"Let us rejoice." Australia Day

Australia Day has come and gone with all the traditional festivities: calls to change the flag, calls for a republic, and the insistence that the only thing that has happened in the last 222 years in Australia was the dispossession of the Aborigines.  For some reason, some people seem to think Australia Day is a day to concentrate on all that they don’t like about Australia. One friend on Facebook went so far as to ask ‘Remind me what we are celebrating again?’

I suppose I could have suggested a unified country with a strong liberal democracy with universal suffrage, freedom of speech, association, and belief, a country that has fought for freedom and not just our own, that was at the forefront of suffrage for women, that has given the world two world-class sopranos, as well as writers, artists, philosophers, sportspeople, actors, and scientists in numbers well above statistical probability and much more, but it seemed like too much work –  in itself something of an quintessentially Australian attitude. Which is not to suggest there are not many and urgent issues we need to deal with as a country, but other writers have gone into detail about that. As I said on my own Facebook status, my country right or wrong; when right to be kept right, when wrong to be put right.

I was thinking of calling this blog “For what it is worth” or “I could be wrong but…”, so here goes: to be frank I don’t see the need for a Republic.  Our government works very well, with stability that is the envy of many other countries around the world. People argue we need to make the gesture of Republicanism, to prove we have matured. I don’t have a lot of time for gestures: they’re easy to make and don’t achieve anything. And setting out to prove you’re mature seems self-defeating.

Mind you when I was given the chance to vote for an Australian head of state, I voted ‘yes’. Which seems contradictory, but if the question is put to me, I have to answer. And if we do go for a Republic, I would like to see a system where the President is appointed by a majority of 2/3 of the combined Houses of Parliament. There are those who argue that having the people vote directly for the President will take the politics out of it. How a popular vote removes politics is a mystery to me. On what basis are to make our vote? Hairstyle? Gymnastic ability? Poetry readings? No, the President will be a figurehead, and so should be appointed by the Parliament of the Day, the 2/3 majority avoiding the spectre of the party hack appointment.

The flag: again, I don’t sense a real need for change. In the latest debate one of the most interesting voices belonged to a number of immigrants, who said the flag was the symbol of their dream to come to Australia (this country with nothing to celebrate) and to change it would be to destroy that which sustained that dream for so long. And what would we change it to?  No design is going to please everybody and no design except the current one has such history attached to it. However, one day, and not too far in the future, I think the Union Flag will disappear from the corner. In symbolic terms, the blue field still represents the British heritage of much of the population, our language and institutions, so that will not be lost. Maybe the Aboriginal flag could go there instead? Or perhaps we replace the whole thing with the Eureka Flag instead, which belongs to all of us, not just the Union movement.

As to changing Australia Day from 26 January, I’m not sure what day we can choose where the Aboriginals were not dispossessed during European colonisation. It seems to me that changing the day to another could lead to a forgetting – surely no-one wants that. However, the argument for change is not unreasonable, and could lead to some people finally shutting up. The most positive date I can think of is perhaps the day of the 1967 Referendum,  so 27 May might be the go. Not that the referendum was the end of the story. There is still a long road ahead of us.

I dislike the term ‘Invasion Day’. It's a very understandable term, considering the armed conflicts that followed between settlers and the natives. All to often though, tt seems a very clumsy and obvious code for  white fellahs to say‘I think the right way about Australian history – do you?’ For me, the word ‘invasion’ is too narrow, and implies a purely military purpose to the British colonisation of Australia that just simply didn’t exist. Read Inga Clendinnen’s excellent book about the early years of colonisation, 'Dancing with Strangers'. One of the first interactions between the British and the Australians was a dance party. Many of the problems that occurred between the two groups was not due to malevolence on either side, but to the gulf of misunderstanding that separated them. They had little if any common ground from which they could begin to truly understand each other, despite efforts on both sides.  As someone smarter than me once said, never attribute to malice that which can be explained by ignorance. No, if you want a term that includes the taking of land from indigenous population, the use of land as a dumping ground for prisoners, the establishment of farms and government buildings, which leads to private ownership of land, an expansion of the original settlement, with clumsy if well meant interaction with the indigenous, the inadvertent spread of disease, as well as the many armed and malicious attacks on those people, leading to the breakdown of their society, the effects of which we are still grappling with, why not use the word we already have – colonisation?

A new friend of mine, daughter of a Greek father and Aborginal mother (she calls herself a Wogerigine) spent Australia Day at a festival called ‘Share the Spirit', celebrating Survival Day. This is a much better term: it focuses on what the Aboriginals have done and are doing and is a true celebration of their culture that we are all invited to join. Australia is heading in the right direction. We can all celebrate that.

"A plague on both your houses!" Farewell my concubine

I have a plan to write a musical based on the Oxford English Dictionary, simply because it's about the worst idea I could imagine. "What's that supposed to mean?" would be the opening number. I think the show may simply be called OED! or O! E! D! or something along those lines.

What on earth brought that up? Oddly, a novel about Chinese history of the 20th century. Which I had to read in translation, Chinese being one of the blind points in my education. Along with French, Russian, German, Greek (Ancient and Modern), Spanish, Anglo-Saxon and any number of other languages that has meant I have had to read many books and poetry in translation.  I can feel the writers in other languages berating me, like the Baker in "The Hunting of the Snark".

I told you in German, I told you in Dutch

I told you in Hebrew and Greek

But I wholly forgot (and it vexes me much)

That English is what you speak.

Translation, like navigation, is always a difficult art. Seamus Heaney, having translated "Beowulf" into modern English, called translation ‘breaking rocks for pleasure’. The art is to translate creative works into a different language while preserving the style and the idiomatic and poetic qualities of the original. And it’s difficult. When "Summer of the Seventeenth Doll" enjoyed overseas success, one commentator wondered ‘How do you translate “You little trimmer!” into Swedish?” Not many of us can do Clive James’ trick of learning new languages expressly to read in them. And so we depend on the skill of the translator. In the end, the perfect translation that conveys all the nuance of an original work cannot exist. Much as I love ‘"Cyrano de Bergerac" I know that in a sense I can never know it in the same way that a French speaker can.

A similar but very different problem exists when adapting works from one form to another. The book I have just read was "Farewell my concubine" by Lillian Lee, translated by Andrea Lingenfelter. I first encountered this work as an extraordinary 1993 film, directed by Kaige Chen. I remember being astonished by this film, although I have not seen it since. I did not even know it was based on a novel until I saw it in my local library. The film is faithful to the story of two boys trained in the Peking Opera, who survive the Japanese invasion, World War Two, the Chinese Civil War and the excesses of the Communist regime. There are some differences, particularly the ending but this is to be expected. What works on the page may not work visually, and vice versa.

Chen Diayi and Duan Xialou meet as children at a training school for Peking Opera. The training is strict and brutal. The stronger Xialou takes Diayi under his wing and their friendship lasts into their adulthood when they become the two biggest stars of the Opera. Diayi falls in love with his friend, a love that cannot be returned and is threatened when Xialou marries. All their lives are cast into chaos as history envelops them. They suffer imprisonment, war, and the mindless violence of the Cultural Revolution.

The Cultural Revolution was one of the horrifying events of the Twentieth Century but we in the West have all but forgotten it. Children were instructed to overthrow all the cultural baggage of centuries of Chinese history. Valuable artefacts, art works and books were destroyed and thousands, if not millions, were tortured, imprisoned and worse. The director of the film was one of those children, and betrayed his own father into prison. His film was in part his act of contrition.

Again I was left to wonder why people can still call themselves left-wing without any of the opprobrium attached to someone who calls themselves right-wing. Left-wing governments were a development only of the Twentieth Century, yet their body count exceeds all the governments that preceded them. Technology may account for some of that number but by no means all. In Russia, China, and Cambodia they killed their citizens with a randomness and ferocity unmatched even by Hitler’s Germany. Still today North Korea keeps its citizens in poverty while the leaders live a life of luxury. If the Twentieth Century taught us anything it was that no political outlook has an exclusive claim on justice and right, yet we seem intent on ignoring that lesson.

What little Chinese literature I have read always strikes me as having a dry objective tone. I have no idea if this is a quality of Chinese writing or its translation into English. Even so, it still has its haunting qualities. The novel takes its title from the opera most performed by the two protagonists, about a Chinese general surrounded by his enemies, deserted by all but his concubine. The lyrics in part run:

                                  My horse cannot advance.

My horse cannot advance, what can I do?

I cannot define why, but I find those lines very affecting. That’s poetry I suppose - even in translation.

"As this day was Cassius born." Julius Caesar

I quote from Shakespeare’s ‘Julius Casear’ (V,i, 71-2) as the book I’ve recently finished was Philip Freeman’s 2008 biography of Julius Caesar, and because I’m writing this on my birthday. Caesar is a character that loomed large in my imagination as a child because, I suspect, he looms large in world history. The most famous leader of the Roman Empire (although the Empire only existed after his death) we still use, in the main, the calender he invented, the rulers of Germany, Russia and other nations took their title from his name, and many of us are born caesarean. We all may cross the Rubicon, cast the die, and come, see, and conquer. He was also a continuing character in Goscinny and Uderzo’s 'Asterix' comics.

Philip Freeman’s book is well-written, very clear and readable. It takes what could a complicated story and makes it accessible and entertaining for the layperson such as myself. And what a story! Caesar came from an old but poor family in the Roman suburbs, and by dint of hard work, determination, and money, allied with political, military and rhetorical skill, not untouched by genius, made himself into the greatest figure of his age. The wonder is not that his enemies killed him, but that he was able to live so long in such a dangerous time.

Caesar was also one of the most literary men of the era, leaving behind a sizable collection of writing. Much of it was done as a means of gaining publicity and popular acclaim which he required, but this does not diminish his achievement. We remember him as the soldier, the politician, a lover, and also a writer; a renaissance man some 1500 years too early. He was intelligent, loyal, cunning, daring, vain, merciful and implacable.

War, Otto von Bismarck once said, is politics by other means. The Romans made this quite explicit, in their activities and in their law. Caesar and the other soldier politicians such as Pompey and Crassus, were always very conscious of how their military activity would affect their political careers back in Rome. I was also struck by how important rhetoric was to them – a good speech in the Senate could make or break a career.

Many people, including George Washington and Orson Welles, saw Caesar as the tyrant destroying a Republic. But we may have this wrong way around. The Roman Republic served the interests of a few of Rome’s oldest and wealthiest families, and kept Roman Citizenship and its privileges from the many. Caesar and his supporters wanted to extend citizenship to many people and decentralise power over the far-flung parts of Roman rule. (Caesar played no small part in increasing this area.) While like Ancient Greek democracy, we would nowadays not recognise his system as our kind of democracy, he was the progressive, representing the common man, giving more freedom to more people, while the Republicans were the conservatives, keeping power and freedom for the few. Call it an error from nomenclature.

Because Casear and Rome were such influences on world history, many of the people in this book I first encountered via popular culture. I have already mentioned Shakespeare’s play and the Asterix comics. A major figure in the story is Crassus, memorably played by Laurence Olivier in Spartacus (John Gavin, Marion Crane’s boyfriend in Psycho, played Caesar - that's him on the left). So when I read the names of Caesar, Crassus, Antony, Cassius, like as not the image that came to mind would be Olivier, Gielgud or Brando – or even a cartoon character.

Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing. The creators of Asterix did their research and their picture of Caesar both visually and as a character is pretty good. Likewise their information on Gaulish life, the Roman conquest and occupation of Gaul is surprisingly accurate. Gaulish warriors were probably in better shape physically though; see The Dying Gaul. (Scroll down that page for the pictures.)

I’m trying to remember what books I have read on Ancient Rome. There was my picture book as a child called ‘The Roman Empire’ but I tended to lose interest after Caesar was killed ie before the Empire was established. Good pictures though. I saw the series ‘I, Claudius’ and subsequently read the Robert Graves novels. And I did spend a weekend housesitting for a friend reading his copy of Seutonius’ "The Twelve Caesars".  Now I think on it, I stopped reading after Claudius. So my knowledge of Roman history can be called spotty at best. At least now it's a little better.

"East is East, and West is West." Rudyard Kipling

“Do you like Kipling?”

“I don’t know, I’ve never kippled.”

“Rudyard Kipling.”

“Is it?”

This ancient and hand-tooled joke was useful to me; it taught me how to say ‘Rudyard’. (I learnt how to pronounce John Geilgud’s name when I read of him turning down a social invitation by saying ‘Geilgud doesn’t feel good”.) But I have never really Kippled until recently. I have read ‘If’, still one of the best formulas for manhood extant, and I have seen Disney’s "The Jungle Book", but for me Kipling was a little more than a name associated with Empire and the White Man’s Burden; a concept rather than a writer.

Which is perhaps how he is for most modern readers. Kipling was one of the last writers who enjoyed a mass audience, but he is not nearly as widely read now. He has attracted the attention of the big screen: ‘The Jungle Book”, “Kim” and “Gunga Din” have all been made into films and television. Another big-screen adaptation of his work was John Huston’s film  "The man who would be king"with Sean Connery, Michael Caine, Christopher Plummer, and the wonderful Indian actor Saeed Jaffrey. I saw this movie some years ago (presented by Bill Collins as I recall) and its story surprised me. It is a boy's own adventure with two adventurers, British rogues, who head to Kafiristan, Ruritania of the East, to become kings to gain power and riches. They conquer many tribes and get their gold and a throne. It starts to go wrong when one of them decides their actions are in fact ordained by fate, a spiritual quest.  The ending is devastating. 

I was surprised because it seemed to me, amid the adventure, humour and derring-do, there was a searing critique of the British Empire, and this from the pen of a man who has the reputation of being the Empire’s chief booster. It was he after all who coined the phrase “white man’s burden”. This was a story of men driven first by greed to conquer a country, who then decide they are the tools of God, and are destroyed by their ambitions. I cannot think of a better potted history of the British Empire, particularly in India. Perhaps, I thought, Huston and his screen writers had changed Kipling’s story to better suit modern values. So when I spotted "The man who would be king; and other stories” in my local library, I  decided to finally read the story. Surprisingly, the film is faithful to the short story, if a little more fun. The criticisms of British Imperialism were all in the story as Kipling wrote it. More astonishingly, he was only twenty-three at the time. If Kipling was ever a jingoistic Empire man, it was an attitude he lost early.

All the stories in this collection were written in the one year, which is also shows what a hard worker Kipling was. His experience as a journalist comes through strongly with his gift for observation, with characters drawn from all levels of Anglo-Indian life, including the natives. Most of the stories are told by a detatched observer, but some from first-person. It is a fascinating glimpse of a world that while not entirely lost, is utterly changed. This Oxford edition comes with plenty of endnotes, explaining the many references to Indian language, regions and British Raj patois and customs now all lost in the mist.

My false impression of Kipling was of course based entirely on ignorance. I wonder how often we make judgements not only on artists but also on politicians and other public figures not on what they said or do, but what we hear they have said or done. Kipling, the apostle of the Empire was in fact a perceptive critic. The literary heir of this political conservative is George Orwell, the socialist. Both men experienced life in the British Raj and both wrote about it clear-eyed, showing us not only the exoticism of the sub-Continent and its people, but the inequities of British rule, Orwell using the essay, Kipling the short story and longer works. Both are definitely worth reading.

It also made me think how much better a short story or novella is for adaptation to the big screen.  “Million dollar baby” and “Brokeback Mountain” were also based on short stories and the adaptations were able to be faithful to their sources. It makes sense – a short story can be used in full in a feature film, whereas with novels it is always a case of what do they leave out. Not that adapting a novella means you will always have a successful adaptation. ‘The Great Gatsby” has always defied filming, and I do not believe Buz Lurhman using 3D is going to change that trend. But I may yet be proved wrong.

Update: Since I wrote this, I have discovered that Kafiristan was in fact a real country. 'Kafir' means 'infidel' as this was a small independent non-Muslim country. It forms part of modern day Afghanistan.

"I'll be back." David Marr on Kevin Rudd

The downfall of Kevin Rudd was as fast as it was unexpected. Though we all knew he and his government were in trouble, no-one, or very few, saw that he would be challenged successfully and having led Labor to one election victory, he would not allowed to attempt to lead them to a second. Wikileaks has shown us that the US Government saw this coming before the press in Canberra did. Right-wing commentators such as Andrew Bolt predicted a challenge to his leadership weeks before, predictions dismissed by left-wing commentators as ludicrous.

I quote David Marr from his essay, Power trip: The political journey of Kevin Rudd, part of the Quarterly Essay series:

When his approval rating began to dip sharply in the polls early this year [2010], commentators  wondered if he might be the first prime minister since Scullin back in the Depression to lose power after only a single term. There was speculation that he was in a very delicate position: essentially friendless in the party and ripe for decapitation by Julia Gillard before the looming elections. This is rubbish. For one thing it underestimates the debts owed by the party to only the third man in sixty years to bring Labor from Opposition to government. But such talk does point to the strange patterns of the man’s political career.

Even after the leadership wrangle was done and Rudd was dusted, left-wing journos on ABC’s excellent Insiders tried to argue that those who predicted the spill were making it up and that there was a spill was entirely co-incidental, and that it was a sudden in real-life as it appeared in the media. When you stuff up, just admit you stuffed up and move on. Such are the vagaries of politics and predictions. Andrew Bolt, for that matter, predicted that Wayne Swann would not be Treasurer after the election, due to his handling of the mining tax. And so it goes.

I was never a fan of Rudd. I thought his prime ministership would be like having the country run by Sir Humphrey without the laughs, and I wasn't entirely wrong. On the other hand, I think Labor panicked in getting rid of him, or perhaps there were other forces at work. Certainly, after such a political bombshell, Labor have done little to get their government "back on track".

Meanwhile, David Marr’s essay is good reading. It is sympathetic to Rudd without being sycophantic. The criticisms of him as an automaton, obsessed with micromanagement and astonishly poor people skills are balanced with his qualities of hard work, depth of knowledge and determination. Marr’s conclusion that Rudd is driven by anger is well-argued. From my inexpert, ill-informed position, it seems to me that vanity is his strongest drive and Alexander Downer agrees with me. Both agree on his drive for power though - maybe that is the key. In any case, Marr’s essay is a good primer on the life and beliefs of Kevin Rudd, finding those strange patterns throughout his career that account for his rise and perhaps his fall. Though down, Rudd is by no means out. Like all good robots, he could reassemble himself and come back at us in the sequel.

"More things in heaven and earth." Two books on religion

Some years ago, two friends of mine, one an atheist, the other a new age spiritual type, were taking about the Narnia series. They both loved the books, then the atheist said ‘It’s a pity about all the Christian stuff though.”  It was like Ned Flanders saying he enjoyed Woody Allen films, “except for that nervous fellah who’s always in them.” It still strikes me as one of the most singularly stupid things I’ve ever heard, made all the worse by the intelligence of the speaker.

But religion, even the lack of it, can bring out the worst in people. It can also bring out the best, but this world being as it is, we tend to focus on the former. Reading any religious discussion on the net inevitably finds atheists lobbing in with their picture of any believer: stupid, ignorant, badly-read, afraid, unthinking, and atheists of course are all intelligent, perspicacious and brave. Actually if you tell me you are an atheist the only assumption I can make from there is that you don’t believe in God, which is rather a priori; anything else is up for argument. I know very stupid atheists and intelligent believers, and vice versa and everything in between.

I should lay my cards on the table at this point and say that I am a practising Catholic, with reservations about the Church. On the other hand, I have reservations about what people like to call secular society as well. I hope we never create a secular society. The pluralistic model seems to work much better. I will also say I am a big fan of science, and find it fascinating. Among the many things I love about science is that every answer found seems to create more questions.  The ideas, the scale, the revelations and the mysteries all boggle the mind, and I enjoy that. I'm not a fan of those who say you can believe in evolution or God but not both.

I’ve recently finished two books in this broad area, neither written by a believer. The first was Darwinian Fairytales by Australian philosopher David Stove, the second The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and its scientific pretensions by American mathematician and philosopher David Berlinski. I don’t suppose either of them offer the final word in the area, but then who on earth thinks that they can – apart from Richard Dawkins? (Reading Richard Dawkins, I find, is rather like being shouted at.) Both books are very readable, with a sense of humour. I have never read Darwin or some of the other key authors so I can only take these authors’ word for what they said, but that is often the way.

I am not in a strong position to evaluate these writers in terms of their conclusions, but I am able to say that they ask very provocative questions. What both authors agree on is that Darwinian theory of evolution is not sufficient to answer the great questions, not even how did we get here, and certainly not why. Be careful here; both of them believe in evolution, but neither think Darwin nor his latter day followers have discovered how it works. Why do we sing, write poetry, music and operas? What survival skills do these relate to? The big flaw in attempts to use Darwinism to explain all human behaviour has always been altruism, the sacrifice of self for others with no reward, perhaps even risk of death. In The Naked Ape, Desmond Morris came up with a weak explanation and Richard Dawkins’ is merely an elaboration on it. They both claim we are all trying to protect our genes, however small an amount may be present in the other person we save. I think better of humans than either of these writers.

Science, for all its excellent qualities, does not have all the answers. And pretending it does makes it easy for those opposed to pick the flaws and the gaps and pretend it invalidates the whole. We see this in the global warming debate. Alarmist predictions and saying “The science is settled” have made it very easy to say ‘Well that bit’s wrong for a start”, “we haven’t run out of water, like you said we would” or “this scientist disagrees” and therefore the problem isn’t even worth discussing, let alone worth taking action. 

Berlinski says, quite reasonably, that the rise of militant atheism is a response to the rise of fundamentalism. However one side being close-minded, arrogant and convinced that only they have the answers is no reason for the other to become so. We have met the enemy, and he is us. Reading reviews and debates and online chats, one is always struck by the amount of anger and vitriol that is engendered. Believers are child-abusers, mentally deranged, or just stupid. I don’t want to live in a world dominated by fundamentalist Muslims, Christians or Jews. But reading Richard Dawkins, the fundamentalist Darwinian, with his angry, dismissive and arrogant approach to all who disagree with him, doesn’t make me want to live in his world either.

It has always seemed to me that in insisting God should be scientifically verifiable in order to be believed, atheists are making a category error, like criticising these apples for their thick skin, soft flesh and odd colour, and condemning those eating them as stupid fools for enjoying those appalling apples, when in fact the group are happily eating oranges, with all the fibre, flavour, and nutrients they are looking for. Mind you, a diet consisting entirely of apples or oranges doesn’t bespeak a particularly healthy or interesting life.

If you are interested in this topic why not read this debate between Dawkins and Francis Collins, a scientist and author of The Language of God: A scientist presents evidence for belief. Books such as Collins’ or Dawkins’ tend to appeal to someone already disposed to think they way the author does. All books do; why else do we pick them up? All we can do is keep thinking, wondering, exploring and, here’s a radical thought, listening. In the end, there is no scientific proof of God, but there is no scientific proof against the concept. As Richard P Feynman, Nobel laureate, atheist, and personal hero once said, “Today we cannot see whether Schrödinger’s equation contains frogs, musical composers or morality. We cannot say whether something like God is needed, or not. And so we can all hold strong opinions either way.”