

 

 

Small Stories – A Tale of Twin Pines

Paul Hemphill 11 Comments

One of the pleasures of moving to the Australian bush and living in Bellingen Shire is discovering its often overlooked history. This is the story of Twin Pines. Not as dippy as Twin Peaks, nor as sinister as Wayward Pines, it is a story of ordinary people doing extraordinary things.

When I first came to this land,
I was not a wealthy man,
So I built myself a shack,
And I did what I could.

I called my shack
Break My Back,
But the land was sweet and good,
And I did what I could.

When I first came to this land,
I was not a wealthy man.
So I built myself a farm.
I did what I could.

Prologue

We in Bellingen Shire , some ten kilometers west of the seaside town of Urunga on the mid north coast of New South Wales. The Tarkeeth Forest lies between the Bellinger and Kalang Rivers, and these are connected tidally to the ocean at Urunga – the only place in Australia where two rivers meet the ocean together. The forest rises from the rivers on either side of the Fernmount Range, the easternmost extension of the Great Dividing Range that spans the eastern edge of our island continent. Above and between the two rivers, it is a rain-harvesting, filtration and stabilization ecosystem vital to the waterways and wetlands around them, and is a habitat for bird, reptilian, mammalian and marsupial wildlife, including koalas, wallabies, echidnas, quolls, goannas, owls, fruit doves and cockatoos. The east-west Fernmount Range Trail is an ancient highway called the Yildaan Dreaming Track. It led from the plains beyond the Dorrigo massif to what is now the seaside town of Urunga, known then to the Gumbaynggirr people as a “place of plenty”. The first people would descend the spurs on the north and south flanks of the range to fishing and ceremonies on the riverside. The Tarkeeth Forest therefore contains areas of significant indigenous culture, recalling song lines and stories of the Dreamtime, places of ceremony, of birth and burial, and of atrocity.

The Fells of Twin Pines

Exploring the history of the forest, I chanced across Lloyd Fell’s story of the Fell Family Farm. This was located close to the present Twin Pines Trail, just east of Fells Road on South Arm Road, and west of the new bridge across the Kalang. It’s a great story of how the road got its name, and of how, in the late 19th century, Moses Lacey, the first selector, ran a store on the river bank. How back then, there was no road along the river, the South Arm (of the Bellinger), and access to farms along the river was by small jetties. South Arm Road was built to serve a quarry, now disused, just west of the present Fell’s Road.

Lloyd tells the story of how in 1926, New Zealand farmer, solo-yachtsman, and returned ANZAC Chris Fell first saw the land that became the family farm, purchasing it from Moses’s deceased estate for a thousand pounds. Chris was impressed by the two mature pines that stood on either side of the track leading to a rough timber house that already stood there – and these gave the farm its name. He cleared the bush, felling and hauling timber (helped by his neighbour Bennett’s bullock team) until he had sufficient land and capital to run cattle. In time, he built up a prosperous dairy business and cattle stud, and he and his wife Laura, a Sydneysider from a well-to-do Vaucluse family, raised their three children there. It was a hard life on the land back then – one of dedication, hard work, and perseverance. Power did not come to the South Arm until 1959. Many in the Shire still remember Chris and Laura and indeed, went to school with Lloyd, Bill and Margaret. When the kids were young, they went to the small Tarkeeth school house located just west of the present Fells Road junction. There are quite a few folk who remember attending the little school before its closure in 1972. Indeed, since I published the story on a local FaceBook page, and a former pupil published a picture of the Tarkeeth School’s “Class of ’68”, old aquaintances and school chums have reconnected with each other. Here is the History of Tarkeeth School. It can be obtained from Bellingen Museum,

Twin Pines is no more. When Chris could no longer work the farm, Bill took over the business. In 1966, with changes in the dairy industry rendering to business unprofitable, he sold it to the Errington family.They sold it shortly afterwards to Australian Paper Mills who in the early ’80s, sold it to State Forests – now the Forestry Corporation. APM cleared the land and established a flooded gum plantation thereon and on adjacent blocks – today’s Tarkeeth State Forest. That plantation is now being aggressively harvested – clear felled, actually – a matter of considerable concern to us locals and to many in the Shire. in the South, the forest comes right down to the Kalang River, and this too is a cause for concern as the harvesting and reforestation operations involve clearfelling, burning and spraying with herbicide. The consequences of an extreme weather event could be dire.

The farm house was not demolished. When the plantation was established, but was destroyed by fire years later. The school was sold to an Erik Johannsen who lived there for many years with a collection of animals. Tragically, he ended his own life after setting fire to the school. Fells Road puts the family name on the map, and whilst the Errintons did not linger here long, they are remembered in Erringtons Trail, a well-maintained forest track linking South Arm Road to the Fernmount Range Trail and thence the Bellinger Valley. Bennett the bullocky has a trail named for him too. Walking through the Forest Corp plantation, you can still just make out the place where the house stood. There is an old dam in the heart of the bush where tomatoes were once grown. In the the forest, amongst the plantation trees and native regrowth, you will come upon large, old angophera, grey gum, bloodwood and black butt habitat trees, their broad, spreading branches indicating that these once grew in open pasture.

The pines are still there, some ten metres in from South Arm Road. They are not on what is now the Twin Pines Trail, but at the beginning of a trail just to the east of it. A pair of big and beautiful hoop pines. And next to one of them, an old gate post, a dumb signpost to a a vanished past. Furthermore, they have had loads of babies. There are small hoop pines close to their parents, and eastwards along the road towards the new bridge over the Kalang. Nature never sleeps.

Hoop pines at Twin Pines, Tarkeeth

Nothing remains of the Fells farm except some old fence posts, but standing there, it is easy to imagine what it would have been like in those days. But one thing has not changed. Walk into the bush halfway between the pines and Eastern Trail, you will see what Chris Fells discovered back in the ‘thirties:

“Down on the left as you looked out of the house, there was an especially thick, almost impenetrable circle of bush surrounding a small lagoon. Within this, was a haven for all kinds of wildlife such as bandicoots, native possums, snakes, frogs, and and a great assortment of birds: parrots, kingfishers, kookaburras, currawongs, black ducks, bowerbirds, honey-eaters, and by the water itself, the beautiful egrets, ibis and spoonbills. If you peep into the lagoon from the road, its great white paperbark trees, knee-deep in thick green water, gave it an air of mystery and magic”.

And indeed, as the photographs below show, the Tarkeeth Lagoon is still quite special. Folk who grew up on South Arm Road and explored the area as children, still remember the mystery of the place. Those animals and birds still live in the Tarkeeth, but the tall paperbarks have long since fallen and lie as moss and epiphyte-covered sculptures beside the water.

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Read the full story of Twin Pines here in Lloyd Fell’s small but captivating book:

Click to access TwinPinesStory.pdf

Local historian John Lean’s new book “Settlers of South Bellingen and the Lower South Arm”, his “Settlers of the Upper South Arm and Spicketts Creek”, and also, “The History Of Tarkeeth Public School” are available at the Bellingen and Urunga museums.

For other posts in our Small Stories series of ordinary folk doing extraordinary things, see: The schools of the Tarkeeth, another tale from our neck of the woods; The Odyssey of Assid Corban, the story of a Lebanese migrant to New Zealand, and The Monarch of the Sea, the rollicking tale of an unlikely “pirate king”. There is also  No Bull! a true though somewhat overwrought local saga of battling bovines – set in Bonville, not far north of us.

Chris Fell – The ANZAC Story

A century ago, on 31st October 1917, the Australian Light Horse charged the Turkish trenches during the Battle of Beersheba in one of history’s last great cavalry charges. The 31 light horsemen who fell are buried in the Beersheba War Cemetery along with 116 British and New Zealand soldiers who perished in the Beersheba battle. There are 1,241 graves in the military cemetery, soldiers being brought in from other Great War Middle East battlefields. It is a tranquil, poignant, and beautiful place in the Negev Desert, where the bodies of young men from Australia and New Zealand and from the shires of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales were laid to rest. “Lest we forget”.

In his ebook The Twin Pines Story, Lloyd Fell tells how his father served as a mounted machine gunner with the New Zealand forces in the Gaza ampaign of late 1917. His war record reports that he was one of the machine gunners who fought through the day before the famous charge to knock out the Turkish machine guns on the strategic al Saba Hill east of Beersheba. Had these fortifications not been overrun, the Light Horse  would have been prevented from advancing on the wells. Afterwards, the machine gunners and their Kiwi mates took part in a bayonet charge against the enemy.

As Jean Bou wrote in The Weekend Australian:
“The New Zealand brigade was sent against Tel el Saba, but this steep-sided hill with terraced entrenchments was formidable. The dismounted horsemen, with the limited fire support of their machine-gunners and the attached horse artillery batteries, had to slowly suppress the enemy defences and edge their way forward. Chauvel sent light horse to assist, but as the afternoon crawled on, success remained elusive. Eventually the weight of fire kept the defenders’ heads down enough that the New Zealanders were able to make a final assault. The hill was taken and the eastern approach to Beersheba opened, but nightfall was approaching.
See:
http://specialreports.theaustralian.com.au/888793/a-remarkable-feat-of-arms/

Beersheba War Cemetery, Israel

This post opened with that great troubadour Pete Seeger singing Oscar Brand’s celebrated pioneer song. I conclude with his rendering of David Mallet’s tribute to the simple life.

Inch by inch, row by row,
Gonna make this garden grow.
Gonna mulch it deep and low,
Gonna make it fertile ground.

Pullin’ weeds and pickin’ stones,
We are made of dreams and bones
Need spot to call my own
Cause the time is close at hand

Postscript – About Bellingen

We have been visiting Bellingen Shire for the last thirty years, and moved a house onto our bush block over twenty years ago. Bellingen, the Bellinger Valley on the Mid North Coast of New South Wales, is well known as a picturesque, well-preserved (founded in 1870) country town. In former times, it was the centre of a thriving dairy and timber industry, and more recently, as a popular tourist spot between the university city of Armidale and the country music capital of Tamworth to the west, and the Pacific “holiday coast” of Coffs Harbour, Sawtell, Urunga, and Nambucca Heads, to the east, with their sand, surf and sun.

Between the two is the Great Dividing Range, the rolling, high country escarpment of the New England Plateau with its gorges and waterfalls, and the world-heritage Dorrigo National Park with it timeless, untouched rainforests – a “land that time forgot”. And linking them all, the old trunk road, aptly if touristically named Waterfall Way.

Bellingen is popular for its cafes and coffee shops, craft industries and shops, music festivals, and federation facades. It’s visual appeal, and it’s bucolic rural environs have seen the town used on many occasions as a film location. In the seventies, it was a Mecca for young people seeking an alternative lifestyle. The hills thereabout are still scattered with cooperatives and communes, or, in local council-speak, multiple occupancies. In the old days, no love was lost between the “hippies” and the farmers and loggers, and politics were dominated by the rural, conservative “born to rule” National and Country Party. Nowadays, it’s heir, the National Party still dominates the political scene, but its clear majorities decrease fractionally election by election, and by the turn of the century, there may no longer be a National Party member. But demographics do change, as does society. The hippies’ children and the farmers’ kids grew up together, attended the high school together, played, partied, and paired together, and now, there are grand children and great grandchildren.

As the timber and dairy industry has declined, Bellingen’s economy has changed. Once exclusively agrarian – including a time as one of the prime producers of cannabis sativa – tourism now plays a vital role. Bellingen advertises itself to visitors and to present and future residents as a clean, green and sustainable shire. Nature’s wonderland, from its golden beaches to its mountain rainforests and waterfalls. A Tourist Heaven with a cornucopia of recreational activities for young and old – from lazy bathing and picnicking to energetic rambling and trecking, camping and climbing, canoeing and fishing. A cultural mecca with many cafes, live music, craft and artisan shops, and music and writers’ festivals.

Two years ago, the online magazine Traveller published a breathless paean to “the bohemian town that is heaven on earth’. Happy traveller Sheriden Rhodes wrote: Some places are so beautiful; it feels like holy ground. For me, Bellingen has always had that consecrated feeling. It’s obvious, given the name the early pioneers gave the Promised Land, a scenic 10 minute-drive from Bellingen’s township itself. Here the land is so abundantly verdant and fruitful; it literally drips with milk and honey. It’s a place so special the fortunate locals that call it home, including its most famous residents George Negus and David Helfgott would much rather keep all to themselves”.

This is the marketing spin hyped up by the council, the chamber of commerce, and real estate and B&B interests. The reality is somewhat different. Bellingen and the “Holiday Coast” generally have seen a large influx of city folk seeking a different lifestyle for themselves and their children, and also of retirees seeking rural or seaside tranquility – in such numbers that Coffs Harbour and its seaside satellites have become in many ways the Costa Geriatrica.

Many newcomers are not fully aware that the Coffs Coast generally is one of the poorest areas of rural New South Wales. Statistics for youth unemployment and senior poverty are among the highest in the state with all the attendant economic, social and psychological impacts as evidenced by high rates of depression, domestic violence and substance abuse. Health and transport services outside the urban centres are  pretty poor. Rising property values and high rents price low-income families and singles out of the market. Decreasing profit margins have forced many of those attractive cafes and coffee shops to close.

Nor is the clean, green, sustainable shire as picture perfect as the brochures portray It. There is environmental degradation with clear-felling and land-clearing, and flammable, monoculture, woodchip-bound eucalyptus plantations that encircle Bellingen – a potential fire bomb primed to explode during one of our scorching, hot dry summers. There is generational degradation of the Bellinger’s banks and the graveling up of its once deep depths. And there the encroachment and expansion of water-hungry, pesticide and herbicide reliant blueberry farms,

But on the right side of the ledger, we in the Shire are indeed blessed by Mother Nature. The coastline boasts magnicent headlands and promontories, and long, pristine and often deserted beaches. The World Heritage Gondwana rainforests are a national treasure, and surrounding national parks truly are a natural wonderland. We never tire of the drive from Urunga to Armidale via Waterfall Way, as it crosses the Great Dividing Range and the New England Plateau. The Kalang River as it flows beside South Arm Road and between the Tarkeeth and Newry State Forests is itself one of the Shire’s hidden and largely unvisited secrets, a haven for fishermen, canoeist and all who love mucking about in boats.

Compared to many places on this planet, we’ve really not much to complain about …

Sic semper tyrannis

Paul Hemphill 5 Comments

You come at the king, you best not miss.
Omar Little, The Wire (after RW Emerson)

The phrase “one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist” is at once apt, correct, and yet often oversimplified to the point of disingenuousness. The word “terrorist” itself describes its goal. To instill fear in the heart of the enemy. In the past, the target would have been the king, the dictator, the ruling class, and those who served them and upheld their rule. Politicians, officials, solders and policemen. Today, terrorists indiscriminately target whole societies. Irish bombers blasted communities of the rival faith, murdered shoppers, office workers, and pub patrons, as well as soldiers and policemen. Palestinian suicide bombers hit malls and pizza bars in city centres. ISIS, al Qa’ida and the Taliban detonate cars in busy city streets and publicly execute prisoners in callous and calculating “lectures in flesh” (the phrase is civil rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson’s, from his chilling account of the trials and execution of King Charles I of England and those who sentenced him, The Tyrannicide Brief.).

But targeted and random terrorism has a long historical pedigree. For centuries, it has been the desperate and nihilistic weapon of last resort of resistance and rebellion against perceived oppression and injustice, and against invaders and occupiers.

In the second century BCE Palestine, the Maccabees used assassination in their resistance to the Seleucid Greeks, and a century later, the Jewish zealots, the Sicarii, named for the easily concealed small daggers, paid the Romans in like coin, and ultimately in an insurrection that culminated in the destruction of Jerusalem in 70CE and the scattering of the Jewish race (giving history the emotive and symbolic last exit that was Masada). In an etymological irony that Mark Twain would have been proud of, the present unrest in Jerusalem, a large number of young Palestinians have perished in attempting to stab jewish soldiers and civilians. Their jaquerie is called the “Intifada Sakni-in”, the ‘Knife Uprising – an echo of those long-dead Sicarii “dagger men”.

Nowadays, one would be excused for thinking that “terrorism” and “terrorist” are synonymous with Arabs and Muslims. And a historical precedent reinforces this erroneous assumption. The Hashishan or “Assassins” of Middle East fame (yes, that is where that noxious noun originated) were Muslim men and boys mesmerized and mentored by Rashid ad Din as Sina-n, the “Old Man of the Mountain” (and all this, before Osama in the caves of Tora Bora), and were Twelfth Century  hit-men contracted out to rival Muslim princes in the internecine conflicts that plagued the Levant in the wake of the Crusades and the demise of the great Arab Caliphates.

But the assassin’s knife (and in modern times, the gun and bomb, and latterly cars and trucks) predates these medieval hoods and links the Hebrew rebels of old to the Irgun and Stern Gang who encouraged Britain and the UN to abandon Palestine in 1948, bequeathing most of it to the new state of Israel, and triggering the Palestinian diaspora. European anarchists and Irish rebels and loyalists were adept at shootings and ambushes. In Algeria, during the ‘fifties, the nationalist FLN and the “colon” OAS shot and bombed each other and those unfortunates caught in the crossfire. The IRA perfected the improvised explosive device that today has crippled thousands of American, Canadian, and Australian soldiers in Iraq abd in Afghanistan. Hindu Tamil separatists of Sri Lanka introduced the suicide bomber, an economical and efficient weapon against soft (civilian, that is) targets, deployed today by Islamist killers in the streets of London and Lahore, Damascus and Dar es Salaam, Jerusalem and Jakarta. Whilst Arabs – and particularly Palestinians may have given the world the hijacking of aircraft – a tactic that fell into disuse due to diminishing political returns and rapid response forces – other Arabs showed us how to fly them into public buildings as the whole world watched in horror and disbelief. The shockwaves of this one are still reverberating through the deserts of the east and the capitals of the western world.

In going up up against their occupiers, the Palestinians have an old heritage. In my old country, Boudicca and Caractacus fought a losing battle against the Romans in Britain during the First CE. The Roman historian Tacitus ascribed to a vanquished chieftain the memorable words  “solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant” – they make a desert and they call it peace. After the battle of Hastings in 1066, the defeated Saxons pushed back against the Normans and brought the genocidal wrath of William the Conqueror down on their heads with the devastating “Harrying of the North”. The Green Man and Robin Hood legends are said to be a retrospective and romanticised remembering of the Saxon resistance. Warrior fugitives from that failed guerilla war fled as far as Constantinple, where many joined the Emperor’s acclaimed Varangarian Guard, (see When Harald Went A Viking) 

In the streets and the countryside of Ireland, my parents’ birthplace, the United Irishmen, Fenians, Free Staters, IRA and Unionists fought against the redcoats, tommies, and black and tans of the British Army. Fought amongst themselves, fought against each other, and killed and were killed in their centuries long war of liberation. And in my adopted country, indigenous Australians fought a futile frontier war against settlers and soldiers just as native Americans did, albeit on a much smaller scale, and paid the price in hangings, massacres, poisoned wells, dispossession, marginalization, and “stolen children”. The legacy of those times lingers still – see The Frontier Wars – Australia’s heart of darkness.

In Central America, Juarez led the Mexicans against the French, and Sandino, Nicaraguans against US marines. Spaniards rose up against Napoleon’s forces, giving the world the word “guerilla”, or “little war”. Russian partisans ambushed the Grande Armé and the Wehrmacht. Throughout occupied Europe, the very term “resistance” became synonymous with the heroic unequal struggle against tyranny. In another of history’s ironies, muqa-wamat, Arabic word for resistance, unites sectarian rivals Hamas and Hizbollah against Israel.

And not just resistance to invasion and occupation, but also against oppression by one’s own rulers. Religious tracts tie themselves in knots reconciling the obligation to obey our rulers with the right to resist and overthrow those that rule badly. The unequal struggle against tyranny – or what is perceived by the perpetrators as tyranny – is the cause that inspires men and women to desperate acts.

The most celebrated in fact, film and fiction is the death of Julius Caesar at the hands of peers who feared that he intended to usurp the ostensibly democratic Republic (ostensible because democratic it was not) and institute one-man rule. That ended badly for the conspirators, and for Rome, as it precipitated years of civil war and ultimately, half a century of empire).

In 1880 the reforming Czar Alexander II of Russia, discovered the hard way that liberating the serfs did not inoculate himself against the bomb that took his legs and his life. His fearful and unimaginative successors hardened their hearts and closed their minds against further reform. setting in train the crackdown on dissent and democratic expression that led eventually to the storming of the Winter Palace on Petrograd in 1917. Narodnaya Volya, the killers called themselves – the People’s Will. And that is what terrorists do. They appeal and owe fealty to a higher court, a greater good, a savage God.

So it was when student and Serbian nationalist Gavril Princip assassinated Archduke Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary in June 1914 and ignited the spark that lit the conflagration of World War 1 which precipitated the demise of the old European empires.

So too when John Brown and his sons brought their broadswords to bear on slavers and their sympathizers and made a date with destiny at Harpers Ferry. Their famous raid may or may not have accelerated the downward slide to the secession and civil war that erupted the following year, but it provided a moral and symbolic prelude and also, the resonating battle hymn of the republic. John Wilkes Booth bookended this bloody era with his histrionic and public murder of Abraham Lincoln, shouting “sic semper tyrannis”, “thus always to tyrants,” attributed to Brutus at Caesar’s assassination – today, it’s the Virginia state motto. Brown and Booth were quite clear in their motives. As was were the segregationalist shooters who did for African Americans Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King. Less so were the killers of the Kennedy brothers in the sixties.

To conclude, sometimes that savage, rebel God is one of faith, sometimes, of blood and soil. In some instances, it is revenge for wrongs real and imagined – the reasons at times lost or forgotten through the passage of time and fading memories. And often, “the cause” is corrupted by the immoral economics of illicit commerce, including contraband, kidnapping, blackmail and extortion. Sometimes all merge in an incongruous hybrid of religious passion, ethic identity, libertarian or anarchistic fervour, and protection racket. As was the case in Northern Ireland, in Lebanon, in sub-Saharan Africa, and currently so in Syria and Iraq.

But most times, terror and turmoil is simply a political weapon planned, targeted and executed as a mechanism of regime change. Rebellion, revolt and revolution. Resisting, opposing, challenging, confronting and defeating the central authority. The seizing, holding, consolidation and keeping of political power.

And one thing is for sure. The outcome is unpredictable. History does not move in straight lines, but often follows a bitter and twisted path. Cliched as it is, the phrase “be careful what you wish for” is an apt one. And when, as Bob Dylan sang, “the line it is drawn, the curse it is cast”, there is no going back. To quote WB Yeats’ famous lines, “all is changed, changed utterly”.

Terrorism, then, can shift the course of history. If we were to stumble into the swamp of alternative histories, imagine what might of happened

If Caesar had walked home from the senate on the Ides of March
If Lincoln had been able to guide the Reconstruction
If the reforming Czar had introduced democratic government to Russia
If Gavril Princip’s shot had missed the archduke
If Kennedy had returned from Dallas
If John Lennon outlived George Harrison
If Yitzak Rabin had left the peace concert in Tel Aviv
If the Twin Towers stood still

To quote “Stairway to Heaven”, a curiously apposite title given the millenarian mindset of many terrorists, “Oh, it makes you wonder!”

Thermidorian Thinking … a revolutionary reverie

Paul Hemphill 7 Comments

I fought in the old revolution
on the side of the ghost and the King.
Of course I was very young
and I thought that we were winning;
I can’t pretend I still feel very much like singing
as they carry the bodies away.
Leonard Cohen, The Old Revolution

‘Thermidorian’ refers to 9th Thermidor Year II (27 July 1794), the date according to the French Republican Calendar, when Robespierre, Danton and other radical revolutionaries came under concerted attack in the National Convention, resulting in their downfall and execution.

Grim travelers butt each other to establish dominance. One lot plays Danton to another’s Robespierre, with the moderate Manon Roland and her Girondins trampled underfoot in the melee. On the scaffold, Madame Roland is said to have exclaimed “O Liberté! O Liberté! que de crimes on commet en ton nom”. Maximillian Robespierre destroys his erstwhile friends and slaughters thousands, precipitating the Jacobin meltdown as the ascetic and purist Marat is murdered in his bath. Robespierre and Saint-Just are guillotined by those who believe “the Terror” had gone too far, soon to be followed by fellow Jacobins Georges Danton and Camille Desmoulins. [Hilary Mantel’s excellent door-stop of a debut novel, A Place of Greater Safety, tells the story of all these revolutionaries. The bones of most of them rest amongst those of tens of thousands of others in the famously macabre Catecombes de Paris, a “tourist” attraction I highly recommend]

I would argue that this “Thermidorian Reaction” – the ostensibly “better angels of our nature” (Abraham Lincoln said that) reasserting themselves – is a rare bird indeed. Inevitably, things get worse, much worse, before they get better. As WH Auden observes in his sombre eclogue The Age  of Anxiety, “many have perished: more will”. 

Revolutions are unpredictable. They never run in straight lines. They reverberate, the shockwaves expanding and impacting on their vicinity, and way beyond. The shots ricochet, like drive-bys and crossfires, and you never know who will be hit, where the bullets will come to rest, and who will be damaged or destroyed. Many people will be liberated, and many enslaved. Many peoples will prosper, and many, many will perish. As TS Elliot wrote, “between the idea and the reality falls the shadow”.”

Stalin seizing Lenin’s crown as the father of the revolution lay dying. Trotsky launching the Red Army against the sailors of Kronstadt whose guns had heralded the fall of the Romanovs, and who then fought to last man against their former comrades. Stalin and Trotsky wrestling for control of party and power as the old Bolsheviks disappeared into the gulags and the execution cells. Stalin’s long arm putting an ice pick through his rival’s skull in Mexico decades later. Trotsky knew a thing or two about “permanent revolution. See Red and white terror – the Russian revolution and civil war and Stalin’s Great Terror

Adolf Hitler making his move against the corrupt and sybaritic Rohm and his Brown Shirt bully boys, a threat to his control of party and state, in the “Night of the Long Knives”, and setting the course for a Germany’s slow spiral to damnation with the plausible deniability of the similarly dramatically named Kristalnacht. The German language has surely given the world ominous words of iron, including Nacht und Nebel; Storm und Drang; Weltanschauung, Blitzkrieg and Schadenfreude – none of them boding well for tyranny’s unwelcome attentions.

It is a zero-sum play book well-thumbed by latter-day revolutionists like the Baathists Saddam Hussein and Hafiz Assad in their relentless and merciless accession to power in Iraq and Syria respectively, like the cruel and vengeful but infinitely pragmatic regime that has ruled Iran’s Islamic Republic for these past forty years, and the kleptocratic dictators who lord over much of Sub-Saharan Africa. In the manner of revolutions past and present, each one has “devoured its children”, harrying, jailing, exiling and slaughtering foes and onetime allies alike.

The sad reality in so many countries is that when the going gets tough, the mild get going, and the hard men ride roughshod over their people.

Vengeful, vindictive. Merciless. Unforgiving and never forgetting. Do no deals. Take no prisoners. Give no quarter.

Also in In That Howling Infinite:  A Political World – Thoughts and Themes

Bolshevik recruiting poster 1917

Danton, Robespierre, Desmoulin, and Manon Roland

Danton, Robespierre, Desmoulins, and Manon Roland

 

Solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant

Paul Hemphill 3 Comments

Why do countries like ours’ and those of Western Europe appear to have settled into peaceful political processes that manage a degree of continuity and stability, and others do not?

In countries where modern institutions are weak and poorly developed, and a democratic or participatory political culture based on consensus and power sharing has not had the time or the political, social and economic conditions to develop, older loyalties and obligations trump allegiance to the state and nation and respect for, or at least, acceptance of its institutions and processes. Countries like Syria and Iraq, and much of Africa, were in reality modern contrivances superimposed upon the wrecks of old empires. The cartographical design may have been determined by the presence of natural resources in such and such a place, or the location of a port or river, highway or mountain pass. And often, in wide tracts of desert or jungle, mountains or plains, lines were simply on drawn on maps from point to arbitrary point, sometimes with the agreement or collusion of a rival power or friendly local despot.

In lands such as these, loyalty and allegiance to family, clan, tribe, religious sect, and ethnic group held precedence over the fabricated state and its often transplanted institutions and processes. Patronage, nepotism, corruption, and a network of mutual favours and obligations smoothed the paths of people seeking or seizing benefits or appointments. Old ways were tried and true, compared to aspirations or pretensions to fair and open governance. Political parties which emerged on ostensibly western lines were no more than parochial political machines, whilst gerrymandering, branch-stacking, vote-rigging and even violence ensured electoral outcomes that favoured the powers that be.

The culture of dependence and obligation that characterized pre-modern societies in the West is still the norm in much the world. And it is replicated throughout society, from the humble street-vendor to city hall. Need a license? A school scholarship? A better job? A party post? Want to avoid a traffic fine? A law suit? A jail sentence? Money changes hands. Deals are done. Debts are incurred. And social and political relationships are established. And thus, the creaking wheels of bureaucracy and governance turn, driven by patronage and payola, often greased with cash and the threat or actual use of violence encourages the emergence of and tolerance for the zaim, the strong leader. That leader develops a sense of identification with the country – not in the sense of service, but that of ownership. Family, clan, kinship and sect obligations and entitlements cement the zaim – literally “boss” – in place, whist patronage and brutal security forces beholden to the elite ensure that he is not challenged. Hence the mukhabarat (literally, intelligence) keep watch on dissent and protest.

Once in power, it can be difficult for the autocrat to vacate his seat. Family interests, party, sect and ethnic ties, and economic imperatives, and fear of retribution should the patriarch depart, render it dangerous for what amounts to a family business to relinquish the keys to the kingdom, and the levers of power. As they say, he who rides a a tiger never can dismount. Hence in countries as diverse culturally and geographically as Syria, Zimbabwe, the Central African Republic, the central Asian ‘stans of the former Soviet Union, and North Korea, the “dear leader” is strongly encouraged to hang in there by his nearest and dearest.

This is indeed how societies and polities evolved and developed during Europe’s so-called Dark Ages in the wake of the collapse of the western Roman Empire. When authority fails, its place is taken by force. Today, we see it in many places around the world, especially in the Middle East and Africa, where social order is under constant attack from paramilitary thugs and religious fanatics, and violence is endemic. Any large, diverse society includes individuals who do not conform to the law. And it is said that some 10% of us have the potential to become psychopaths. When that society is in a state of breakdown, violence and the resort to force become widespread, these come into into their own as chieftains, warlords, robber barons, and pirate kings rule their parochial roost, commanding mercenaries, militias, and private armies. As the Bard wrote, “Take but order away and hark what discord follows”. Violence breeds violence, requiring a corresponding use of force by the state to maintain order. And if the initial, brutal crackdown fails to stifle dissent and rebellion, to borrow from Shakespeare again, the dogs of civil war are let lose, and all hell breaks loose. The Bard of Avon had his Henry declaim “Cry Havoc”, this being an old English war cry that signaled no quarter, and ensuing rape and pillage.

On the marches of civil wars, the bleeding edges of nations and empires collapse in on themselves like stars to create black holes where roam robber bands, death squads, militias, and drugged and indoctrinated child soldiers deal out death and destruction whilst trading variously in oil, diamonds, heroin, grass, guns, and people, extorting dollars and gold from locals and from foreign donors. Quantrill’s Raiders and Jim Lane’s Red Legs cut a swathe through “bloody Kansas” and Missouri. And other times and places have seen their sad share of jaywalkers and bushwhackers. Swedish and German mercenaries marched back and forth across a devastated Mitteleuropa during the Thirty Years War, just as Reds and Whites ranged and ravaged through Byelorussia and Ukraine during the civil war that followed the Russian Revolution. The dying decades of the Twentieth Century saw this in Bosnia, Chechnya and Afghanistan. And it prevails today in Syria and Iraq, Libya and Yemen, Afghanistan and Africa.

And so, and as clear and present example, to suffering, sad Syria.

Following in Father's Footsteps, Following Dear Old Dad

Following in Father’s Footsteps, Following Dear Old Dad

Bashar al Assad inherited this patrimony from his father Hafez. He was a reluctant ruler, not expecting to take charge. The heir apparent was his brother, a fast-living hedonist who died in a car crash. He did endeavour to bring about gradualist change in Syria. I saw changes whenever I visited Damascus.

This was not to suggest that Syria was an Arab utopia. There was a large divide between town and country, exacerbated by a a long and ongoing drought that forced many rural folk to migrate to the rundown fringes of the major towns, adding to pressures on resources, housing and employment. Whilst in practice a secular, multi-faith and multi-ethnic society, there was a cultural and spiritual divide between the conservative, Islamic rural communities and a more secular-minded urban middle class. The country was ruled for near on fifty years by a family and elite drawn from a particular, minority sect, which sat atop a pyramid of nepotism, patronage and corruption. And that rule was upheld by a cruel and efficient secret police and military special forces that kept a proactive watch on dissent. There was definitely an air of anxiety and caution amongst those who aspired to a more liberal Syria, with the midnight knock on the door, arbitrary arrest, and detention in one of the regime’s many political prisons being a fact of political life in this secular, socialist country.

But on the other hand, Syria was almost self-sufficient in food and oil products. It had well resourced and efficient health and secular education systems, and a flourishing arts scene. As a nation, Syrians were a tolerant and welcoming people, and within the bounds of religious propriety and political caution, freedom of worship, of expression, of lifestyle, and even of discreet gender preference were given. In the narrow streets of the Old City of Damascus, Thursday night, the eve of the Muslim holy day, was a fairy land of lights and laughter. Courting couples hand in hand, girls in hijab and uncovered alike; families promenading in their “Sunday best”; young goths with spiky hair and black makeup, short skirts and tight jeans. Busy stalls and sweetshops, crowded, street-side cafes – the famous Damascene maqha – or coffee shops.

Foreign observers, friendly and hostile, have noted how well-dressed and cashed-up the refugees flooding into Eastern Europe appear to be. The reality is that these are Syria’s middle class. By local metrics, they were comparatively well-off, and had a strong work ethic and a high wages to savings ratio. These were, and are Syria’s future.

Syrians were genuinely proud of their country, of its status as a centre of Arab culture and Arab nationalism, and of its history. And of its priceless archeological heritage. The Roman cities of Apamea, Palmyra, and Bosra; the Crusader castles of Krak de Chevaliers and Salah ud Din; the Byzantine monastery St.Simeon; the Umayyad mosques of Aleppo and Damascus; the Christian villages of Maaloula and Saidnaya where Aramaic is still spoken; the ancient suqs of Aleppo and Damascus. Syria was a historian’s idea of heaven.

When the revolution broke out, sympathetic commentators wondered whether Bashar would be “Hammersmith Man”, a reference to his former career as a ophthalmologist in London, where he lived for many years with his gorgeous, well connected, merchant banker wife and children, or “Hama Man”, recalling his father’s brutal crackdown on an Islamist revolt in that city in 1981 where in some thirty thousand souls perished at the hands of security forces. In the end, Junior was swept along by the elite’s blinkered but well-tried survival mechanism – force and fear.

Back in the heady days of the Arab Spring, Syrians from all ethic, religious and political groups hoped for a loosening of authoritarian controls. But the regime resorted to form and to repression. Sectarian militias murdered and mutilated initiating a cycle of bloody vengeance as a popular, peaceful and largely secular movement became militarized, polarized, in many areas, Islamized, and as internal and external interests with varying political, religious, and geopolitical motives became involved and embroiled against the regime, against the rebels, against each other. Regular forces, militias, warlords, village defense forces, Kurdish separatists, foreign fighters, mercenaries, foreign air forces, undercover operatives. A war of all against all, as Thomas Hobbes once said. To paraphrase Mark Twain, history might not repeat itself, but it certainly rhymes.

And now, whilst most of the antagonists have been herded by their foreign patrons towards a crowded and reluctant negotiating table, it all seems like a terminal case of “too little too late”. Syria is in ruins, some half a million Syrian are dead, and countless more maimed.and it its population is scattered, weighing heavily on the consciences and economies of neighbours and of the European Union. Syria as a nation state may in fact be no more. There is talk of partition, and a redrawing of the map that emerged from the peace treaties of The Great War. And the odds are that with Russian military support, Bashar al Assad, bete noir, pariah, lame-duck to those governments who wished him gone, and his Iranian and Hizbollah allies, are going to win the civil war.

He may or may not succeed. Right now, his forces are pushing back the rebels, writing himself a pivotal part in the peace. Right now, the parties talk and walk whilst the killing continues, and the diaspora grows. International forums are but talking shops, stages for self-righteous and self-aggrandizing  posturing and stotting, acrimonious gatherings that appear to function in a time bubble that is remote from the brutal reality. If and when the guns fall silent, Bashar may or may not be able to put the country back together. He may or may not be able to recreate the multi-faith, modernizing, cosmopolitan society that existed before the war. He may or may not be able to disarm the hundreds of militias and private armies that have proliferated and even prospered during five years of chaos.

He will need billions of dollars and the help and goodwill of many nations to rebuild the towns and cities, and to restore the shattered archeological heritage. He will never bring back the dead, or the skilled and educated exiles who will chose to make new lives in foreign places of greater safety. Nor will he be able to repatriate the thousands of plundered artifacts and treasures that have disappeared into the international black market. He will not be able to heal the wounds, give solace to the bereaved, assuage the grief, counsel and treat the trauma, and divert the desire for vengeance into the promethean labour of reconstruction.

Putting his own words into the mouth of a conquered British chieftain, an old Roman once said, “solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant” –  they make a desert and they call it peace.

See also:

Sic semper tyrannis

Thermidorian Thinking

Syrian Streetscape

Syrian Streetscape

Zaatari Rrefugee Camp, Jordan

Zaatari Rrefugee Camp, Jordan

The Children of the Revolution

Paul Hemphill 2 Comments

I finally broke into the prison,
I found my place in the chain.
Even damnation is poisoned with rainbows,
all the brave young men
they’re waiting now to see a signal
which some killer will be lighting for pay.
Into this furnace I ask you now to venture,
you whom I cannot betray.
Leonard Cohen, The Old Revolution

The Syrian civil war broke lose in March 2011, two months after the events in Tahrir Square, and one month after the fall of Mubarak.

Amidst the tumult and media hype of the Arab Spring, it was as if the distant drums had suddenly hit the volume switch. In the dusty border town  of Dara’a, just north of Jordan, local kids wrote on a wall: “The people want the regime to fall”. The words had been repeated from Tunisia to Egypt, from Yemen to Bahrain. It was the cry of the revolution. The local governor decided to come down hard. The young people, all under 17, were thrown in jail. The punishment stunned the town, and suddenly, Syria, progressive, diverse, proud, beautiful, but authoritarian Syria greeted the misnamed Arab Spring.

The young men’s families and friends weren’t having any of it. It is said that in broad daylight, dozens of young men pelted a poster of a smiling President Bashar Assad; a statue of the Bashar’s  late father and predecessor Hafiz Assad was demolished; and official buildings, including the HQ of ruling Ba’ath Party’ and the governor’s office, were destroyed. “There is no fear, there is no fear, after today there is no fear!” hundreds of men chanted in shaky mobile-phone footage.

Over that weekend, security forces opened fire on marchers. This was the regime’s well tried negotiating technique. But Assad responded immediately, sending a high-ranking delegation to deliver his condolences to the families of the dead. The governor was sacked, and the boys released.

So far, so “I mentioned the war but I think I got away with it” But the die had been cast. The demonstrators made demands the regime was unwilling or unable to meet. And the rest is tragedy.

I am not about to retell the story of the Syrian revolution. It is still being written, and as yet, there is no ending. Only more blood. As I write, well over three hundred thousand souls have perished (soon, it will overtake the butchers bill of the Spanish and American Civil Wars), and tens of thousands have disappeared into prisons and oubliez. Millions have been displaced within the country; millions have sought shelter in neighbouring countries; and at least eight hundred thousand have taken to the roads of Central Europe.

But I will quixotically hark back to just before events reached the fork in the road, to when there was an outside chance that Syria could avoid the chaos and carnage that was besetting other children of an Arab Spring that was turning into a bitter winter.

Back to the days before The Fall when pundits were asking whether Bashar would be Hammersmith Man, reflecting his former career as a successful ophthalmologist in London, and his glamorous, cosmopolitan, former merchant banker wife, or Hama Man, recalling his father’s crackdown on an Islamist rising in Hama in 1982, in which uncounted tens of thousand are believed to have perished. We discovered very soon whom he was destined to become.

To the days before The Fall, before the revolution became weaponized and islamized, and demonstrators danced together in the streets, earning the intifada the short lived sobriquet ‘the Dabke Revolution’, named for the circle folk dance popular throughout the Middle East and the Balkans.

image

The days before the slaughters began. First by the forces of regime, led by Bashar’s brutal brother Maher and his notorious Fourth Armoured Division. Then by the thuggish Alawi militia – the Shabiha, or “ghosts” or “shadows”, a double-edged meaning alluding to their underworld origin and methods, and also to the fact that they literally turned people into ghosts. And then, in reciprocal ferocity, by opposition militias that grew and proliferated, fought and died, divided, and divided again, and embraced a jihadi creed, sowing the dragon’s teeth that evolved into Jabhat an Nusra and Da’esh.

The days before it became too dangerous to gather on the streets, when men, women and children would parade in public places, waving the flag of the old Syria, the one that flew before the Assad clan seized power in 1966. Canny camera men could take media-friendly shots of photogenic little girls in face makeup looking sad, vulnerable and defiant. When the picture that is the featured image of this blog was first published in Al Jazeera in early 2011, I was both enchanted and inspired. I immediately started using it, with acknowledgements, in my publications and postings. When more and more of these images appeared, I used them too. But I was becoming a tad suspicious. The lasses looked too clean, too cute, and indeed, many actually looked alike. The photographers’ daughters, perhaps, or those of friends. Were they for-real or where they posed? I guess I will never find out.

Needlessly to say, as the rebellion morphed into harrowing civil war, such images disappeared, and in their place, we saw destruction and carnage, and the broken bodies of little girls and boys slain by bomb and bullet, hardship and hunger. Now, as families were forced to abandon their homes and make their way to the borders, and thence, into Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey, and finally, into Europe, we see children staggering on dusty roads, carried piggy back by exhausted fathers, pushed in strollers, scorched by the sun, soaked by the rain, and frozen by the snow. And we see little Aylan on his golden beach, a Kurdish toddler now a symbol of all the drowned babies of the Mediterranean and the Aegean Sea.

Photogenic children no more. Just victims, survivors, lost souls.

I fought in the old revolution
on the side of the ghost and the King.
Of course I was very young
and I thought that we were winning;
I can’t pretend I still feel very much like singing
as they carry the bodies away.
Into this furnace I ask you now to venture…
you whom I cannot betray.

See also, Bombs and Babies

Children of the Revolution

On a personal note, we were last in Syria in March 2009, and whilst visiting the famed Roman amphitheater at Bosra, just northeast of Dera’a, we had the pleasure of the company of a crowd of Syrian school children. They treated us like visiting celebrities and sang us a song of welcome. It is saddening to look at these pictures now, and wonder where these children are now.

Bosra Bosra 2

 

Bosra

Hejira

Paul Hemphill 5 Comments

You know it never has been easy
Whether you do or you do not resign
Whether you travel the breadth of extremities
Or stick to some straighter line
Joni Mitchell, Hejira

People’ll tell you where they’ve gone
They’ll tell you where to go
But till you get there yourself you’ll never really know
Where some have found their paradise
Other’s just come to harm
Oh Amelia it was just a false alarm
Joni Mitchell, Amelia

How sweet it is to learn new things – to walk new streets, to look through new windows. Working lately as a volunteer with the Humanitarian Settlement Services progrmme,  I have had that opportunity. The HSS’ mission is to assist newly arrived refugees to settle in Australia, participate in our way of life,  access services available to us all, and to develop the skills and knowledge needed to begin a new life in our country. The  following  pieces recall two days in my volunteer life. They are a sequel of sorts, and indeed, a happy ending to my recent post No Going Home in which I endeavored to imagine the refugee journey.  

Hejira is an Arabic word that commemorates specifically  the flight of Muhammad from Mecca to Medina in 622.  But it also refers to any emigration or flight, and this is the context here.

Arrival

I wait at our tiny  airport for an Afghani family coming to Australia from a refugee camp on the Pakistani border. They have come here straight from Iran with but a short transit in Sydney. The plane is a little QANTAS Dash 8, and the passengers walk down the gangplank. The day is hot. Young girls in short shorts and skivvies disembark, and young men in shorts, tees and thongs (the sandals, that is). There a few suited businessmen, and retirees in nondescript array.

Our new arrivals are last off. Mum and two teenage sons. She wears a hijab and Iranian dress,, and the boys, jeans and tee shirts. They step onto the hot tarmac and walk, tired and nervous, to the arrivals lounge. We are with the welcoming party – a family of Afghanis who settled here a short while ago, two young girls, their mother and their auntie. They too are dressed in salwar kameez – they came here from a  camp in Pakistan. The ladies dwelt there for twelve years, and the girls were born there.

A young Hazara serves as our interpreter. She is dressed like a fashionable Iranian muhajibabe in simple and smart attire – for it is indeed Iran that she and he family sought shelter from the Afghan storm. She is eighteen, and arrived with her mother and siblings two years ago. Her English is excellent – she wants to be an interpreter, and is working towards that goal at TAFE. And this is the thing. These folk have all come here on 204 visas for women at risk, the sole carers of dependent families. Their husbands are either dead or decamped in Afghanistan or in the border camps.

And then there are we three Aussies. The tireless Humanitarian Settlement Service caseworker, a lady from community services who wanted to witness an arrival, and myself, working for the HSS as a volunteer, likewise bearing witness to what is quite a powerful scene.

The meeting and the greeting is done with salaams, embraces (the Afghanis) and handshakes (we locals). The first minutes in their new home in the sun. I help the lads load the suitcases on to the bus, and my work done, I bid them all “khoda hafez” and take my leave. They are driven off to their new digs, an Afghan meal, the first of much paperwork, and then sleep.

But not before they are taken to the headland, from where they will view the Pacific Ocean to the east, hills covered in banana plantations to the west, and beyond them, below the cloudless blue sky, the blue-green foothills of the Great Dividing Range. On the other side, far to the northwest, their landlocked, shattered  home is 11,353 kilometers away.

Moving

Our mission today is to move a Hazara family from their first, interim dwelling, to a permanent home on the other side of town. A mother with four children. Three of these are at school today, and the eldest, a sparky eleven year old, has stayed home to help mom move house and help us with translation. Although she has been in Australia for just six months, her English is astonishing. She later tells me she can speak five Afghan languages, Urdu, and a bit of Hindi. Nothing is going to hold this one back.

Their bags and boxes are ready, and these fill the bus. So off we all go to their new home. Two Afghani neighbours greet us on  arrival, with two young girls and a tiny boy. Three ethnic groups, three languages, and two religions, and they are getting along famously.

“Why do you think that is?” asks the caseworker. “Because there are no men around”. No men. No controllers. No patriarchy. No rules. No tribes. No prejudice.

 In Sydney, in Melbourne, with the larger Afghan and Muslim communities, with the mosques and madrassas, imams and ideologies, the self-appointed and self-perpetuating mullahs and muftis, male control would be asserted, with their restrictive rules and regimentation. All the old baggage that was left behind would be brought in and unpacked – the tribal loyalties and enmities, the specious theological diktats on dress and demeanor, form and function. And the patriarchy.

But not here, in this northern, sea-side town. Just women doing their best to get along and make the new life work for themselves and their children.

What will the future hold for these women taken out of their homes, their culture, their society, and asked to craft a new life and identity for themselves and their children in a new and strange land? How will they go with the language and with life in general? Will they make new friends, find rewarding work, and “fit in”,  or will they cling to their old lives, lonely and isolated, their children the sole interface between themselves and the world?

I wonder about the young girls – and particularly the bright and outward-going ones I have met. Will they build successful school and professional careers? Will they make long and lasting friendships with their Australian and other peers?  Will they let go the costumes, conventions, and constrictions of their parents’ culture?

I wonder about the young boys, and the young men whom I greeted at the airport. How will they fare in their matriarchal domestic world? How will they adjust to their new life here with all its challenges and temptations?

If they remain in this regional city, who will be their role models? Will they become more Australian than Afghani as they grow up and mature among their north coast peers? Will they complete their education, and find work in an area with a very high level of youth unemployment? Or will they be isolated and lonely, dislocated and discontented? Will they assume their old culture’s patriarchal role and demand their mothers and sisters subject themselves to the son’s authority as head of the family, and impose restrictions their movements and morality, demeanor and dress?

Will they be drawn to the capital cities with their diverse Muslim communities. And into which circle will they be drawn? To the moderate ones who just want to get on with their lives in an Aussie world, to the pious and unassuming who see jihad as an internal spiritual quest, to the criminal and bikie gangs that we hear so much about, or to the radical proselytizers who view our culture and values as anathema to the word and will of God?

All this is in the future, and as these folk might say, in Gods hands. But in reality, it is in their’s and their’s alone. But I am glad to have been able to play a small part in setting these new arrivals on their path.

see also: No Going Home