The 25th April is Anzac Day, Australia’s national day of remembrance, honouring Aussies and Kiwis who perished in foreign wars from South Africa to Afghanistan. It takes its name from the ill-fated Gallipoli campaign – on this day in the spring time of 1915, Australian and New Zealand soldiers landed under heavy fire from Ottoman forces entrenched in the heights above what was later to be called Anzac Cove on Turkey’s Gallipoli peninsula.
The Anzacs were just part of a wider campaign devised by British Secretary of the Navy Winston Churchill to knock The Ottoman Empire out of the war with one decisive blow by seizing the strategic Dardanelles Strait and occupying Istanbul, the capital. It do not go well. The Ottoman soldiers commanded by Mustafa Kamal Pasha, the future founder of modern Turkey, Kamal Atatürk, held the high ground and fought stubbornly and bravely, and ultimately, victoriously.
The bloodshed ended in stalemate. The Allies withdrew eight months later leaving behind over eight thousand dead Australians and nearly three thousand New Zealanders (along with over thirty thousand English, Irish, and Frenchmen, Indians and North Africans, and close on ninety thousand Ottoman soldiers, Turks and Arabs, Muslims and Christians), without, historians say, having had any decisive influence on the course of the First World War.
Whenever we visit Israel, our friend and guide Shmuel of Israel Tours drives us all over tiny beautiful and vibrant country (travelling through the West Bank, we use Palestinian guides). During the pandemic year, most Israelis had been locked down three times and like in many countries, the all-important tourist trade barely has registered a pulse. When permitted to travel beyond his home in Jerusalem, Shmuel has spent the year exploring and learning, visiting places he has never guided to before. He believes that he has exited the plague year a better guide, and we are already making plans for our next Israel adventure, including recently excavated Herodian palaces and further travel in the Negev Desert.
Shmuel recently told me that he had visited Tel Sheva, Tel as Sabi’ in Arabic, in the Negev, five kilometres east of the city of Beer Sheva, a site inhabited since the fourth millennium BC. The ancient fortified town dates from the early Israelite period, around the tenth century BC. The walls, homes, storage warehouses and water reservoir system have been excavated and opened to the public. Today, Tel as Sabi’ s also known as the first of seven Bedouin townships established in the Negev as part of the Israeli government’s policy to plant the once-nomadic Bedouin permanent settlements.
It was from the foot of this stark desert hill that the Light Horse Brigade launched its famous charge towards the Ottoman lines at the strategic rail-head and wells of Beersheva on October 31st 2017.
Today, it is the ninth (not seventh) stop on The Anzac Trail which traces the route of the Light Horse Brigade from Gaza on the Mediterranean coast to Beer Sheva. For obvious reasons, it begins beyond Gaza’s wire and concrete encirclement and trail culminates at the Anzac Memorial Centre In Beer Sheva, inaugurated on the 100th anniversary of the battle.
Tel as Sabi’ to Tarkeeth
As we commemorate Anzac Day this Sunday, few folk in Bellingen Shire would know that there is a link between that hill in the heart of the Negev and Tarkeeth on the north bank of the Kalang River just six kilometres west of Urunga as the crow flies.
In A Tale of Twin Pines, the first of our Small Stories, I wrote of how researching the history of the Urunga area where we live, I came 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 Uncle Tom Kelly motorway bridge over the Kalang River. Click here to access TwinPinesStory.pdf
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 a deceased estate for a thousand pounds. Chris was impressed by the two mature hoop 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 until he had sufficient land and capital to run cattle. In time, he built up a prosperous dairy business and cattle stud where he and his wife Laura, a Sydneysider from a well-to-do Vaucluse family, raised their three children. The house has long gone, but the two magnificent pines are still there.
On October 31st 1917, Chris Fell and his comrades in the New Zealand Mounted Infantry fought on Tel as Sabi’.
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 campaign 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 Tel al Saba, east of the strategic desert town Beersheba.
The strong position the Ottomans had established on the hill was a key obstacle to the conquest of the town and the ANZACs had to seize it before storming Beersheva itself. The Ottoman soldiers fought valiantly, and it was only at around 3 p.m. that the fighters of the New Zealand Brigade, primarily the Auckland regiment, succeeded in capturing the hill in a face-to-face battle. 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.
“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”
Major-General Harry Chauvel, the ANZAC commander faced a dilemma. The light was fading and there wasn’t enough time to properly regroup to assault the town. An unsuccessful attack would mean withdrawing far to the south, whilst delaying ng the attack until morning would deny him the element of surprise and and also give the Turks time to destroy the town’s vital wells. He decided to attack, and assigning the the mission to the Australian 4th Light Horse Brigade.
Epilogue
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. We visited it in May 2016. 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”
Of our elaborate plans, the end Of everything that stands, the end No safety or surprise, the end
Jim Morrison
For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son. John 3:16
The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918 saw an end to four years of carnage on the western front and the end of of the First World War. The armies were demobbed and men went home to lives that were changed utterly: British and French, Austrian and German, Belgian and Italian, Serbs and Bulgarians, Turks and Arabs, and also, soldiers from across the ocean – Americans and Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders, South Africans and Indians. Friends and foes.
The victors retired to a restless peace, but the vanquished, Germany, Austria, and Hungary, descended into revolution and civil war for a time as gangs of former soldiers fought on the left and the right. In eastern Europe, the crumbling of empires, the Russian revolution, civil war and the struggle to establish the borders of newly established states meant that armed violence continued, leaving deep scars and bitterness that many ways set the stage for the autocracies of the 1930s and further bloodshed.
The Polish-Soviet war lasted until 1921. The Russian Civil War, ending in 1923, raged across most of today’s Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova and the Baltic region. British, Australian, American and French soldiers were dispatched to Murmansk and Archangel to fight the Red Army; Poles fought Ukrainians and Lithuanians, and defeated the Soviets at the gates of Warsaw; pogroms were perpetrated against Jews just as they had been for years, decades, centuries prior, accelerating , with subsequent consequence, Aliyah to Palestine.
The Greek-Turkish war of 1919-1922, which saw the Greeks, with British and French support, endeavouring to seize Constantinople, led to terrible massacres, and a forced exchange of populations that uprooted one and a half million Greeks and Turks from towns and villages they had occupied for a millennium. Armies marched back and forth across the Great European Plain, bringing devastation and starvation and destroying millions of lives. Central Asia, the lands now covered by the once Soviet ‘’stans likewise became battlegrounds for Reds, Whites and local warlords.
And in ‘John Bull’s Other Island’, as expat GBS Shaw called it, a “terrible beauty was born” – WB Yeats’ exquisite words – the doomed intifada that was the rebellion of Easter 1916, launched, opportunistically yet quixotically whilst English eyes were elsewhere, led exponentially into open rebellion, a qualified victory, and a civil war and partition that rested, roused and then resurrected in Derry in 1968 and decades termed somewhat innocuously ‘The Troubles’.
For some, there was light at the end of the terrible territorial tunnel. Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Finns, Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians, achieved statehood, or the restoration of nationhood, as did, fleetingly, Ukrainians, Armenians and Azerbaijanis. Poland reappeared on the map after over a century of having been carved up by empires. Hungarians lost two-thirds of their territory and more than half of their population. “Little” Serbia, which had ignited the Balkan powder keg in 1914, with Gavril Princip’s famous shot that ricocheted through complacent, twitchy and mightily armed Europe, was united with its Slav but religiously fractured Balkan neighbours in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia – and we now know how well that worked out.
Beyond Europe too, a bitter ‘Peace’ sowed dragon’s teeth. Last year, we commemorated the centenaries of the infamous Sykes Picot Agreement, the first draft of a colonial dispensation that established borders that remained unchallenged until Da’ish assaulted the status quo in 2014, and the Balfour Declaration, which set in train the rise and rise of the state of Israel and the long descent of Palestinian hopes for a land of their own. Ironically, the most militant Zionist pioneers and later, soldiers, terrorists and statesmen, emigrated from Poland and the Tsarist empire. These many legacies resonate today.
The end of WW1 saw the destruction of the Ottoman Empire and left Britain in control of Palestine and Mesopotamia. The peace conferences that followed led to the creation of modern Turkey, and, though for decades under French and British colonial rule, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Jordan. The Kurds turned up at the conference table but were denied a seat and thereafter, a state.
The war changed more than maps, frontiers and regimes. The needs of modern warfare brought women into the workforce, galvanizing the movements that won them the vote in many democracies. The pace of technological change already underway in industrialized countries was quickened by the demands of war, and advances in land transportation and aviation continued exponentially, as did the development of weaponry, together with the insatiable demand for fossil fuels. Economic privation precipitated the first successful Communist revolution and many failed ones, whilst the peace, resentments, reparations, and recession prompted many to turn to far-right authoritarians in Italy and then Germany. The mass movements of populations helped spread the deadliest epidemic the world has ever known: the 1918 influenza virus or Spanish Flu, which quietly killed possibly up to a hundred million souls – more than both world wars combined.
In the last decades of the Twentieth Century, historians would observe with the benefit of hindsight how the Second World War rose ineluctably from the ashes of the first, just as the division of Europe and the Soviet enslavement (and I say this as a lifelong leftist) of those Eastern European countries that emerged after 1918 led to the Europe of today, and as the peoples of the Middle East reaped the whirlwinds of both conflagrations. Many look back on the tumultuous decades that followed the Great War, and sensing signals and signposts in contemporary temporal tea leaves, advise is to be afraid, be very afraid.
We like to identify patterns in history that help us understand and explain our contemporary world. But we should exercise caution. To continue the hindsight riff, remember that things we see in the rear view mirror appear closer than they really are. The world is very much different today, as is our knowledge, our perception, our hopes and fears, and so also, our prognostications and expectations. If we can do it all over again, we’ll do it differently, and much more dangerously and destructively. Having learned so much, we have, one fears, understood so little.
As we remember that moment in Western Europe and the Levant when the guns at last fell silent, let us contemplate melancholy mathematics of the human toll poignantly described by American economist and academic Patrick Chovanec in a fine article in the New York Review of Books, which I have reproduced below:
“In the Great War itself, over sixteen million people died, including almost seven million civilians. The US got off relatively lightly, with 117,465 people killed, just 0.13 percent of its population. In Serbia, somewhere between 17 and 28 percent of the country’s population was killed. But even numbers like these leave little concrete impression on our minds … people would (tell) me about a grandfather or great-uncle who fought and died in the war, and is forever twenty-four-years old in some field in France, or Turkey, or Italy, or at sea. For most people, that absence is what defined the war: someone left and never came home. The world that they shaped, by their presence and their absence, is the one that we live in, whether we realize it or not. And we, like them, can only grope our way forward, day by day, into an unknown future”.
Gavrilo Princip arrested after his assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, Sarajevo, June 28, 1914
Four years ago, I went to war. Like many of the people whose stories I followed in my daily “live-tweets” on World War I, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. What began as an impulsive decision to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of Austrian Archduke Ferdinand’s death at the hands of a Serbian assassin, in June 1914, snowballed into a blood-soaked odyssey that took me—figuratively and literally—from the rolling hills of northern France, to the desert wastes of Arabia, to the rocky crags of the Italian Alps, to the steel turret of a rebel cruiser moored within range of the czar’s Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, Russia. And like the men and women who actually lived through it, now that the Great War is ending I find myself asking what, if anything, I’ve learned from it all.
In the American mind, World War I typically occupies an unimpressive place as a kind of shambolic preamble to the great good-versus-evil crusade of World War II, a pointless slugfest in muddy trenches for no worthy purpose, and no worthwhile result. Its catchphrases—“The War to End All Wars,” “Make the World Safe for Democracy”—evoke a wry and knowing chuckle. As if. But the war I encountered, as it unfolded day by day, was far more relevant, passionate, and unpredictable.
Posting daily newspaper clippings and photographs, found mainly in books and online archives, I began to see the Great War as a kind of portal between an older, more distant world—of kings with handlebar mustaches, splendid uniforms, and cavalry charges—and the one that we know: of planes and tanks, mass political movements, and camouflage. It snuffed out ancient monarchies in czarist Russia, Habsburg Austria, and Ottoman Turkey, and gave birth to a host of new nations—Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine, Armenia, Azerbaijan—that, in their struggles to survive and carve out an identity, continue to shape our world today. The British declared their intent to create a national homeland in Palestine for the Jews.
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Russian infantry marching to battle, Poland, August 1914
The needs of the war brought women into the workforce, and helped win them the right to vote. The huge privations it inflicted triggered the world’s first (successful) Communist revolution, and the frustrations it unleashed prompted many, afterward, to turn to far-right authoritarians in Italy and then Germany. And finally—though many have forgotten it—the comings and goings of people caused by the war helped spread the deadliest epidemic the world has ever known: the 1918 influenza virus, which quietly killed an estimated 50–100 million human beings in their homes and in hospitals, more than both world wars combined.
I also encountered a cast of characters more varied and amazing than I thought possible. Rasputin, the dissolute Russian mystic who warned Czar Nicholas that going to war would destroy his dynasty, and was murdered in part because he was (falsely) suspected as a German agent. The Austrian Emperor Karl, who inherited a war he didn’t want, and tried fruitlessly to make peace. T.E. Lawrence, a scholarly young intelligence officer whose affinity for the Arabs helped turn them to the Allied cause, and shaped the modern Middle East. Mata Hari, a Dutch-born exotic dancer who played double-agent, seducing high-ranking Allied and German officers for valuable information, until she was caught and shot by the French as a spy.
Some of the names are familiar, and offer hints of future greatness—or infamy. A young anti-war journalist named Benito Mussolini, sensing the way the wind blows, changes his tune and aggressively advocates for Italy to enter the war, before signing up himself. A young Charles De Gaulle is wounded at Verdun and taken prisoner for the rest of the conflict. A relatively young Winston Churchillplans the disastrous Gallipoli Campaign and pays his penance by serving in the trenches, before making a political comeback. A young Harry S. Truman serves as an artillery officer on the Western Front, alongside (and outranked by) a young George C. Marshall (his future Army Chief of Staff and Secretary of State) and Douglas MacArthur (his future general in the Pacific and Korea). A young George S. Patton develops a fascination with tanks. A young Walt Disney doodles cartoons on the side of the ambulances he drives, in the same unit as a young Ray Kroc (the founder of McDonald’s). Another young ambulance driver, Ernest Hemingway, finds inspiration on the Italian Front for his novel A Farewell to Arms. A young Hermann Göring (later head of the Luftwaffe) becomes a dashing flying ace, while a young Erwin Rommel wins renown fighting at Verdun and in the Alps. Meanwhile, an odd young German corporal, who volunteered in the very first days of the war, is blinded by poison gas in its final days, and wakes up in hospital to the bitter news that Germany has lost. His name is Adolf Hitler.
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French troops under shellfire during the Battle of Verdun, 1916
The dramatic panoply of people, places, and events, however, only occasionally rises to the fore. For the most part, the war is a steady stream of ordinary people doing ordinary things: washing their clothes, attending a concert, tallying supplies, fixing a car. History books give us a distorted sense of time, because they fast forward to major events. A day may take a chapter, a month may be passed over in a sentence. In fact, there were periods where nothing much happened—plans were being made, troops trained, supplies positioned—and when you live-tweet, you experience that waiting. Sometimes, it led to intriguing surprises, like photographs of dragon dances performed by some of the 140,000 Chinese laborers brought over to France to lend muscle to the Allied war effort. Mostly, it was a matter of endurance. Each winter, the fighting came to almost a complete stop as each country hunkered down and hoped its food would last. The “turnip winter” of 1916–1917, when the potato crop failed, nearly broke Germany; the increasingly desperate craving for “bread and peace” did break Russia the following year.
The future president Herbert Hoover made his reputation by coordinating food relief shipments to German-occupied Belgium, and later as the US “food czar” ensuring Allied armies and populations were fed. The vast mobilization was effective: by 1918, the Allies were able to relax their food rationing, while Germany and its confederates, strangled by an Allied naval blockade, were on the verge of starvation. America’s war effort was accompanied by a vast expansion in the federal government’s power and reach. It nationalized (temporarily) the railroads and the telephone lines. It set prices for everything from sugar to shoes, and told motorists when they could drive, workers when they could strike, and restaurants what they could put on their menus. It seized half a billion dollars of enemy-owned property, including the brand rights to Bayer aspirin, and sold them at auction. The US government also passed espionage and sedition laws that made it illegal to criticize the war effort or the president. Some people were sent to prison for doing so, including the Socialist Party leader Eugene V. Debs, who ran for president for a fifth and final time from a cell.
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A woman munitions worker operating a machine in an armaments factory, Britain, circa 1915
Winning the war, however, was far from a sure thing. For three years, the Allies threw themselves against an evenly-matched enemy on the Western Front, without making any breakthroughs, while the Eastern Front gradually crumbled. An early Allied foray to take out Turkey, at Gallipoli in 1915, ended in bloody disappointment. Inducing Italy to enter the war on the Allies’ side, that same year, was supposed to swing the entire conflict in their favor; instead, the catastrophic Italian rout atCaporetto, in the autumn of 1917, put the Allied effort in greater jeopardy. When Lenin seized power in Russia, at the end of 1917, he took it immediately out of the war and ceded immense land and resources to German control. True, the US had by then entered the war, in response to Germany’s submarine campaign against merchant ships and its clumsy diplomatic scheming in Mexico. But with the war in the East essentially won, the Germans saw a window in which they could shift all of their armies to the West and crush the exhausted British and French before enough American troops could arrive to make a difference. Their spring offensive, or “Kaiser’s Battle,” in early 1918 drove deep into Allied lines, prompting the French government to evacuate Paris.
The Germans’ big roll of the dice failed. The Allies held, and the US mobilized much faster than anyone expected. By the summer of 1918, a perceptible change had taken place. Hundreds of thousands of American troops were arriving every month at French ports, and their first units were taking part in battles, piecemeal at first, to push the Germans back. Even in September, however, nearly everyone expected the war to continue into 1919. That was when a huge US army of 3 million men would be ready to take part in a big Allied offensive that would drive all the way to Berlin. It never happened. That fall, the German army—and those of Turkey, Austria, and Bulgaria—first buckled, then collapsed like a rotten log. By November 11, the war was over.
The fact that nobody saw the end coming, the way it did, highlights the value of going back, a hundred years later, and reliving events day by day, as they took place. What may seem obvious now was anything but so then, and we do the people who lived through it, and our understanding of them, a real disservice when we assume that it was. “Life can only be understood backwards,” the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard observed, “but it must be lived forwards.” The British historian C.V. Wedgewood elaborated on the same idea: “History is lived forwards but is written in retrospect. We know the end before we consider the beginning and we can never wholly recapture what it was like to know the beginning only.” We can’t entirely forget that we know what happened next, but when we at least try to identify with people who did not know, we shed new light on them, and on what did happen.
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Leon Trotsky with the Soviet delegation to negotiate a peace treaty with Germany, Brest-Litovsk, 1918
Take the Russian Revolution. We see it as the birth of a Communist superpower, and struggle to make sense of the seemingly half-baked, half-hearted effort by the Allies to intervene by sending troops, including Americans, to Russia’s ports in the far north and far east. People at the time, however, saw it almost entirely through the prism of the Great War. At first, the Allies welcomed the overthrow of the czar, and believed it would rejuvenate the failing Russian war effort. By replacing an infamous autocrat on the Allied roster with a fledgling democracy, it made “making the world safe for democracy” a more credible call to arms, and helped pave the way for the US to enter the war. When Lenin took over and made a ruinous peace with the Central Powers, he was seen as simply a German puppet. And when Bolshevik forces, augmented with released German and Austrian prisoners of war, attacked a unit of Czech soldiers crossing Siberia to rejoin the Allies on the Western Front, those suspicions blossomed into fear of a full-fledged German takeover of Russia. The Allies sent troops to key Russian ports to secure the war supplies stockpiled there and provide an exit route for the loyal Czechs. They considered trying to “reopen” the Eastern Front, but realized it would take far too many men. They assumed that when Germany was defeated, their proxy Lenin would eventually fall, and when the war ended, they naturally lost interest. It all makes sense, but only if you see through the eyes that people saw through at the time.
Did it really matter who won the war? In its aftermath, the Great War came to be seen as a colossal waste, a testament to the vanity of nations, of pompous older men sending foolish younger men into the meat-grinder for no good reason. War poems like “Dulce et decorum est” and novels like All Quiet on the Western Front have crystalized this impression. But this was not how people felt at the time. German atrocities in Belgium and on the high seas—some exaggerated, but others quite real—convinced many people that civilization, as they knew it, really was at stake. I was consistently and often surprisingly struck by the sincerity of support, not just on the home front, but among soldiers who had seen the worst of combat, for pursuing the war unto victory. The tone matures, but remains vibrant: these were, for the most part, people who believed in what they were fighting for. At what point the bitter cynicism set in, after the war ended, I cannot say. But at some point, that enthusiasm, and even the memory of it, became buried with the dead.
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Boys wearing bags of camphor around their necks to ward off influenza, 1917
Though, in fact, in many places the war did not actually end. An armistice was declared on the Western Front, and the armies there were disbanded and sent home. But Germany, Austria, and Hungary all descended into revolution and civil war for a time, with gangs of demobilized soldiers fighting on all sides. In Russia, the Soviet regime and its multiple enemies would battle for several years, while trying to reconquer territory surrendered when it quit the war against Germany. The Greeks tried to reclaim Constantinople from the Turks, and would be massacred when the Turks succeeded in reconsolidating their country. The Poles fought wars with the Ukrainians and the Soviets to define the boundaries of their newly independent country. Jews and Arabs continue to fight over the new lands liberated from the Ottoman Empire to this day.
In the Great War itself, over 16 million people died, including almost 7 million civilians. The US got off relatively lightly, with 117,465 people killed, just 0.13 percent of its population. In Serbia, somewhere between 17 percent and 28 percent of the country’s population was killed. But even numbers like these leave little concrete impression on our minds. Some of the most touching parts of my experience live-tweeting were the times when people would tweet back to me about a grandfather or great-uncle who fought and died in the war, and is forever twenty-four-years old in some field in France, or Turkey, or Italy, or at sea. For most people, that absence is what defined the war: someone left and never came home. The world that they shaped, by their presence and their absence, is the one that we live in, whether we realize it or not. And we, like them, can only grope our way forward, day by day, into an unknown future.
Historica Graphica Collection/Heritage Images/Getty Images
Bethlehem has captured the imagination of the world for centuries – we are culturally and spiritually drawn to this famous Palestinian town, and specifically, to an event that may or may not have happened 2,020 years ago. Many express doubt but we nevertheless embrace the myth and the magic it inspires: the appearance of a “star of wonder, star of light, star of royal beauty bright”, harking back to prophecies of old; stories of wise men journeying on camels’ back from the exotic and mysterious east, choiring angels, simple shepherds watching their flocks, and homely livestock; and an auspicious birth in the outhouse of a village pub – all the well-loved dramatis personae of the classic manger scene.
These moments in time have long inspired painters and poets, and are recalled by carol singers from the field mice of The Wind in the willows to the sentimentality of that famous book by the one they now hail as “the man who invented Christmas” to the songs that make shopping at this time of the year cruel and unusual punishment.
Poets have always been ambivalent about Bethlehem. It’s been invested with a symbolism quite detached from the geographic. TS Elliot’s magi we’re unsure what it all actually meant, whilst to WB Yeats, it might’ve been a place where bad things would happen. But then they hardly knew the place, and them and countless others, it is a place of myth and memory, most if it imagined.
And whilst “the hopes and fears of all our years” abide with this town of some 27,000 souls, it has a life of its own, a history, a society, an economy, and a political story that reaches back eleven thousand years.
Like Jerusalem, its sacred, senior sibling, just ten kilometres away as the crow flies (and much, much longer by road due to the impositions of the occupation), the “little town of Bethlehem” is as much a city of the mind and heart as one of bricks and mortar and of ordinary people with myriad preoccupations and passions.
British author and screenwriter Nicholas Blincoe has now written an affectionate and informative biography of a town that is as close to the heart of our culture as any town ever was, and yet one that is almost unknown. Whilst “the hopes and fears of all our years” abide with this town of some 27,000 souls, it has a story of its own that reaches back eleven thousand years.
Ballad of a border town
Blincoe’s story is part history, part travelogue and memoir, the past intermingling with the present in informative and ofttimes entertaining anecdotes and interviews, memories and personal experiences, as he takes us on a journey from the stone age to the stone wall – one that is in places eight metres in height.
Bethlehem has since the beginning of recorded history been a border-town on a physical and metaphysical borderland.
A borderland between “the desert and the sown”, the Judean Desert with it’s sheep-herding nomads and Bedouin bandits, and the orchards and vineyards in the fertile wadis that for centuries had supplied world-famous wine and olive oil.
A borderland between the Christians who once constituted a majority, and who for generations have tended to the churches, shrines, and monasteries that were drawn to the holy ground around the Church of the Nativity, and the vast Muslim hinterland from whence over the centuries have come traders and invaders, missionaries and marauders, tourists and tanks. For two thousand years, Jerusalem and Bethlehem have been one of the world’s preeminent destinations for religious tourism, and over two million tourists and pilgrims visit the town each year.
Bethlehem’s location has given it a social, political, economic, and strategic significance disproportionate to its size. It grew the confluence of the springs and aqueducts that have supplied nearby Jerusalem for millennia. “All ittakes to conquer Jerusalem is to seize its water supply…This is what every future invader did.” It was close to the historic trade route between the Kings Road that linked the Hijaz to the Hauran, Damascus and the north, and the ancient Palestinian ports on the Mediterranean.
Its importance as a Christian island in a sea of Islam saw it serve as a refuge for the oppressed and dispossessed of Ottoman pogroms and genocides and also of the Nakba, it has earned a reputuaion as a haven for the more secular and radical elements of the Palestinian national movement their struggle with more religious and indeed fundamentalist adversaries.
But over the last half-Century, it is town that is increasingly cut off and isolated by the Separation Wall, encircled and encroached upon by the ever multiplying and expanding Israeli settlements (forty one at the last count with well over 100,000 inhabitants), hostile and acquisitive settlers, and the daily impositions and injustices of the military occupation with its restricted roads, armed soldiers and border police, checkpoints and the Kafkaesque permit system.
A cultural caravanserai
For most of his historical narrative, Blincoe maintains a degree of scholarly detachment with regard to the serpentine history and politics of the region, and crafts a captivating tale of warlords and adventurers, of soldiers and saints, as a parade of foreign armies pass through. Egyptians, Hittites, Persians, Greeks, and Romans, Arabs, Franks, and Mamluks, Turks, Brits, and finally, Israelis. There is a great picture of a group of Anzacs from the far side of the world in their winter coats emerging from the cave of the nativity in December 1917. Rulers and rebels have passed this way, and many, like mad, bad King Herod, Bar Kokba’s Jewish fighters, and the Shabab of the Palestinian Intifada-t have died nearby.
Given its religious significance, Bethlehem has forever been a focus and at times, a flash-point for events that have enmeshed the Holy Land and its Holy Places, from the fossicking of Emperor Constantine’ mother Helena and the self-imposed exile of estranged Empress Eudocia, through the Muslim conquest, the Crusades and Mongol raids to the Crimean War, the Palestine Campaign of WW1, and the Arab-Israel conflict. Bethlehem’s history has been one of civilization, colonization and conquest.
As a former scholar of philosophy, Blincoe seems particularly at home amidst the theological disputes of the early Christian, Byzantine period, and brings to life a host of passionate, idiosyncratic, adventurous, and infuriating men and women – the wandering saints and scholars, clerics and ascetics, wealthy widows and society matrons of the Middle Ages, and an unending caravan of pilgrims, tourists, evangelical adventurers and amateur archaeologists that have walked these hills and valleys for centuries. As with Jerusalem, seekers of the numinous could never get enough of the place.
He doesn’t shy away from the social, theological and political complexities of his chronicle, but his objectivity is severely tested in his final chapters when writing of Bethlehem and the occupation.
But then he does after all have a lot of skin in the game: he is married to Bethlehem filmmaker Leila Samsour, dividing his time between London and Bethlehem. He is quite embedded with Leila’s Christian Palestinian family, one with deep roots in the town’s history and politics, and has often been in the thick of the crises, protests, incursions and violent clashes that periodically embroil his adopted home.
He is not some desktop warrior, NGO apparatchik or “occupation tourist”. And whilst he deplores the actions of the settlers and the right wing politicians – Avigdor Leiberman and other nationalist MKs are virtual neighbours of his – and ascribes to revisionist Israeli historians like Ilan Pape and Benny Morris’ reading of the Nakba, he is not one of Israel‘s haters But he is disappointed, saddened, infuriated even by the Jewish state’s often cavalier and callous approach to its Palestinians who are its neighbours and also, its sullen, subject people.
Banksy’s Bethlehem Bouquet
Breaking the wheel
Palestine, and with it, Jerusalem and Bethlehem have always been under strangers’ dominion. But in the past, the rulers largely left the locals to live their own lives and manage their own affairs in accordance with their own social, political, and religious ways, and in the fullness of time, they departed, ceding the land to the next despot. Until, that is, the Israelis. In the words of Daenerys Targaryen: “ We’re not going to stop the wheel. I’m going to break the wheel.”
Year by year, Bethlehem’s economy shrinks. Over two million tourists and pilgrims visit “Royal David’s City” annually, but its economically stressed, and it has the highest unemployment rate (nearly 30%) in the West Bank.
Year by year, Bethlehem’s Christian population diminishes as people head overseas in search of a better life – and particularly its young folk. In 1950, Bethlehem and the surrounding villages were 86% Christian, but by 2016, the Christian population was but 12%.
Year by year, the settlements grow, and settlers, encouraged by an extremist, nationalist government and a seemingly compliant IDF, become more emboldened in their expansion onto Palestinian land. Considered illegal under international law, Israel regards them as legitimate suburbs of Jerusalem- a territorial fait accompli that is tantamount to de facto annexation.
Year by year, Bethlehem becomes more and more cut off from the rest of the West Bank by walls, wire, and a web of “Israeli only” highways, and indeed from the world beyond the wall. Travel to Jerusalem and to the rest of the West Bank is severely restricted by roads, checkpoints and permits, whilst the interaction between Israelis and Palestinians that existed during the seventies and eighties, in workplaces, educational and health institutions, friendships and romances, ceased after the terrors of the second, bomb Intifada as israel and Israelis withdrew into their mental and physical fortress.
A generation of young people on either side of the old and ostensibly moribund Green Line have grown up with negligible contact with their peers on the “other side” – and this is most likely to be limited to military service in the Occupied Territories on the one hand, and confrontations with armed soldiers on the other.
Writing of the 1948 war, Blincoe notes: “From their future actions it became clear that both Jordan and Israel saw the term “Palestine” as an empty tag: it was the name of a piece of real estate rather than the home of people demanding self representation”, this is how he sees the future for Palestine and for Bethlehem, his adopted home. He argues that the settlement project is first and foremost about land and cheap housing for middle and lower class Israelis pressed by rising property values and a shortage of affordable housing to rent or buy in Israel proper. it is real estate developers, he argues, with friends in high places, who are calling the shots, rather than the more visible and vocal Zionist nationalists. As the Israeli historian and one–time deputy mayor of JerusalemMeron Benvenisti puts it, the settlements are a “commercial real estate project that conscripts Zionist rhetoric for profit”. The story of Jesus and the money-changers somehow comes to mind.
It is an intriguing argument that invites further research. it also echoes what would appear to be a similar patter in those parts of the West Bank that are under the direct control and administration of the Palestinian Authority, as we have reported earlier in Castles Made of Sand, an account of the land rush that is taking place in Area A.
With this and all the other pressures in play, from Blincoe’s perspective, the future prospects of Palestine and the little town of Bethlehem not appear to be promising. Bethlehem – Biography of a Town does not have a happy ending.
Synchronicity – a footnote
A few days after this post was published, an article by Hillel Zand appeared in the Matzav Review addressing the settlements and the real estate argument: “Israel’s right-wing has strengthened in recent years because it has promoted heavily financing the settlement project as a way to compensate for the not insignificant negative side-effects of neoliberal economic policy, especially rising housing prices and increasing inequality and poverty…In Israel, the “losers” are being compensated by the advocates of these policies with incentives, subsidies and entitlements that allow them to maintain, or even raise, their quality of life by living in West Bank settlements”.
The Israel- Jordan collaboration referred to by Blincoe also raised its controversial head recently when Justice Minister Ayalet Shaked and her boss Naftali Bennett hinted, favourably, at the prospects of US’ impending “peace deal” that includes the West Bank being ceded to Jordan and Gaza to Egypt. Murmurings from US allies Egypt and Saudi Arabia have also indicated support for such an idea.
Aida Refugee Camp, Bethlehem
Walls and wire define the brotherhood of man – Aida
Whenever I pen commentaries such as this, people ask why I rarely forward my own opinion on the issues I am presenting or discussing. On the contrary, I would argue that my views are fairly transparent in the subjects I chose to engage with, the words I use, and the vein in which I use them.
With respect to my numerous posts about Israel and Palestine, and the Middle East in general, I come to my conclusions from a political science and sociology perspective – that’s where my academic experience came from – and a background in conflict resolution, supported by study and travel. If I do on occasions display any particular bias, it. originates in my longtime interest, understanding and affection for the history, politics and culture of the region, of its geography and archaeology, and of its people of all faiths and nationalities that I make my observations.
I am presently working on a piece that encapsulates my thoughts on this complex and controversial subject. But meanwhile, here is a brief exposition.
I do believe that the systematic dispossession of almost a million Palestinians and the destruction of half of their towns and villages in 1948 is Israel’s original sin. It is the primal stain that colours and corrupts all that followed. And yet, if not for the actions, often daring, often brave, often questionable, and often deplorable, of the politicians and soldiers of 1948 – and of the generations that folllowed – Israel would not exist today. This paradox is addressed sympathetically by Avi Shalit in My Promised Land, referred to above, and scathingly by ‘new history’ scholar Ilan Pappe inTheEthnic Cleansing of Palestine.
The Occupation, fifty years old this year, which grew out of the unexpectedly total victory of June 1967, has taken on strategic, ideological and indeed messianic dimensions by many in the Israeli government and political elite. It compounded the original sin, deepened the primal stain, released the demons of messianic fervour, and wounded Israel’s soul. The settlements locked the nation into the the colonialist project. With the close-call of the Yom Kippur War, the violence and murder of the first and second Intifadat, and present Palestinian jaquerie, Israel’s heart has not just hardened, it has become sclerotic.
I admit that I have always been sympathetic towards Israel – from my first visit in 1972. But it is not a blinkered viewpoint. I am deeply critical of Israeli politics and policies, and have no respect for many of its leaders.
Ayelet Shaked, the nationalist’s La Passionaria, and her boss Naftali Bennett do not not represent ALL Israelis! They hold extremist views just like we in UK, US, and Australia have parties and individuals with extremist views. But there are hundreds of thousands of Israelis who oppose the present government and long for justice and peace. And if – a very big “if” – Arab Israelis and the Israeli left could work together, they could obtain a majority in the Knesset and change Israel’s politics.
Yet meanwhile, Binyamin Netanyahu and his nationalist allies call all the shots, the Israelis continue to control and exploit the land, its people, and its resources, whilst varying degrees of annexation are on the cards. The settlements are an abomination, as are the policies and practices of the state and its occupying army, as described by Lyons and others. There’s no escaping these facts.
But I am likewise critical of Palestinian governance, politics and politicians. Hamas and the PA are on the nose in their respective fiefdoms, and if a moderate “third force” were to arise – and survive, because sure as hell, they would risk being murdered – Palestinians who just want a quiet, normal life, adequate services, and opportunities for their children, and Israelis who want likewise, might – just might – reject their extremist, dogmatic, entrenched leaders and reach some form of modus vivendi.
Palestinians themselves have to take control of their own lives, kick out their corrupt leaders, cease inculcating their children with hatred and jihadism, and use all that international good will and dollars to build a viable economy that can provide jobs, opportunities, and security, economic and physical to the people. Only this way will they be inoculated against cronyism, corruption and extremism. And yet, the dead hand of a moribund, patriarchal, conservative and ethnocentric culture holds them back – but that is the subject of another, future discussion for In That Howling Infinite.
Today, the ‘powers that be’, defenders and beneficiaries of a status quo that looks more like a cul de sac, predominate over a dispiriting array of competing, clamouring factions, left, right, nationalist, secular, tribal, Haredi, and Islamist alike. New, young, brace, local voices in both Israel and Palestine, are not heard.
So what happens next?
I get that question too. And I am perennially reluctant to venture an answer beyond one that runs like “on the one hand…but then on the other”. I inevitably fall back on Robert Fisk’s response to the same question with regard to the calamitous freezing over of the Arab Spring and the fall and rise again of the same old autocrats and tyrants: “my crystal ball is broken”. It’s a cop out, really, but just as cogent as that famous line in that UK spy drama Spooks: “What’s gong to happen to me?” “Bad things!”
One thing is for sure: as songwriter Warren Zevon sang, “the hurt gets worse, and the heart get harder”.
We Acknowledge the Gumbaynggirr People, the traditional custodians of the Land we live upon, and the Land from the Tablelands to the sea. We also pay respect to Elders past, present and emerging of the Gumbaynggirr nation
Australia Day has always been celebrated on 26th January – except when it wasn’t …
For now, 26 January is all that we are. It is all that we are not. Australia lives in that tension. Stan Grant, author, commentator, and Wiradjuri man.
Today is our national day. We celebrate the first settlement of white settlers on Australian shores. Captain Cook had been here a decade before, and Dutch, Portuguese and English mariners had touched land at various point earlier in the century, but didn’t find the amenities attractive enough to stick around.
People, particularly right wing politicians and opinionistas, and white Anglo-Celtic nationalists regards this seminal moment as “a good thing” to borrow a phrase from “1066 and All That”. After all, it brought the benefits of European civilization to those whom Rudyard Kipling might later have referred to as “fluttered folk and wild, half demon and half child”. After two centuries of dispossession, enslavement, massacre, and, in recent times, gradual steps towards recognition and restitution, many descendants of the first peoples think otherwise and regard 26th January as Invasion Day, a time of mourning, as do an ever increasing proportion of the population generally, particularly the younger generations.
The day is celebrated throughout the land with ceremonies and performances by representatives of our many cultures. But indigenous artists, dancers, and musicians face a profoundly deep dilemma when asked to perform. By participating in official commemorations, are they helping to sanction and even sanitize a day they associate with deep historical pain and trauma? Conversely, by boycotting the event, would they be giving up an important opportunity to celebrate and promote indigenous culture, helping non-indigenous Australians to understand that Australia has an indigenous history as well as a white one, and that this is a living culture and that over two hundred years, it is still with us today.
Australia Day January 26th 1988
The days and weeks leading up to Australia Day have become a time for debating our history, and also, our identity. It is also about memory and myth. As American author CE Morgan has written, “Repeated long enough, stories become memory and memory becomes fact”. German academic Ulrich Raulff put it this: “ … our historical memory is a motherland of wishful thinking, sacrificed to our faith and blind to known facts … This is why historical myths are so tenacious. It’s as though the truth even when it’s there for everyone to see, is powerless – it can’t lay a finger on the all powerful myth”.
And so around this time every year, people argue about moving the date to one that is less divisive, and indeed, to one that more realistically commemorates the founding of the Commonwealth of Australia. January 1st for example. is put forward as the day six states came together as one Commonwealth under a federal government. The problem with January 1st is of course that being New Year’s Day, and already a fireworks and hoopla day off, no one would notice. The Queen’s Birthday weekend in June (it’s not her’s actually, but George III’s, but never mind) is also mooted. But that’s wintertime And not good for the beach and a cold beer. Moreover, January 26th is ideally placed as the last long-weekend before the kids go back to school.
As if responding to Pavlov’s bell, folk of a conservative persuasion evoke the irrevocable sanctity of January 26th as a commemoration of how we became who we are – that is, a mainly white and Christian but increasingly multi-hued and multi-faith democracy at the fag-end of the earth. The conservative media seize upon it as an opportunity to serve up overblown, meretricious flimflam not withstanding the fact that the story of the First Fleet is thrilling enough without over-leavening it with patriotic flag-waving, triumphalism, and a big serve of manifest destiny.
The idea of celebrating the acknowledged virtues of our country – its tolerance and openness, its acceptance of immigrants of all colours, cultures, and religious beliefs, its mythical values of “mateship” and a “fair go” are sound. In citizenship ceremonies across our island continent, migrants from all over swear allegiance to our nation and it’s English queen (but we won’t go there). And yet, the day itself has evolved into a shibboleth, a caricature, a bombastic, jingoistic carnival of flags and fireworks, partying and posturing. It’s as if we forget that on January 26 1788, Captain Arthur Phillip established a penal colony – not a nation. Of the 1336 souls who landed, over half of them were in chains, and most of the others were guarding them.
Ironically, the day is not at all sacrosanct. For most of the century of our existence as a nation, most Australian states did not see a reason to celebrate this Sydney-centric beano with such gusto. Indeed, as the picture below shows, the date itself was quite portable. the It was only on the occasion of our bicentenary in 1988 that it officially donned the aura of a secular holy day of obligation – and, of course a public holiday conveniently placed between the hot and lazy Xmas holidays and the commencement of the school year. Recent polls have show that a majority of Australians wouldn’t be too fussed if the date was moved. A significant proportion are hard pressed to say what it is we are actually commemorating.
Perhaps one good reason we ought to abolish Australia Day is that we are not grown up enough as a nation to deserve it.
[I have included at the end of this post what I consider a reasonably well-nuanced appraisal of the culture wars being fought out over Australia Day. Paul Kelly of The Australian is a conservative commentator, and is obliged to recite form the News Corp song sheet when it comes to repeating the cliched mantras of his mother-ship – or is it ‘fathership’?) but he weighs well the tired arguments of left and right and argues for what would, could or should pass for the ‘reasonable middle’]
And so, today is our national day. A day when the “black armband” and “white armband” tribes leave off their month-long cage-fight that has dominated the media during the Xmas holiday doldrums, and just enjoy a day off.
And we can have a break from self righteous patriotics until our next official day off: Anzac Day, when we celebrate our defeat the hands of Johnny Turk at Gallipoli, and when, of course, The Australian and it’s hired hacks will get carried away by all the Anzacery bluster, and express their indignation with all who criticize that shibboleth. The irony of Anzac Day is that whilst it rightfully remembers the cost and futility of war, its commercialization has meant that more money is spent on political and patriotic posturing than on our serving soldiers and on those who return home injured and traumatized. As Samuel Johnson quite rightly (is said to have) said, “patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel”.
WARNING: This story contains images of deceased Indigenous people.
Aboriginal men perform a dance at a 1938 re-enactment of the landing and proclamation of Captain Arthur Phillip at the 150th Australia Day celebrations. (State Library of NSW)
On January 26, 1938, as the first rally against Australia Day was held, 25 Indigenous men were told if they did not perform the role of ‘retreating Aborigines’ in a re-enactment of the First Fleet, their families would starve.
Government officials had selected the best dancers and singers from Menindee mission in far-west New South Wales and told them they were required to perform cultural dances in Sydney. What they were sent to take part in was a re-enactment of the landing and proclamation of Captain Arthur Phillip at the 150th Australia Day celebrations.
Ngiyaampaa elder Dr Beryl (Yunghadhu) Philp Carmichael, born and raised on the mission, was only three at the time, but her memory of the fear in the community never left her.
Ngiyaampaa elder Dr Beryl (Yunghadhu) Philp Carmichael,
My grandfather protested Australia Day in 1938
The inescapable reality is that Australia’s current national day excludes and alienates Indigenous people — 80 years after my grandfather marched the streets in a fight for equality, writes Ngarra Murray. “All I can remember is the crying, all the women were crying,” she said. “Whether they were taking them away to be massacred or what, no-one knew. The community went into mourning once they were put on the mission truck.”
The men returned a week later, but Dr Carmichael said it was many years until they would talk about their experience. ‘They came back very quiet,” she said. “It was only in the late 70s they started saying something about what it was like down there. We knew whatever happened down there really hurt them and we didn’t question them.”
Hidden from friends and family
It is speculated that part of the reason for bringing Indigenous people all the way from Menindee was because those in Sydney refused to take part. In Sydney plans were afoot to hold a rally on Australia Day; the Aborigines Progressive Association would declare it a ‘day of mourning’.
Aboriginal rights leaders William Ferguson and John Patten published the Aborigines Claim Citizen Rights! pamphlet on January 12, 1938. In it they declared, “We do not ask you to study us as scientific freaks … the superstition that we are a naturally backward and low race … shows a jaundiced view of anthropologists’ motives”.
Those in power at the time seemed eager to keep the Menindee men well away from activists, keeping them locked away in police barracks.
The incident was detailed in a biography on William Ferguson, written by Jack B Horner in 1974. “The Secretary of the Protection Board had a shrewd idea that Ferguson would try to prevent the Menindee men from taking part in this re-enactment. The Board was taking no chances. Nobody could meet the Aborigines in the coming week in Sydney, without … obtaining personal permission.” — from Vote Ferguson for Aboriginal freedom: a biography by Jack B Horner
Dr Carmichael said there had been whisperings of the movement on the mission, and a direct link to Mr Ferguson.
“Most people on missions couldn’t read and write; that made it really hard for them to understand the government documents they were throwing around,” she said. “Old Bill [Ferguson], because he knew his brother Duncan was back on the mission, he used to send messages back to him. But in the end the mission manager found that out, picked the old fella [Duncan] up in a truck and dumped him over the hill [outside the mission boundary].”
Mr Ferguson attempted to get word to the Menindee men while they were in Sydney but, as elaborate as they were, his efforts were unsuccessful. “Then followed in the week before the celebrations an amusing battle of tactics between the Protection Board officers and the executive of the Aborigines’ Progressive Association….Some Sydney relatives of a Peter Johnson from Menindee tried to see him at the barracks. The relatives had been sent by Ferguson, of course, in order to pass to Hero Black (the leader of the Menindee party) a message not to take part in the mortifying ‘retreat’ from the ‘first party of Englishmen’.” (From Vote Ferguson for Aboriginal freedom: a biography by Jack B Horner) . They were eventually allowed a closely supervised visit from two female relatives.
The men soon discovered their duties would include playing the part of Aboriginal people fleeing British soldiers.
Threatened with ration cuts
While the activists may have gotten their message through to the performers, discouraging them from taking part in the re-enactment, the men were left with little choice.
Dr Carmichael said when it came to performing traditional dance, the men were troubled to find they would be led by an Aboriginal actor who did not speak their language or know their culture.
“The government unknowingly or knowingly put up a big Aboriginal, good looking fella as the leader of the dancers and they didn’t even know him. He wasn’t from Ngiyaempaa,” she said. “That really devastated the people and they refused to dance. [The government] threatened them and threatened them; if they didn’t perform they’d cut off the rations to their people on the mission. It was the toughest time of their lives, I think. I’m just happy we survived’
Eighty years on, as debate continues around whether January 26 is celebrated or mourned, Dr Carmichael said she was happy to have survived, even though she was sad about the past. “We were brought up to tolerate a lot of things and to give thanks for being alive,” she said. “I’m just glad I survived with my culture intact and am alive to teach and pass it on. We should strive for peace, between all nations. We need to come together as people.”
Australia Day: we must face the two truths about January 26
Paul Kelly, Editor-At-Large, The Australian, Illustration: Eric Lobbecke
Australia Day is getting bigger, brighter, more celebratory and stained by the rising tide of culture war hostility. The transformation of January 26 from a sleepy public holiday two generations ago into a boisterous party and civic commemoration has provoked a political backlash conceived in two different sentiments — grievance and exploitation.
The debate is not just about our national day. It’s really about who we are, what symbols we honour and, ultimately, the legitimacy of our civilisation. This debate can break one of two ways: robust differences can generate a better understanding of Australia and its national day or the upshot can be a destructive orgy of self-interested identity politics leading to a diminished and divided country.
The progressive crusade to remove January 26 as Australia Day has won fresh momentum for a movement bent upon imposing its views on the nation. Nobody should be surprised.
The volatility of social media, the power of negative politics and the emotional manipulation around “invasion day” constitutes sufficient warning that things could go badly wrong.
A nation ignorant of its history or simply unable to handle its history is heading for trouble in the present age of populist and cheapjack disruption.
Those pledged to “change the day” underestimate the popularity of the late January public holiday before the kids return to school, when barbecues abound in parks and backyards, fireworks make a spectacular night, the Australian flag adorns cars and front verandas, the sense of community is tangible, and civic and citizenship ceremonies at the local level testify to a beating patriotism.
In every such event there are tributes to the first Australians. This is embedded in our civic culture. More indigenous peoples are participating and being recognised on Australia Day, with its official emphasis on multiculturalism and diversity. Since governor Lachlan Macquarie nominated the public holiday in 1818, the day has seen enormous and essential reinterpretation.
Beware, however, the emerging malaise — a culture war between the green-identity, politics-progressive left determined to destroy the current day and the hopelessly unpersuasive conservatives who defend the status quo, speak and listen only to one another and lose every battle because they cannot find a language to appeal to a diverse mainstream.
There are two truths about January 26, 1788. It was the threshold moment for one of the most audacious experiments of the Age of Enlightenment seeding a British settlement and society on the continent most distant from Britain under the practical yet visionary leadership of Arthur Phillip, in many ways the true founder of Australia who, against almost every prospect, had the insight to believe this convict colony at the ends of the earth would one day be “the most valuable acquisition Great Britain ever made”.
Those who say the story of the First Fleet and settlement are boring and uninspiring are dead in their imagination and blind in their vision.
The associated truth is that the oldest civilisation on earth, isolated for thousands of years from the rest of the globe and hence extremely vulnerable, was unable to defend itself and suffered dispossession of its lands, ravage from disease, loss of life in conflict and loss of its way of life.
Despite the initial good intentions towards the Aborigines displayed by Phillip, the great moral failure in Australian polity was the belief there was no place, no dignity and, indeed, no life for the original Australians.
Both truths are authentic. Neither can, nor should, be denied. This is our inheritance and, in its soaring achievement and murderous squalor, it constitutes the unique meaning of Australia. One of the central purposes of our existence is to find a way of living with these truths and ensuring the peoples who embody such different traditions can live together and thrive together. There is simply no alternative.
We should exist neither in perpetual grievance nursed by the indigenous peoples and those, like the Greens, who recklessly exploit their grievances, nor in the complacency of those Europeans who still pretend there was no dark side to the civilisation we enjoy.
The issue is whether we have the maturity to hold together conflicting truths and sort things through, or whether we choose ideological indulgence and cynical zero-sum politics.
Australia Day needs to stand because the nation cannot run or hide from either the glory or tragedy in its duality. The answer to indigenous feelings about January 26 is to construct, not destroy — if there is sufficient agreement, then construct a new day of indigenous commemoration, suffering, survival and triumph. That will take time but over time it may emerge as one of the constructive solutions for Australia.
Declaring that January 26 must be shut down as a day of shame, genocide and mourning offers no solution to anyone. Telling the descendants of Arthur Phillip that the origin of the British civilisation and prosperous multicultural democracy they have built lacks sufficient legitimacy to be honoured as the national day is dishonest and destructive. How could it not be?
In this paper today, indigenous leader Noel Pearson says the blackfellas were here 65,000 years before whites arrived and it is vital we “recognise and honour this”. Pearson also says the whitefellas aren’t going away, they created something and it is also vital to “recognise and honour this”.
Tearing one truth down in the cause of another is the road to ruin for Australia. Both truths need to be confronted and engaged. “Trying to erase January 26 is denying the very history we want Australians to face up to,” Pearson says. “There is no other relevant time or date other than those 24-48 hours when ancient Australia passed into the new Australia.” It is this transition the nation must face.
The enemies of this obligation are thick on the ground as radicals and conservatives, often peddling phony mantras. The self-interested cynicism in the stand of Greens leader Richard Di Natale is gobsmacking. With his eye on stealing future votes in inner-city Melbourne, Di Natale announces changing Australia Day will be a priority for the Greens during the rest of the year since the day is about theft and genocide.
What will replace January 26? Why should Di Natale bother with such trifles when there are ideological axes to be swung and votes to be purchased through cultivating national self-abasement under the fraudulent cover of morality?
In response, Labor leader Bill Shorten was just pathetic: he won’t defend Australia Day, he won’t abandon Australia Day and he doesn’t like another day of Aboriginal commemoration. In the end he says the day itself is not what really counts. Yes, this is the alternative PM on our national day. Perhaps we should be grateful he didn’t line up with Di Natale’s view that the flag should be flown at half mast on the national day.
Malcolm Turnbull, unsurprisingly, said he’d like to hear Shorten speak “proudly and passionately” about Australia Day. But Shorten has a problem, given the embrace by much of the Labor rank and file of a progressive orthodoxy towards changing the national day anyway and at odds with majority public opinion.
Indigenous ALP frontbencher Linda Burney stepped into this confusion, criticising the Greens, saying Australia Day won’t be changing any time soon, but highlighting the difficulty it poses for Aborigines as a day of celebration. Aware that NSW ALP policy calls for consultation about a new and separate public holiday devoted to indigenous commemoration, Burney put this idea on the table. It is not ALP policy but Burney was being constructive and her proposal merits serious consideration.
Turnbull preaches an Australia Day that brings people together and celebrates our multicultural diversity. The government has properly removed the right of local councils to hold citizenship ceremonies if they refuse to recognise Australia Day and hold citizenship ceremonies on that day. But the reality cannot be avoided: division over Australia Day will mount in the future and this will require astute leadership and management.
For many Aborigines, January 26 will remain invasion day, and that is understandable. But any alternative national day that commemorates British settlement or the foundation of Australia has a similar problem. The logical alternative of January 1 — the inauguration of the Commonwealth of Australia — would honour an event that denied any role or existence for Aboriginals and assumed they were a dying race.
In truth there is no escape from the history — yet the historical story must be authentic, not convenient mythology. Australia was always destined to be settled by a European power. The force of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution would never be denied from the great southern land. There are few inevitabilities in history and this was inevitable.
We are fortunate the European power was Britain, not France or Spain. This was an 18th-century blessing. We are fortunate the British came not just to establish a convict colony but to bring their values and institutional ethos.
Phillip had an 18th-century faith in improvement, a belief he was founding a new British society and serving the cause of humanity. With slavery still not abolished in the empire, Phillip declared from the inception of Australia that “there can be no slavery in a free land and consequently no slaves”.
The Aborigines he encountered were not a nation state. They were a collection of hundreds of tribes speaking different languages, devoid of collective political purpose or leadership, often at war with each other and without the structures to allow sovereign negotiations or dealings.
To say the British should not have come is a ludicrous denial of reality and makes as much sense as saying the early explorers should not have advanced inland to discover the continent. To pretend the Aborigines could or should have retained their possession of the continent forever is delusional and is a device to avoid historical reality.
The encounter between the British and the Aborigines was without precedent in human history. The idea that good intentions were enough for success is absurd. Historian Geoffrey Blainey says in first volume of his The Story of Australia’s People: “The racial conflict in Australia — nearly all would agree today — should have been handled more wisely and firmly but the British leaders lacked the political and cultural experience needed to handle a dilemma that was exceptional in world history. Furthermore, London at one end of the globe and Sydney and Hobart at the other end viewed the dilemma and their duties and powers, differently.”
The idea that the British arrivals should have negotiated a treaty is nonsense. With whom and on what basis? There is no answer. During the 70 years after settlement many thousands of Aborigines were killed by Europeans — though far more died from diseases — creating a moral legacy the nation cannot deny and must confront.
Efforts to do this have been substantial while incomplete. Witness the Reconciliation process, the Mabo case and granting of native title rights, huge though flawed public funding, and the continuing process of constitutional recognition.
The first Australians lost much from the events of 1788 yet they also gained much, eventually — proving that indigenous peoples could live and thrive in a modern urban society. Aborigines are poised to become more prominent in every facet of Australian life.
The related truth, however, is that as a nation we cannot pretend there is full atonement for the dispossession. We cannot say: “Sorry, let’s leave.” We could not do this in 1808, let alone 1901, let alone 2018. There can be no full rendering of justice, no full recompense after dispossession. History cannot be reversed.
We must honour and reflect on the history, restore Aboriginal rights, and strive for justice as much as practicable. But it cannot serve indigenous Australians to engage in perpetual grievance, to magnify the sins of the past in an endless demand for atonement and more atonement still, part of a futile quest to deny any legitimacy to January 26. That is the road to a self-defeating misery.
The bulk of the Australian population, including the millions of post-World War II immigrants and their descendants, will neither accept nor tolerate the idea that the British founding of this country was a shameful and illegitimate event. When the Greens and other progressives promote this sentiment — exploiting indigenous resentment for their own ideological and electoral gains — there is no upside for our polity, just counterproductive bitterness with the risk of violence.
Where is the legitimacy in January 26? It lies in the society that evolved and continues to evolve, a nation that, for all its faults, is democratic, egalitarian, tolerant and, in per capita terms, has opened its door to immigrants on a more sustained basis than virtually any other developed country. This constitutes a powerful legitimacy.
It was Noel Pearson more than a decade ago, in a famous letter to John Howard, who offered the most honest and enduring framework for presenting and understanding contemporary Australia. For Pearson, the nation embodies three traditions: the indigenous peoples, the first Australians, who roamed this continent for 65,000 years, long before the ages of Babylon, Athens and Rome, finding a way to live and thrive in this environment; the British inheritance dating first from the voyages of James Cook and then from the initial colony under Phillip, followed eventually by Lachlan Macquarie and more settlements across the continent that led to a polity of British-derived laws, values and institutions that still operate today; and the immigrant tradition, the ethnic input from so many nations that broadened and deepened the culture and led to a multicultural nation, one of the most successful on earth.
These three traditions need formal embodiment. Pearson’s vision was adopted by Tony Abbott as PM. But it needs a more declaratory form authorised by the parliament or the people. This is a critical step in finding a national identity that is shared and inclusive and can win wide support because of its validity.
The issue of constitutional recognition of indigenous peoples needs to be reopened with a new process. This time there needs to be greater realism on all sides. The Turnbull cabinet rejected the final recommendation for an indigenous advisory body to be inserted into the Constitution because it believed such a referendum had no prospect of success. Those attacking this decision have singularly failed to offer any explanation or strategy of how such a referendum could be passed.
There have been some suggestions that the Australia Day issue can be postponed pending the inauguration of an Australian republic. That is a tempting but most unwise proposition. The republic will not provide the answer and, moreover, it is probably many years or decades away.
While the republic is a necessary step in Australia’s evolution, its cause is currently weak and devoid of energy. This is because of the destructive transformation in progressive politics to embrace change based on individual and group rights around sex, gender and race, a combination of tribal and narcissistic imperatives.
The republic has no voice or appeal in this world. It won’t change your personal life, it won’t relate to how you live, it won’t speak to your gender, sexual or racial identity. Paul Keating once lamented the republic had been consigned to an after-dinner conversation; these days it doesn’t even win that rating. When was the last dinner party you attended where the republic got anything more than the briefest mention?
Shorten pledges that in office he will launch a path to the republic. But that will prove immensely difficult in today’s Australia. The republic is now a token of progressive politics, nothing more. The emotions, energy and priorities of progressive politics lie elsewhere.
The nation must face the Australia Day issue and competing historical truths as a constitutional monarchy or not at all.
The horse has been man’s most important companion – forget cats and dogs – and the most durable of historical alliances – against which every other covenant has been fragile and ephemeral – not even our relationship with our gods has shown a comparable degree of stability. Our story resonates with an equine leitmotif – in our dreams, our fantasies, our histories, our literature, and our movies; in our aesthetics and our notions of speed, strength, power, courage, fortitude, loyalty and beauty.
Hey and away we go Through the grass, across the snow, Big brown beastie, big brown face, I’d rather be with you than flying through space.
Mike Oldfield, On Horseback
Pastorale
Oh the world is sweet The world is wide And she’s there where The light and the darkness divide And the steam’s coming off her She’s huge and she’s shy And she steps on the moon When she paws at the sky
Leonard Cohen, The Ballad of the Absent Mare
What is there not to love about a horse?
Its big, brown, doe eyes; its earthy, sweaty aroma from a land somewhere between babies and barnyards; the warmth of its neck on your palm; the rough feel of its mane in your fingers; the smell and the squeak of saddle leather; the jingle-bells of the bridle. The strength you sense through your thighs; an exhilaration that is close to fear as you kick his flanks into a trot, a canter, a gallop, and whoa! and you’re never one hundred percent sure she will obey you. And then, when it’s over, the radiated heat, the damp hide, the glow of sweat, almost a mist of equine energy as you dismount after the ride. You feel wired, alive, and at one with the horse, with the land, with nature.
I first rode a horse in the late seventies, on my first visit to Australia with my first wife. Her old man was a doctor on locum in Coolah, ‘beyond of the Black Stump’, which is to say, the back of beyond (and there really WAS a black stump on the outskirts of town, for the infrequent tourist to be photographed by in pre-selfie days). A local farmer had invited us out to ride his large property, and so we rode, in the heat haze of high summer, through wide, dry, open, paddocks, mobs of roos scattering as we approached, flocks of cockatoos roosting riotously in the branches of dead trees, and flies. Yes, I learned about the “Aussie salute” that summer. I fell in love with the Australian bush then and there, the “wide brown land” of Dorothea Mackelllar’s “sunburnt country“. A few years later, as a newly arrived immigrant, I would go riding again, this time with country friends in the Dungog cattle country north of Sydney.
I was not a good rider, but I loved the craic. Not a natural like Adèle. When we first met, she kept four horses and looked after a whole riding school of them, bringing them in bareback riding, stock-whip cracking, a proper jillaroo. ‘Western pleasure’, it was called. No jackets and jodhpurs – it was cowboy hats, boots and blue jeans – before helmets and Occupational Health and Safety. I rode her gorgeous chestnut quarter horse called Twopence, and she, a handsome palomino named Trigger (of course). A riding accident put me in hospital – and I never rode a horse again.
Twopence & Trigger
That was a decades ago, but living in the bush, I still feel pleasure when I see horses in their paddocks. The sight, sound, and smell strike a melodious, atavistic chord that many would recognize as distinctively Australian. How many Aussies of a certain age would not thrill at the Banjo’s ballad of the bushman that is almost our national poem:
He hails from Snowy River, up by Kosciusko’s side, Where the hills are twice as steep and twice as rough, Where a horse’s hoofs strike firelight from the flint stones every stride, The man that holds his own is good enough’.
In this centennial year of the Palestine Campaign of WWI and the gallop of the Australian Light Horse towards the strategic Beersheba wells – praised, inaccurately, as history’s last great cavalry charge, the Light Horseman and his hardy “Waler” (from New South Wales) have achieved iconic status in a media supercharged on “Anzackery”. Calmer voices have argued that on the scale of the carnage on the western front, where Diggers died in their thousands, and indeed the Gaza battle itself, where the Anzacs were a very small part of a very large army, it was really no big thing, But never let the facts get between a politician and a photo-opportunity. During the closing scenes of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, the journalist says: “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend”.
And it was always thus. As German academic and cultural scientist Ulrich Raulff’s tells us in his captivating “micro-history” Farewell to the Horse: The Final Century of Our Relationship:
“Like love and the stock exchange, our historical memory is a motherland of wishful thinking, sacrificed to our faith and blind to known facts…This is why historical myths are so tenacious. It’s as though the truth even when it’s there for everyone to see, is powerless – it can’t lay a finger on the all powerful myth”.
Farewell to the horse
It is an easy segue from my Australian pastorale to Raulff’s illuminating canter through the story of the “Centaurian Pact” between humans and horses. it is at once a ride, a revelation, and a reminiscence of my short-lived ‘cowboy’ days.
“The horse” Raulff begins, “has been man’s most important companion – forget cats and dogs – and the most durable of historical alliances – against which every other covenant into which we have entered has been fragile and ephemeral – not even our relationship with our gods has shown a comparable degree of stability”.
He then recounts how over the span of a few decades, a relationship that endured for six millennia went “to the dogs” – excuse my awful pet-food pun. And it happened almost unremarked, unnoticed, and unsung. “For a century, the oat-powered engine was the universal and irreplaceable power unit of the forced mechanization of the world”. And then it was gone, replaced by the internal combustion engine. And yet, the term “horsepower” is to this day a measure of the performance of vehicle engines (although now mostly replaced by kilowatts) – a horse was the equivalent of seven men.
“The twilight of the equine gods”, as Raulff describes it, was a long goodbye indeed, and in the realm of myth, memory and metaphor, horses are with us still; or as he so lyrically expresses it: “ghosts of modernity” (echoes of Dylan, in my mind, at least) that “haunt the minds of a humanity that has turned away from them”.
Like its subject, Farewell to the Horse is a handsome, wide-ranging, beast. More elegy than epitaph, eclectic and imaginative in scope, viewing the horse as muse, as mount, and as metaphor, Raulff sings the song of the horse – and if ever there was a ‘horse opera’, this is it.
Eloquently and at times poetically translated, and generously illustrated with pictures from galleries, libraries, and photo archives, Raulff takes the reader through the many worlds of the relationship. On his academic home-turf of sociology and psychology, his references are primarily German, but straying from his academic stable, he ambles into a lush and diverse pastureland of history and mythology, politics and philosophy. economics and geography, industry and commerce, physics and biology, science and medicine, sport and recreation. And art and literature: how artists and writers brought their perspectives, personas and passions onto canvas, Kodak and the printed page. In many ways, its infinite variety reminded me of English historian Simon Schama’s fascinating Landscape and Memory.
Raulff has divided his book into four broad thematic sections, each with an evocative title – The Centauran Pact, A Phantom in the Library. The Living Metaphor, and The Forgotten Player – each exploring a particular aspect of the horse’s story. But he allows himself much extempore stream of consciousness as he periodically wanders off-script with childhood reminiscences and collected anecdotes, and dips into favourite paintings, books and films. And time-travels through six thousand years, and traverses the globe too in his long ride – from the Steppes of Eurasia to the Great Plains of America, from the cities of MittelEuropa to those of the Midwest, with side trips to the Middle East and Andalusia.
It was contagious. I too got to thinking beyond the page, recalling and contemplating a miscellany of ideas and images that came to mind whilst reading, and indeed, whilst writing this review, wandering down forgotten bridle-ways (literally, a horse riding path, or trail originally created for use by horses, but often now serving a range of travelers). And is this not what a good book should do?
The Song of the Horse
The horse, the intelligent mammal, the great vegetarian, a prey animal whose strength is in flight, who has no desire or need for confrontation or quarrel. It’s speed, its main asset, enabling it to flee its predators, is also what attracted it to the attention of man, with whom it entered into a long-lived, unequal devil’s bargain. “They were able to turn the inconspicuous potential energy of tough prairie grasses, inedible to almost all other animals into the spectacular energy of a fast endurance runner. Thanks to its natural properties as a converter of energy, the horse could bear kings, Knights, female lovers and rural doctors, draw carriages and cannons, transport hordes of workers and employees, and mobilize entire nations”. And indeed, Raulff takes us on a jaunt through these tableaux.
He quotes historian Ann Hyland: “it was a small step, albeit a brave one, for man to mount a horse”, and writes: “The comparison with the moon landing is certainly not exaggerated. The moment when man began, by domestication and breeding, to connect his fate to the horse – not with a nutritional intention, but with a vectorial aim – may have been, before the invention of writing, the narrow gate through which man entered the realm of history”.
And lo, our story resonates with an equine leitmotif.
The horse is in our dreams and our fantasies, in our literature, and our movies, in our aesthetics, and our notions of speed, strength, power, courage, fortitude, loyalty and beauty. From the diverse mounts that conveyed Chaucer’s pilgrims to Canterbury to that paragon of American folk culture, the cowboy. From the rambunctious centaurs of Disney’s’ Beethoven Fantasia to the gaunt quartet bearing the seer of Patmos’ horsemen of the Apocalypse. From the teenage innocence of National Velvet and Black Beauty to Thomas Hardy and Carey Mulligan’s sensual and photogenic jaunt in the recent remake of Far From the Madding Crowd. From the patriotic jingoism of Alfred J Tennyson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade and Rudyard Kipling’s East is East and West is West to Banjo Patterson’s blokey bush ballad The Man From Snowy River, which I have quoted above (and will reprise below). The horse has even entered into the invented worlds of science fiction, with Joss Whedon’s rollicking space-pirate adventure, Firefly, and more recently, Westworldwith its Wild West theme park populated by lifelike android cowboys and Indians on their robot horses.
Westworld
[If I have one small quibble about Farewell to the Horse, it is in its Eurocentricity. The Land Down Under doesn’t rate a mention even though the horse has played an important role in the evolution of Australia’s perceived national identity – “perceived” because here too, we are captive to that “powerful myth” that Raulff believes subverts fact]. We see horses every time we leave our rural property. They are an intrinsic part of our country life, and many of our friends are riders. Here are a couple of pictures of our good friend Chris riding the National Trail through Guy Fawkes National Park:
Whilst drawing cleverly on the arts – and the book is well-furnished with illustrations that are well spoken to in the text – Raulff does not venture into poetry, where there are to be found many wonderful images. Take but a few examples drawn from just one poem, and marvel at the metaphors in Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Boys Own’ tale of a young British officer tracking down a daring Pathan bandit:
The Colonel’s son has taken horse, and a raw rough dun was he, With the mouth of a bell and the heart of Hell and the head of a gallows-tree”.
“It’s up and over the Tongue of Jagai, as blown dust-devils go, The dun he fled like a stag of ten, but the mare like a barren doe. The dun he leaned against the bit and slugged his head above, But the red mare played with the snaffle-bars, as a maiden plays with a glove”.
“They have ridden the low moon out of the sky, their hoofs drum up the dawn, The dun he went like a wounded bull, but the mare like a new-roused fawn”.
And, of course, there are the songs. There’s the doomed Texan troubadour Townes van Zandt’s enigmatic anti-hero:
Pancho was a bandit, boys His horse was fast as polished steel, Wore his gun outside his pants For all the honest world to feel
Pancho and Lefty
And whilst Raulff includes a poignant picture of a lone, pedestrian cowboy carrying his saddle through the scrub like a mariner lost on the land, he doesn’t mention Leonard Cohen’s bereft and distraught cowpoke :
Say a prayer for the cowboy His mare’s run away And he’ll walk til he finds her His darling, his stray
The Ballad of the Absent Mare
But more from St. Leonard of Montreal later…
Frederic Remington’s Bronco
A Phantom Limb
The horse’s glory days may be over, but the echoes of a long and fruitful relationship linger in our lines and in our language – in our idioms and our figures of speech: like, “getting back in the saddle”, “pulling the reins” and “taking the reins”, “champing at the bit”, “gaining the whip hand”, and the timeless put-down, “get off your high horse!” Phrases such as these are used everyday by people who have never been physically close to a horse let alone ridden one, and whose visual encounters are limited to country outings, circuses, televised equestrian events and westerns (in Australia, as in the US, we can still enjoy country fairs and carnivals that feature rodeos and endurance rides).
And note that these usages are somehow connected to power, control, and aggression – and often, casual, almost matter-of-fact violence (the idea of being “horse-whipped”) – violence inflicted not only on humans but on the animals too.
Raulff asks: Why is it that the most powerful visual images of horses are in their warrior role? Does it not say more about ourselves than what was genetically a passive, docile, tame-able (we call it “breaking”) grazer?
Equestrian Statues
Salah ud Din al Ayubi, Damascus
The horse has a complex and varied curriculum vitae. For six millennia, it has been our dependable beast of burden, the bearer of people, packages and progress, shrinking distance and opening up new lands. But it has also been the agent of power, politics and pogroms. A bearer of great ideas, and also of great tyrants.
The horse has long been a living metaphor of power – the absolute political metaphor, indeed.
“The combination of horse and rider is a powerful symbol of domination, and one of the oldest in the book”. The caudillo, the martial “man on horseback” so beloved of painters and sculptors – and of putative dictators (although Stalin and Hitler, Raulff reminds us, despised horses). There’s Alexander the Great on Bucephalus, defeating Darius; David’s conquering Napoleon crossing the Alps; bodacious Boudicca reining in her chariot steeds on The Embankment. To be physically and violently unhorsed is to be taken down literally and figuratively. Hence Richard III’s anguished “my kingdom for a horse”, and George Armstrong Custer and the men of the Seventh Cavalry demountd and doomed on Last Stand Hill.
The rise of the horse changes the position of the people and along with it, their view of the world around them – what Raulff calls the ‘cavalier perspective’. It is rooted in an age-old fantasy of the fusion of man and beast, from centaur to chevalier. The unfortunate Aztecs believed the mounted conquistadors to be half man half beast. That dismissive rebuke “get off your high horse” echoes a primal fear of the mounted marauder, be he the Scythian archer, the Mongol warrior, the rogue knight or the Red Indian (“savage” he was called back in the day) of the Great Plains. Recall the Cossacks lining up on the snow-covered square, about to charge the defenseless marchers in David Lean’s Dr Zhivago. Recall the Dothraki, screaming their war cries, thundering down on the doomed Lannister infantry. “We still see traces of horses’ archaic role as inspirers of terror when required to intimidate picketing workers or to drive rallies of protesters out of shopping precincts”.
Something wicked this way comes – Clive Owen’s Slav King Arthur
During his travels, Raulff visited Israel, where he chanced to observe ultra-orthodox Jews protesting against their youth being conscripted into the Israeli Defense Force. Jerusalem authorities mobilized mounted police officers against the recalcitrant religious. He indulges in pogrom projection, imagining the Haredim being intimated by a Cossack Shtetl flashback. Fanciful, perhaps, but as a young man during the Vietnam demonstrations in London’s Grosvenor Square, I learned that there’s no greater killer of revolutionary passion than the sight of than a wall of fat horse’s arses backing towards you with those nervous hooves a’twitching.
And yet, the use of the horse in this manner forces it to go against its nature, trained to stand its ground in dangerous circumstances when all its instincts are to flee danger. Ostensible police brutality in Grosvenor Square was juxtaposed by the reality that police horses were stabbed by banners and tripped and stoned with glass marbles. Several were so injured that they had to be euthanized.
Horse meets Haredim in Jerusalem
…and meanwhile, in the other side of town
The Wide Open Spaces
The power bestowed upon men by horses is much more than such authoritarian, martial muscle. The horse enabled landsmen to conquer what Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey called “the tyranny of distance”. For Rudyard Kipling’s “fluttered folk and wild”, it ushered in a tyranny of a malevolent kind.
The horse-led conquests of European and Asian empires during the second millennium BCE by the chariots and later, cavalry of the horse-people disgorging from the steppes like some equestrian blitzkrieg, transformed world history. They brought their political structures, their warfare, their masculine, spiritual character – their “asabiyyeh” or, literally “muscle” as famed Arab historian Ibn Khaldun put it. The Eurasian nomadic warrior, “that ‘natural born’ combatant, who, as tough and austere as his resilient horse, emerged as the terror of the sedentary populations of Europe and the orient”. The same could be said of the warriors of Islam as they erupted out of their Arabian heartland and reached the walls of Constantinople and the frontiers of the Franks.
One powerful factor in these invasions was the horsemen’s speed. “In every contemporary account of the Mongols, great stress is laid on their speed: suddenly they were there, only to vanish and appear somewhere else even more suddenly”. The alliance between man, horse, and the arrow was likewise significant, providing the ability to kill from a distance, whilst moving, on horseback.
“Thanks to the horse, distant territories could be conquered and vast dominions could be established. The horse and its rider made the land they traversed tangible, recognizable, and able to be taken”. The horse became indispensable in terms of control of the land, subduing its inhabitants, and enabling Its exploration. In America, it brought the conquistadors, and in time, ensured that The West was won with catastrophic consequences for the native Americans with the loss their land and hunting grounds.
War Horse
Since it’s domestication, we humans have never resiled from putting our beloved horses in harms way. As an inspirer of terror and as a battering ram of blood and bone, mounted cavalry have been used on battlefields against soldiers and in streets and villages against civilians. Horses and mules have long provided most of the muscle used to move men and machines – the true “horsepower” of any war effort – serving in a wide variety of roles, including being ridden, as draft animals pulling vehicles and heavy weapons, and as pack animals. They, like their human comrades have perished in uncounted numbers by shot and shell, by accident and cruelty, disease and starvation, and during World War I, by poison gas. Sending animals to war seems, today, somehow even more awful than sending people to war, but in the past, there was little room for that sentiment. Animals were absolutely essential to any war effort, and they had to be sent – during WWI, millions of them, Most were horses and mules, but dogs, pigeons, camels, and even water buffalo and elephants were also found in some theatres of the war.
Celebrated English composer Sir Edward Elgar wrote in August 1914: “Concerning the war I say nothing … the only thing that wrings my heart and soul is the thought of the horses … oh! my beloved animals … the men … and armies can go to hell but my horses: I walk round and round this room cursing God for allowing dumb brutes to be tortured … let him kill his human beings but … how can he? Oh my horses.”
Farewell Old Friend by Fortunio Matana
A Day at the Races
Our pact with the horse was much more up more than the power and the glory, the conquest and the trail-blazing. Horses’ fleetness, stamina and beauty satisfied other, more hedonistic yearnings, and today, their days on the field of battle long over, they serve to give us pleasure – and profit.
And they have always done thus – particularly in the antecedents and descendants of the Ancient Greek hippodrome (named thus for horses and the racing thereof). In the downtime between warring and raiding, hunting and horse and chariot racing attracted many a warrior’s energy and enthusiasm, and provided less martial spectators with, vicarious thrills. We have been racing horses for as long as they have been our companions, and wagering on their speed and stamina. This passion fostered complementary endeavours in breeding, training, thieving, and gambling.
The racing carnival still exerts an atavistic, ofttimes addictive spell over riders, owners and punters alike. “The spectacle of race day echoes times and indeed conflicts past, the jockeys’ bright colours, representing a return of heraldry, a way of distinguishing otherwise indiscernible participants”.
It’s there you’ll see the jockeys and they’re mounted out so stately, The pink, the blue, the orange and green, the emblem of our nation, When the bell was rung for starting, all the horses seemed impatient, I thought they never stood on ground their speed was so amazing
Galway Races (Ireland, traditional)
In horse racing, nothing and no one is hunted, only the shadows of time”, Raulff notes prosaicly.
American author EC Morgan is similarly lyrical: “Time is a horse you never have to whip”,
In That Howling Infinite recently published a review of Morgan’s masterwork The Sport of Kings, a long and deep story about an old Kentucky horse-breeding family. She displays an unerring instinct for metaphor and music. A horse’s neck shudders under its rider’s hands “like a dreaming dog”. Of the racehorses, she writes: “they exploded out of the gate like doves from a cote”; and, “now the school of horses swung round the turn as if caught in a sweep net”.
Raulff explains why horse racing was indeed ‘the sport of kings: Britain emerged as the world power of thoroughbred racing under the racIng-mad Stuart Kings who transformed the sleepy village of Newmarket into the Mecca of the turf, supplanting hunting with punting as the favourite pastime of the idle rich and the indolent upper classes. When Scots King James wasn’t corralling and coaxing the best minds in the land into producing his beautiful Bible, he was both patron and participant with a keen eye for quality horse-flesh.
Teenage Daydream
Did I mention that horses can be dangerous? They are large, high, broad, heavy, and for all their tameness in the hands of a seasoned rider, they can also be excitable, unpredictable, and wild. When you take up the reins, you literally put your life in your hands. In My Early Life , his biography of his cavalry days, Winston Churchill wrote: “No hour of life is lost that is spent in the saddle. Young men have often been ruined by owning horses, or through backing horses, but never through riding them, unless, of course, they break their necks, which, taken at a gallop, is a very good way to die”.
But danger can come in other guises.
There was probably no way a cultural scientist trained in sociology and psychology could or would avoid how in its variegated pedigree, the horse has also figured as a sexual metaphor, conjuring up thoughts erotic with images of fair maids carried away by amorous riders. Raulff’s copious images include those famous abduction scenes beloved of renaissance painters, but there are many encounters in literature, art, cinema and song that are much less violent. It is as if the rider’s skill with his mount presages his prowess in the sack. There is titillation, there is temptation, and perhaps, surrender. Picture Ross Poldark cantering broodily across the Cornish clifftop, and lifting his Demelza up onto Seamus’ back (that is indeed his name).
True you ride the finest horse I’ve ever seen, Standing sixteen one or two with eyes wild and green, And you ride the horse so well, hands light to the touch. I could never go with you no matter how I wanted to.
Jimmy McCarthy, Ride On (listen to the song at the end end of this post)
Ross Poldark and Seamus
Ulrich gets into his stride, so to speak, when he commits to print his daydreams of the object of many a teenage baby boomers’ longing, the androgynous, pony-tailed cow-girl. He ponders also the puzzle of pubescent girls and horses – that tom-boy world, temporary “islands in the flowing river of time”: “Somewhere between a doll and a real-life partner, the horse is the ultimate sex toy. It’s the largest, most beautiful and final plaything before the transition from home and family to a new relationship with a sexual partner”.
Arwen Evenstar
Having raised the subject of women on horseback, there no ignoring the Amazons. Legend says that they were adept horse-women. As are the heroines of the literary canon who express their subversive sexuality in equestrian interludes – Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina, and Thomas Hardy’s Bathsheba Everdene. Each are subjected to the author’s affectionate attention. When JRR Tolkien wanted to present a strong and wilful heroine in his ostensibly homoerotic epic, he placed Éowyn on a horse, albeit incognito. But she was the exception to JRR’s macho rule. He would never have sent elf princess Arwen Evenstar out like that. But director Peter Jackson, sensing how well it would translate to film, substituted the luminous Liv Tyler for elf lord Glorfindel to confound the Nazgul riders at the ford of Bruinen. Here is a Carey Mulligan in glamorous array as Bathsheba:
The horse, the healer
So what is this spell that horses weave? We’ve talked about power. We’ve talked about prowess. We’ve talked about passion. Raulff doesn’t venture into the imaginative, the mystical, the magical, and, going further, ameliorative power of horses – that inexplicable feeling you sense when you’re in close proximity to a horse. presence, an aura of sentient calmness. Let’s go back to our opening paragraph.
“What is there not to love about a horse? Its big, brown, doe eyes; its earthy, sweaty aroma from a land somewhere between babies and barnyards; the warmth of its neck on your palm; the rough feel of its mane in your fingers; the smell and the squeak of saddle leather; the jingle-bells of the bridle. The strength you sense through your thighs; an exhilaration that is close to fear as you kick his flanks into a trot, a canter, a gallop, and whoa! and you’re never one hundred percent sure she will obey you. And then, when it’s over, the radiated heat, the damp hide, the glow of sweat, almost a mist of equine energy as you dismount after the ride. You feel wired, alive, and at one with the horse, with the land, with nature”.
It is said that there there is much more to a horse than its rider and that undeniably physical allure – that if you put your hands on or even near a horse’s body and close your eyes, you can feel a golden thread of energy travelling from your hands to its body, and from that body to your hands. There is a quiet strength to a horse that communicates a state of calm, relation, and peace. and a Therapists who work with grief and trauma are discovering that an emotional connection can exist between a horse and a human, that being in nature, in the presence of horses, seems to help children, teenagers and adults expand their emotional awareness and enhance their mental health, beginning the work of reconnecting them to the self, and to their environment, and even healing something inside that has been broken, often for years.
Poets might describe it as an opening up the heart. Therapists call it limbic resonance, the capacity for sharing deep emotional states arising from the limbic system of the brain, which can include heightened feelings of empathic harmony. Horses, they believe, are highly sensitive creatures and possess an uncanny ability to read and mirror us because it is a skill that keeps them alive. They are instinctively prey animals, and in order to survive, they had to become excellent interpreters of energy, emotion and intention. Their sensitivity has been bred into their DNA for millions of years. But It is still all about the heart and the emotional states of calm and even joy when we feel positive emotions.
As a coda to this brief commentary on the horse as healer, a friend of mine passed away recently in Bellingen Hospital. The hospice ward is an impressive place in terms of its staff and the care they give a horse came to his bedside and lay its head on his chest – a small horse, but a horse nonetheless. I have learned since that this pony is a regular visitor to hospices and aged care homes in the area. Bellingen hospital also allows cats and dogs to visit their owners.
For further reading on the horse as therapist, read this piece on horse heart math and an article by Candida Baker, an equine facilitated learning practitioner who helps people suffering from trauma in the Sydney Morning Herald.
The Unequal Bargain
There are wealth of emotions associated with horses, such as pride and admiration, a desire for power, fear and joy, compassion, and companionship, and a lust for freedom. The pony is the cowboys’ closest pal. Western star and crooner Roy Rogers described it best:
Who carries your burden, who carries your load On tumbleweed land or a long dusty road Who asks you no questions, who tells you no lies That four legged friend with the two honest eyes A four legged friend, a four legged friend He’ll never let you down He’s honest and faithful right up to the end That wonderful four legged friend
Roy Rogers, A Four Legged Friend (listen to the song at the end end of this post)
Over two millennia we have lavished depthless emotion, boundless affection and unlimited treasure upon horses. But we have also been capable of great cruelty both casual and calculated, – from willful neglect and senseless whipping to silent sacrifice as expendable extras on battlefields and motion picture sets. Raulff documents in prose and picture the violence inflicted upon our “four legged friend”, and also how pathos and sympathy for the horses’ plight evolved into a worldwide movement for the prevention of cruelty to all creatures great and small.
That very same Banjo Paterson who gave us the Snowy Mountain man’s famous ride also glorifying the race track – and yet the annual Melbourne Cup, Australia’s ‘race that stops a nation’, sees horses killed every year. we as a nation continue to praise and perpetuate what many see as animal cruelty. In Paterson’s day, horses were valuable and relied upon for transport and pleasure – theft was common – yet they were treated appallingly. Read The Man From Snowy Riverand reflect on the agony the hero inflicts upon his mount, which could barely move by the end of the ride and ‘was blood from hip to shoulder from the spur’. Yet Banjo, like apologists for the deaths on the track today – suggests that the horse was reveling in the chase.
But horses’ iconic place in our hearts and souls are sealed by their status as mobile metaphors of speed, of grace, of the wind in one’s hair, of wild, exhilarating, uninhibited freedom: “Run wild, run free”, like the troubled teen and the wild blue-eyed white colt in the 1969 British film of that name.
As Victorian bush poet James Cayce write in his poem A Magnificent Contradiction, a reminder of a debt that cannot be repaid:
The swirl of your mane alive in the wind, the glow on your flanks in the sun The spirit of freedom you stir in my soul, the rhythm and grace when you run. A whirlwind of power to wield or withhold; each movement made with conviction, A titan at work, a child at play; a magnificent contradiction
And it is with this in mind that Raulff concludes his epic ride, for it is one of the most poignant paradoxes that the idea of freedom and movement associated with horses and being on horseback, the image of the wild mustangs in The Misfits and Banjo Paterson’s Colt from Old Regret, is juxtaposed with the reality that this “creature of the wind”, as the Arabs described him, has surrendered her freedom and free will in the service of man.
Quoting the poet Albrecht Schaefer, Raulff tells of how “the horse knows that it would like to be free … but the burden is never ending, and it is rarely allowed to run and has to stand there even when it is frightened and when it is seized by the urge to return to its nature, to flee … It is trapped in eternal captivity, always overshadowed by an inescapable will to which it resigns itself without ever realizing”.
This magnificent animal, Raulff writes, “held in perpetual captivity, is seen by us as the epitome of all in nature that embodies nobility and magnanimity, stature, pride, and courage”.
Now the clasp of this union Who fastens it tight? Who snaps it asunder The very next night Some say the rider Some say the mare Or that love’s like the smoke Beyond all repair
Leonard Cohen, The Ballad of the Absent Mare
When the white man came into the new world, he brought his horses. He conquered the land and broke it – its ecology, its pre-Colombian history, and its people.
In the early years, the horses of the conquistadors humbled and harried the Native Americans. In time, many horses scattered and ran wild, and on the open prairie grasslands, they prospered and multiplied. The free people of the plains captured and tamed those feral mustangs, and so mounted, were better able to travel over great distances to fresh pastures and to the wide grazing grounds of the vast herds of buffalo, a rich source of food and fashion.
The horse gave the Native Americans mobility and speed, and an economic asset of value. They began trading horses with their neighbours, and also horse stealing, whilst their mounts gave them the edge in their territorial vendettas with neighbouring tribes. They bought steel axes and knives From the white traders who ventured into their lands from the east, and also, firearms which augmented their already effective mounted archery. This gave them a tactical edge when they first came up against the mounted soldiers of the US Army.
They were a formidable foe, their speed and maneuverability and their skill with bow and rifle, were more than a match for the clumsy, old-school heavy cavalry, and these, indeed, were compelled to adjust their own style and tactics to match their guerrilla adversaries, taking up light weapons – carbines and revolvers – and fighting on foot as circumstances dictated.
An irony of the Battle of Little Big Horn 8in 1876 is that George Armstrong Custer and his men rode on to a battlefield in which they were out-horsed, outgunned, and outmaneuvered by their numerically stronger foe. Another irony is that the only US Army survivors of that famous battle were the cavalry horses. As a contemporary witness of the aftermath wrote:
“As the men looked up and searched the broken terrain with weary, tearful eyes, down by the river a horse was struggling to get to its feet. Several of the men recognized the horse because of its peculiar buckskin-like colour. It was Comanche, the favourite mount of Capt. Myles Keogh, who had valiantly rallied the men of “I” Company right up to the end… He had apparently sustained at least seven wounds, and his coat was matted with dried blood and soil.” Comanche’s wounds were serious, but he recovered and spent his days as a celebrity, taking part in ceremonies and parades as a symbol of Custer’s memory. After his dearth, he was stuffed and placed on display at the University of Kansas Museum of Natural History. https://www.globetrotting.com.au/comanche-the-horse-that-survived-custers-last-stand/
The US Army exacted a terrible revenge for Little Big Horn. The days of the Plains Indian were numbered as the army and the hunters destroyed the buffalo herds that fed and clothed the tribes, and killed their horses, ending forever their wandering ways. As Neil Young was later to sing in Pocahontas:
They killed us in our tepee And they cut our women down They might have left some babies Cryin’ on the ground But the firesticks and the wagons come And the night falls on the setting sun
Say a prayer for the cowboy
His mare’s run away
And he’ll walk til he finds her
His darling, his stray
But the river’s in flood
And the roads are awash
And the bridges break up
In the panic of loss.
And there’s nothing to follow
There’s nowhere to go
She’s gone like the summer
Gone like the snow
And the crickets are breaking
His heart with their song
As the day caves in
And the night is all wrong
Did he dream, was it she
Who went galloping past
And bent down the fern
Broke open the grass
And printed the mud with
The iron and the gold
That he nailed to her feet
When he was the lord
And although she goes grazing
A minute away
He tracks her all night
He tracks her all day
Oh blind to her presence
Except to compare
His injury here
With her punishment there
Then at home on a branch
In the highest tree
A songbird sings out
So suddenly
Ah the sun is warm
And the soft winds ride
On the willow trees
By the river side
Oh the world is sweet
The world is wide
And she’s there where
The light and the darkness divide
And the steam’s coming off her
She’s huge and she’s shy
And she steps on the moon
When she paws at the sky
And she comes to his hand
But she’s not really tame
She longs to be lost
He longs for the same
And she’ll bolt and she’ll plunge
Through the first open pass
To roll and to feed
In the sweet mountain grass
Or she’ll make a break
For the high plateau
Where there’s nothing above
And there’s nothing below
And it’s time for the burden
It’s time for the whip
Will she walk through the flame
Can he shoot from the hip
So he binds himself
To the galloping mare
And she binds herself
To the rider there
And there is no space
But there’s left and right
And there is no time
But there’s day and night
And he leans on her neck
And he whispers low
“Whither thou goest
I will go”
And they turn as one
And they head for the plain
No need for the whip
Ah, no need for the rein
Now the clasp of this union
Who fastens it tight?
Who snaps it asunder
The very next night
Some say the rider
Some say the mare
Or that love’s like the smoke
Beyond all repair
But my darling says
“Leonard, just let it go by
That old silhouette
On the great western sky”
So I pick out a tune
And they move right along
And they’re gone like the smoke
And they’re gone like this song
Counterfactual or alternative history had never gone out of fashion. As a history tragic with many kilometers on the clock, I enjoy such alternative history. “What if…?” and “if only…” are natural, if not instinctual responses to events around us – particularly the unpleasant ones. Hence the popularity of films like SS-GB and The Man in the High Castle (WW2 and the “Nazi victory” books they are based which on have always attracted us alternative history aficionados. There is currently excitement (and panic in some politically correct quarters) about the prospect of a project pitched by Game of Thrones’ show-runners visualizing a USA in which the Confederacy won the Civil War and slavery endures still. But such history is an indulgence that serious historians ought not take seriously – unless they are branching out into historical fiction, that is, which many indeed do. Popular English author Peter Ackroyd has said, the words “What if …” should never be on a historian’s lexicon. But writers of historical fiction have literary license to let their imaginations roam. Counterfactuals or alternative history is a fiction genre all of its own.
When we create alternative histories, we largely replicate a history we already know, often intimately. We replicate histories in which most of the same variables coexist, and the same historical trends prevail. Our motives are quite often as much to warn readers or audiences as to entertain them. Hence the tendency for such endeavours to drift into the depressing dystopian dramas that are so in vogue in these challenged times.
And yet, changing one or more of the players, removing or adding ingredients, hypothesizing different, even opposite scenarios, and imagining how events might have transpired differently, may not radically alter the result. In the case of the First World War, for example, if the conflict had not happened, the European empires may or may not gave endured. Often such multinational entities contain the seeds of their own demise – internal dynamics and contradictions, the impact of events in other countries. Whose to say what might have happened in say France, Germany, Russia, Türkiye or the US that might have upended the balance of power?
One surmises whether or not there is an iron law of inevitability that determines – predetermines, even – the same or similar outcome – a historical equivalent of Oedipus’ unsuccessful efforts to avoid his prophesied fate, affirming TS Elliot’s observation in Little Gidding: “And the end of all our exploring will be be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time”.
In this entertaining podcast, British historians Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland discuss many examples of what might have been if …
In an interesting if light-weight and indeed disappointing exercise in alternative history, with an absolutely meaningless but catchy play on the title of a fabulous song, title, The Sultans of Spring, The Economist recently pondered how events would have unfolded if the Ottoman Empire had sat out WW1 or joined the Entente of Britain, France and Russia instead of throwing in its lot with the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary. You may click on the above link, or page down to the full (and brief) transcript. Al-Sisi below, but preceding this is a brief précis of a a popular paperback historical novel published a short while ago which presented an imaginative if overcooked and totally different Ottoman history.
But first, here is my own argument:
So, what if?
Removing the Ottoman Empire from the strategic equation, or else placing it in the military scales against the Central Powers, would certainly have a significant impact upon the conduct and progress of the European war on both the eastern and western fronts. Russia and Britain would not have had to divert forces and materiel to the Middle East arenas. The Ottomans could have reaped the political and economic benefit of either neutrality or victory, with commensurate benefits for their own survival. The hypotheticals with respect to what may have happened next are innumerable.
The Economist surmises: “How much of today’s mayhem in the Middle East, from civil wars to terror in the name of Islam (and of restoring the caliphate) to the emergence of sectarian dictators such as Bashar al-Assad, not to mention of such a grudge-bearing Ottoman revivalist as Recep Tayyip Erdogan, might have been avoided, if only Churchill had embraced Johnny Turk instead of sinking him?”
But would things have turned out radically different if this had happened – notwithstanding the fact that three to five million Turks, Arabs, Armenians, Africans, Indians, and Europeans who lived in or soldiered through the Middle East theatre would have lived to die a natural death after fulfilling their own particular destinies or to perish purposefully or pointlessly in some other conflict.
The previous century had seen the steady decline of the Sultan’s Empire. It had commenced with Napoleon, and the rise of Muhammad Ali in Egypt, an Albanian “slave soldier” who in practical terms, seceded from the empire. Greece followed next, assisted by European states, and then, bit by bit, the Balkans. The Czar dubbed the empire the “sick man of Europe”, or so British politician John Russell misquoted him, and everybody wanted a piece. The European powers were circling hoping to pick up pieces as the Empire’s borderlands detached – Russia in the east, France in the Levant, and Britain in Egypt and the Gulf. The Crimean War was but one manifestation of “the Eastern Question” that had excited European Chancellories for a hundred years. France and Britain challenged Russia for power and influence in the East and went to war on the Sultan’s side, ostensibly to protect Christian rights in the Holy Land, but weightier matters were in play – alliances have always been fluid in this part of the world, as today’s shifting allegiances demonstrate. Crimea ended in stalemate, but Russia kept encroaching, whilst France established its presence in the Levant. Britain, meanwhile, has its sights set on Egypt and the Red Sea, (the vital route to its African and Asian empires), and when it was finally built, the Suez Canal, a strategic and commercial link that to this day concentrates the minds of foreign and state departments, military strategists and corporations worldwide.
The Balkan states continued to decouple from the empire, and prior to 1914, engaged in several bloody wars with each other, drawing their neighbours deeper and deeper into the tangle. The slow countdown to WW1 accelerated with the Austro-Hungarian archduke being killed by a Serbian student. Gavril Princip’s “shot that echoed around the world” in Sarajevo in 1914 was but one part of a chaotic picture, igniting tinder that had long awaited a match. Russia, supported the Serbs, Germany, the Austrians, Britain, and France, the Russians. And the Ottomans, forever hard pressed by the Russians, French and Brits, had already moved into the German orbit. When the Ottomans entered the war on the side of the central powers, the cards were dealt.
The Empire was already on a revolutionary path what with the Sultan’s desultory efforts with constitutional reform, the ascendency of Young Turks, a cabal of Turkish nationalist army officers, and the parlous state of the economy. Efforts to institute political and economic reform had faltered, and sooner or later, something was going to blow.
Arab nationalism had already taken root in the Levant, a secular creed spear-headed by Arab Christian intellectuals, to be brutally suppressed by the Young Turk triumvirate, Enver, Talat and Jamal. “Martyrs” were being strung up in Beirut, Damascus and Jerusalem. Perhaps the Ottoman Middle East would have unraveled like in the Balkans (and Balkanised too? Most probably). The “wars of the Ottoman Succession” that we are witnessing today amongst the states created in 1921 would eventually have erupted.
The Zionist project was already underway at the outbreak of war, with settlements of Jews from Eastern Europe and Russia well-established in Palestine, often encouraged by the Ottoman authorities. The pioneers included many of the founders of modern Israel, including its architect and first prime minister David Ben Gurion. The pressures that drove Jews from eastern Europe and Russia in the first place (the discrimination and the pogroms paramount) were unlikely to abate given the atavistic nationalism of Holy Russia and just as Holy Poland. Sooner or later, Zionism and Arab nationalism were going to collide. We will never know how the Ottoman state and its Arab provinces would have coped with the emergence of a Jewish state in Palestine. It certainly would have put the popular (but highly qualified) narrative of Ottoman tolerance of other faiths through a rigorous stress test. The Zionists had a pretty clear road map, and they weren’t sharing it with their new neighbours.
The British, French and Russians had been involving themselves in Middle Eastern affairs – that confounding “Eastern Question” – since the Napoleonic wars. , and Germany, seeking its coveted “place in the sun”, wanted in. German influence was already strong amongst progressive army officers – Prussian elan, ethos, menswear and weapons have exerted a powerful influence on wannabe juntas, the “men on horseback”, since the days Frederick the Great. The Kaiser’s government was very keen on expanding German influence in the east as a counter to British and French imperial power. Meanwhile, the industrial powers were already sniffing around the Gulf, Iranian, and Mesopotamian oilfields, the economic impetus behind imperialism having yet to run its course. The sea-lanes that preoccupied policy-makers in London, Paris and Moscow were soon to be joined by railways and pipelines, with the Germans making the running with its backing of the Berlin to Baghdad Bahnhof. Petroleum would soon join the fabled Great Game as a western imperial obsession. And this too, in time, would have to come up against rising Arab nationalism.
Would Ataturk and Ibn Saud’s ascendency in Turley and Arabia respectively have happened? Perhaps. The political instability in Anatolia and the Arabian Peninsula, and also, as we have described in the Levant, would have created conditions which could have brought these ambitious, capable and charismatic men to power.
Mustafa Kemal was just one of many promising Young Turks. Whether he would have risen above his peers without his Gallipoli reputation is moot – he would still have had to shove aside the three amigos. His Turkish nationalism, like that of his Young Turk compadres, was not sympathetic to Arab aspirations. Nor was his agnosticism empathetic to what he considered to be a backward and suffocating Islam. Fezzes and face-coverings were amongst the first things to go once he established his secular republic. Whether he could have held the empire together is another question.
Ibn Saud was not the only kid on the Arabian block. The Hashimites (the descendants of Jordan’s King Abdullah) held the western edge of the peninsula, but also the most spiritually significant – the “haramayn” of Mecca and Medina, no less. The Hashimite princes has their eyes on an Arab Kingdom, but Ibn Saud had his eyes on them. The house of Saud, with its Salafi Wahhabi credentials of a cleaner Islam was way “out there” as far as Arab politics and religion went at the time. Apart from perennial outbreaks of intolerance towards and repression of religious and ethnic minorities and heterodox Muslim sects, Istanbul ruled its multinational and multicultural empire with a light if autocratic hand. But there was all that oil – and to British policy makers, that trumped loyalty to the Qurayshi wannabes in the west, for all their descent from the Prophet and their custodianship of the Holy Places.
How would British-controlled Egypt’s politics have developed? Resistance to Britain and its puppet monarchy (headed by the descendent of that famed Albanian schemer Muhammad Ali, who had caused the Europeans so much angst in the early days of the Eastern Question) was growing and would develop into a secular Egyptian nationalism on the one hand and the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood on the other.
So: no Gallipoli campaign (Churchill would have had to find another project, and young Australia another patriotic shibboleth); no Arab Revolt – the Hashemites would have remained just another influential desert clan and TE Lawrence would not have become a legend; no Balfour Declaration or Sykes Picot agreement to distort and dismember the Arab Levant with two conflicting and irreconcilable nationalisms, so, no Syria, Iraq and Lebanon; no British (and Australian) advance on Gaza, Jerusalem and Damascus (General Allenby might have ended up on the Western Front instead of the steps of King David’s Tower in Jerusalem) and arguably, therefore no Mandate, no Palestine, and no Israel; no Armenian genocide to darken Türkiye‘s reputation and prefigure the Shoah that was to come, or then again, perhaps never came; and no Türkiye as we know it today (although President Erdogan is certainly acting out his inner sultan).
As former and unlamented Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice prematurely proclaimed in 2006 too much ridicule from Arabs generally, “a new Middle East”.
TE Lawrence, General Allenby, Ataturk, and Ben Gurion
The Ottoman Secret
By Raymond Khoury
The Ottoman siege of Vienna of 1683 sees the city fall and the Christian forces annihilated. Western Europe is conquered soon afterwards and in 2019, an increasingly repressive Sultan still rules the continent (though Britain and Russia withstood the onslaught and remain independent nations). A lot has happened in the world since 1683, and as Christendom was vanquished, many things just didn’t happen. Russia is still ruled by the Czars, and America by a post-Mayflower Christian theocracy. Concepts like democracy, freedom of thought and expression, and gender equality are ideas still struggling against heavy odds to be born.
We are in Muslim Paris in 2019. Kamal Arslan Agha is a patriotic, loyal subject of the the Sultan and a special investigator of the Tashkeelat-i Hafiye, the secret police, on the front line of the empire’s harsh response to increasing political and economic turmoil throughout Europe. The Caliphate’s efforts to maintain law and order spare no one, and soon, Kamal’s own family attracts the Hafiye’s attention.
His brother and sister-in-law discover a secret so dangerous, the Caliphate must suppress it, and with the foundations of the Empire under threat, Kamal’s family have no choice but to run. Whether or not they can escape the pursuing Hafiye will determine their own fate, and that of the Caliphate itself – its past, its present, and its future.
Khouri’s vision of a world dominated by conservative, repressive regimes combining religious conformity with modern technology is not a pleasant one. Western democracy might have its faults, but as Churchill said, it’s better than most of the alternatives.
This is, of course, fiction, written by a novelist and not a historian. Its political, cultural and technical milieu is predicated on “what if? What if the Ottomans had expanded and prospered for three centuries instead of gradually transforming into the “sick man of Europe” to be dissected and defeated by western powers? What if through serendipitous and underhand means, the empire has acquired the military, industrial, scientific and technical wherewithal to build over four centuries a world that in many ways in not unlike our own? What if their had been no enlightenment, no French or Russian revolutions, no Hitler, no Holocaust, no Hiroshima?
Incidentally, the siege of Vienna in 1683 gives its name to ‘Gates of Vienna’, a fanatically anti-Muslim far-right blog. Its essential thesis is that this was only one battle in a long war and that Europe and its civilisation are constantly threatened by a Muslim invasion.
As Kurt Vonnegut’s avatar Kilgore Trout would say, “so it goes …”
Sultans of Spring – if the Ottoman Empire hadn’t collapsed.
Imagine the mayhem that might have been avoided had the Ottoman Empire been saved rather than sunk. Blame, among others, Winston Churchill
When a Serb gunman shot an Austrian archduke in the summer of 1914, the nations of Europe tumbled into war with all the grace of bowling pins. Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, whose ally Russia declared war on Austria, whose ally Germany declared war on Russia, whose allies France and Britain declared war on Germany and Austria. By early August the continent was in flames.
Much as it wobbled like the rest, however, one of those bowling pins could not make up its mind. Which way would Turkey fall? Should the fading Ottoman Empire join the Triple Entente (Britain, France and Russia) or go with the Central Powers (Germany and Austria-Hungary)
Turkey’s 500-year-old empire was shrinking. It had lost its territories in Africa, nearly all its Mediterranean islands and most of its Balkan lands as well as chunks of eastern Anatolia. It was debt-ridden, industrially backward and politically shaky.
Still, the sultan’s lands straddled two continents, controlling access to the Black Sea. His Arabian territories stretched beyond the holy cities of Islam to the mountains of Yemen and the Persian Gulf, where there were rumoured to lie vast caverns of the sticky black liquid soon to replace coal as the world’s chief source of power.
Confident of Turkey’s weakness, Britain, France and Russia could have clobbered the Ottomans and divided the spoils. Thankfully, wiser heads prevailed. At a secret conclave aboard a British dreadnought off the coast of Norway in late July, a far-sighted politician by the name of Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, worked with French, Russian and Turkish diplomats to forge a treaty. The Turks drove a hard bargain for, as they coyly revealed, Germany too was proffering arms and gold in exchange for an alliance.
The deal that was reached proved immensely beneficial to all concerned. From France, Turkey received generous debt relief. Russia scrapped all claims to Ottoman territory, and made a limited goodwill withdrawal from parts of Anatolia. Churchill waived further payment on two warships that British shipyards were building for Turkey. And Turkey received assurances that its vulnerable extremities would not be attacked; for an empire that for a century had been preyed upon like a carcass this was a new lease of life.
The rewards to the Triple Entente were equally big. Granted exclusive access to the Black Sea, Russia’s allies could resupply the tsar’s armies when they faltered at the start of the war. With no need to defend its Turkish frontier, Russia moved thousands of crack troops from the Caucasus to shore up its front lines. Turkey signed separate agreements recognising British control of the Suez Canal, Aden and the Trucial sheikhdoms of the Persian Gulf, securing the sea lanes for Britain’s massive deployment of troops from the colonies to the Western Front. Turkey’s own army joined in a broad front against Austria-Hungary. Together, these Allied advantages are thought to have shortened the war by as much as a year; the Central Powers might not have sued for a truce as soon as America entered the war, but fought on instead.
Reprieved from collapse, the Ottoman Empire’s government pursued radical reforms. Challenged by growing nationalist tendencies from Arab, Armenian, Greek and Kurdish subjects, Sultan Mehmed V issued a historic firman or proclamation that recognised these as individual nations united under the Ottoman sovereign.
The sultan got to keep the title of caliph, commander of the Sunni Muslim faithful, which his ancestors had acquired four centuries earlier. This proved useful when the empire had to put down a rebellion of religious fanatics in central Arabia, led by a man called Ibn Saud who gained followers by claiming he would restore Islam to a purer state. But mostly the empire was seen as a tolerant place. When Nazi persecutions drove Jews from Europe in the 1930s, many took refuge there (as they had done when expelled from Spain in 1492), particularly in the province of Jerusalem.
If only…
Needless to say, none of the above happened. Quite the opposite. Turkey aligned with Germany in the first world war, and the allies did attempt to invade and divide its empire. Churchill, instead of handing over the warships that ordinary Turks had paid for by subscription, had them seized for the British navy. In 1915 he ordered a catastrophic attack on Turkey; the landing at Gallipoli cost the allies 300,000 casualties. British campaigns against Turkey in Iraq and the Levant cost another million lives.
Turkey’s casualties mounted, by war’s end, to 3m-5m people, nearly a quarter of the Ottoman population. This included some 1.5m Armenians, slaughtered because Turkish officials believed they might become a fifth column for a hostile Russia. And when Britain and France grabbed the Ottomans’ Arab lands, their suppression of uprisings cost thousands more lives.
How much of today’s mayhem in the Middle East, from civil wars to terror in the name of Islam (and of restoring the caliphate) to the emergence of sectarian dictators such as Bashar al-Assad, not to mention of such a grudge-bearing Ottoman revivalist as Recep Tayyip Erdogan, might have been avoided, if only Churchill had embraced Johnny Turk instead of sinking him?
Ataturk Monument, Istanbul
Here are other posts about Turkey past and present:
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.
Read the full story of Twin Pines here in Lloyd Fell’s small but captivating book:
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; TheOdyssey 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
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 …
Its been a diverse year In That Howling Infinite. We have traveled, to quote Bob Dylan, “all the way from New Orleans to Jerusalem” – and to many other places in between. Vikings and Roman legionaries; Bob Dylan, Jackson Browne and Bruce Cockburn; Britain in the ‘forties and Paris in the ‘fifties; America, the Levant, and even Wonderland. By Year’s end a million souls will have journeyed to Europe from the war-ravaged lands of the Middle East, and my final posts for the year contemplate what it might mean for refugees who find to safe haven in Australia.
Here is a retrospective.
The year began with a short piece on recent archeological discoveries in Jerusalem that strongly suggested that the Via Dolorosathat Jesus trode on his final journey to Golgotha was the wrong route, and that instead, it began just inside of the Jaffa Gate. I took a light-hearted look at the Jerusalem Syndrome, a mental condition involving the presence of religiously-themed obsessive ideas, delusions and other psychoses triggered by a visit to The Holy City.
I read but one piece of fiction this year – a sad admission from a lifelong bibliophile – but this one book was probably one of the best I have read: The Incorrigible Optimists Club, winner of the prestigious Prix de Goncourt, by Jean Michel Guenassia. It is set in Paris’ Rive Gauche, as the ‘fifties gives way to the ‘sixties; as the crooners makes way for rock n’roll; as the Cold War divides a continent, sending dissidents and refugees fleeing to a safe haven in Paris; as the Algerian war divides and destroys families: and as the seeds of ‘les evenments de Mai 1968’ are sown in the hearts and souls of France’s young people. It is a coming of age book, of young hopes and fears, love and loss, a book about writers and reading, and the magic and power of the written word in prose and poetry.
March saw the passing of my old friend Dermott Ryder, chronicler and luminary of the Folk Music revival in Sydney in the early ‘seventies. Dermott’s Last Rideis my tribute to him. And April was a month of anniversaries and remembrance. Forty years since the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War, and the centenary of the landings of the ANZACs at Gallipoli. Pity the Nation takes its title from Robert Fisk’s tombstone of a book on the long war; and he had taken it from a poem written in 1934 by Khalil Gibran, Lebanon’s most celebrated poet, a poem that was both a prophetic testament and a testimony of times to come: “Pity the nation divided into fragments, each fragment deeming itself a nation”. The Watchers of the Water is a song about Gallipoli sing by a Turkish solder.
May saw two diverse pieces of social history. The Spirit of 45 takes personal perspective of British filmmaker Ken Loach’s documentary of the excitement and optimism that followed the Labour Party’s election victory at the end of World War II. This laid the foundation stone for the British welfare state. Bob Dylan’s Americana discusses the meaning and significance of the lyrics and the imagery of Dylan’s early ‘eighties masterpiece Blind Willie McTell, a harrowing journey through America’s dark heart.
In June, we visited Yorkshire and in London, conjuring up memories and historical connections. Harald Went A Vikingis a saga about the first of two kings to die on English soil in the late summer of 1066, and the adventures that took him from Norway to Constantinople and Jerusalem and finally, to Yorkshire. Roman Wall Bluestakes its title from WH Auden’s poem about a homesick and grumpy legionnaire on Hadrian’s Wall, and contemplates the lives of the ethnically polyglot soldiery who defended the Empire’s borders. And June saw another famous anniversary, the Bicentennial of the momentous and bloody Battle of Waterloo. The Long Road to Waterloo prefaces a song for the men who, after twenty six long years of war, never came home.
Battle of Stamford Bridge, depicting King Harald Hardrada hit in the neck by an arrow
In July, controversy erupted in the Land of the Free over the flying of the Confederate Flag in states that were once part of Old Dixie. The dead hand of the Civil War reached out and touched the hearts of Americans and their friends throughout the world in the wake of yet another mass shooting. This time, a young man gunned down worshippers at prayer. That the victims were folk of colour, and the shooter, a young white extremist, reopened wounds that have never really healed. Rebel Yellsurmises that The South will always be with us, in our thoughts, in our historical memory, in our art and literature, our books and films, and our favourite music.
September marked the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Lewis Carroll’s timeless, fabulist masterpiece Alice In Wonderland. Go Ask Alice, I Think She’ll Know reproduces Australian critic Peter Craven’s masterful celebration of Alice 150. The title belongs to the mesmerizing Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane who cut through to the rabbit chase channeling the long-gone Lewis in a psychedelic musical masterpiece.
On an infinitely sadder note, Ruins and Bones is a tribute to the memory of Syrian archeologist Khaled Muhammed al Asaad, murdered by ISIS in August 2015, and of Palmyra, the ‘Pearl of the Desert’.
Allende’s Desk and Osama’s Pyjamas is a brief commentary on the extension of American military power and the pathology of demons and demonization. Tales of Yankee Powerlooks at American foreign policy during the 1980s from the perspective of the songs of Jackson Browne and Bruce Cockburn.
November’s Children of the Revolution looks at the events that led up to the beginning of the Syrian Civil War, and the early 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. Those days of hope are long gone.
A highlight of this past year has been my work as a volunteer with the Humanitarian Settlement Services programme. The HSS’ mission is to assist newly arrived refugees to settle in Australia. In No Going Home, I endeavour to imagine the refugee journey. Hejirais a sequel of sorts and, indeed, a happy ending.
Happy New Year to these prospective New Australians, and to all my readers. May 2016 be fortunate and fulfilling.
Back in the last century, before ANZAC Day became the secular Christmas that it has become, before marketing people and populist politicians saw its commercial and political potential, before the fatal shore became a crowded place of annual pilgrimage, my Turkish friend, the late Naim Mehmet Turfan, gave me a grainy picture of a Turkish soldier at Gelibolu carrying a large howitzer shell on his back. Then there was this great film by Australian director Peter Weir, starring young Mel Gibson and Mark Lee. There were these images of small boats approaching a dark and alien shore, of Lighthorsemen sadly farewelling their Walers as they embarked as infantry, and of the doomed Colonel Barton humming along to a gramophone recording of Bizet’s beautiful duet from The Pearl Fishers, ‘Au fond du temple saint’ before joining his men in the forlorn hope of The Nek.
There were other melodies I could never quite get out of my head. One I first heard in a musical in Beirut before that magical city entered its Dark Ages – Al Mahatta, written by the famous Rabbani Brothers and starring the Lebanese diva Fayrouz. And The Foggy Dew, one of the most lyrical and poignant of the Irish rebel songs:
Right proudly high over Dublin town, they hung out the flag of war. ‘Twas better to die ‘neath that Irish sky than at Suvla or at Sud el Bar…Twas England bade our Wild Geese go that small nations might be free, But their lonely graves are by Suvla’s waves or the fringe of the grey North Sea.
Over three thousand Irishmen died at Gallipoli.
The song grew out of these many inspirations.
It was first performed in public by HuldreFolk in the closing concert of Coffs Harbour Folk Festival at the RSL on Australia Day 1984. When we had finished, there was absolutely silence in the hall. Then a voice cried out “the sky didn’t fall down!”, and the hall erupted with applause.
Once upon a war…
Monday 25th April is Australia and New Zealand’s national day of remembrance for all Anzac solders killed and wounded in their nation’s wars, and to honour servicemen and women past and present. At first, the Anzacs fought in the British Empire’s Wars, beginning with the Boer War, and then through two World Wars. From the mid -twentieth century, they have fought and died in what could ostensibly be called America’s wars even though these were waged under UN, EU or western alliance auspices: Korea, Gulf Wars II and III, Afghanistan, and the current interventions in Syria and Iraq. Incidentally, Australian veterans are presently commanding mercenary forces hired by the Gulf coalition that is laying waste to towns and villages in Yemen (with the help of American and British weaponry).
At the heart of the Anzac Day remembrance is the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps’ role the Dardanelles campaign of 1915-16, Winston Churchill’s grandiose and ill-conceived plan to take the Ottoman Empire out of the war by seizing the strategic strait between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, thereby threatening Istanbul, the Ottoman capital. It was a military failure. From the initial seaborne assault to the evacuation, it lasted eight months and cost 114,000 lives with 230,000 wounded.
In 1915, Australians greeted the landings at Gallipoli with unbridled enthusiasm as a nation-making event. But it wasn’t long before they were counting the dreadful cost. More than 8000 Australians died during the Gallipoli campaign. As a loyal member of the British Empire, Australia eventually sent 330,000 men overseas to fight for the King. Volunteers all, not all of them white men – despite the authorities policy of recruiting only Australians of Anglo-Celtic stock, their ranks included many indigenous, Chinese and others. By the time the war ended in 1918, 60,000 of them were dead. As the late historian Ken Inglis once pointed out: “If we count as family a person’s parents, children, siblings, aunts and uncles and cousins, then every second Australian family was bereaved by the war.
[As for the Anzac Day march], I’d say only returned people could march. And then the day would come, I’d hope, when there’d be the last person marching, the last survivor as it were. And I’d think what a great day that would be … because it would mean we’d been at peace for a long time. And that’s what those men in the First World War were fighting for.”
Bill Gammage, historian and author of The Broken Years.
Gallipoli is cited as the crucible of Australian nationhood, but the Anzacs’ part in the doomed campaign was but a sideshow of the wider campaign. Although it is celebrated in Australian song and story, it was the Ottomans’ most significant victory in the war that was to destroy the seven hundred year old Ottoman Empire secure the reputation of its most successful general Mustafa Kemal, who as Ataturk, became the founder of modern Turkey.
Some thirty four thousand British soldiers died on the peninsula, including 3,400 Irishmen, and ten thousand Frenchmen – many of these latter being “colonial” troops from West and North Africa. Australia lost near on ten thousand and NZ three. Some 1,400 Indian soldiers perished for the King Emperor. Fifty seven thousand allied soldiers died, and seventy five thousand were wounded. The Ottoman army lost fifty seven thousand men, and one hundred and seven thousand were wounded (although these figures are probably much higher). An overlooked fact is that some two thirds of the “Turkish” solders in Kemal’s division were actually Arabs from present day Syrian and Palestine. Gallipoli was indeed a multicultural microcosm of a world at war.
Whilst the flower of antipodean youth is said to have perished on Gallipoli’s fatal shore, this was just the overture. Anzac troops were despatched to the Western Front, and between 1919 and 1918, 45,000 Aussies died there and 124,000 were wounded.
Once upon a war, the Dardanelles Campaign of 1915-16 was a sideshow to the bigger theatres of the Eastern and Western Fronts. To some, it was a reminder that they could not stomach Winston Churchill for this was said to be his greatest stuff up in a career replete with such (although they would admit that he more than exonerated himself his and Britain’s Finest Hour). For many Australians and New Zealanders, it was a national baptism of fire, of youthful sacrifice on the altar of Empire. And notwithstanding the military defeat and retreat, the folly and foolhardiness, in the harrowing adversity and heroism, lay the bones of a young country’s enduring creation myth.
Former soldier James Brown, Anzac’s Long Shadow
There are abundant primary and secondary sources relating to the Dardanelles campaign and the Anzacs, but here is a wiki primer: Gallipoli Campaign
And here is HukdreFolk’s rendering of Russian poet Yevtushenko’s account of the parade of German prisoners of war through the streets of Moscow in 1941, juxtaposed with The Watchers of the Water.
Anthem for Doomed Youth
Wilfred Owen
What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,—
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.
In That Howling Infinite 