And What Do You Do Mr. Gable?

  And yet they do.

  Lest we forget, they dutifully murmur, along with staying the course and seeing the mission through. And in thinking we are honouring the dead we forget again and again that politicians who speak softly have always been careless with the lives of others.

  The Drum

  19 October 2010

  MY FATHER WAS one of Dunlop’s Thousand, that now mythical group of POWs who endured the horrors of the Death Railway under the Japanese, led by a doctor called Weary Dunlop.

  Recently he told me how one day on the railway a digger called Slappy Oldham turned up to sick parade with a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. An English major called Driscoll made a swipe at Slappy, which the POW evaded by the slightest move of his head.

  ‘Lucky you missed,’ said Slappy Oldham.

  Driscoll angrily demanded to know why.

  ‘If you’d touched me,’ said Slappy Oldham, ‘I’d have dropped you, you bastard.’

  Driscoll grew more agitated and was speaking of charges when Dunlop arrived. Slappy walked up to the colonel.

  ‘You know that bastard, Driscoll,’ said Slappy Oldham. ‘He tried to swipe me, and I told him off.’

  ‘Good on you, Slappy,’ replied Weary, to the amazement of the upper echelon. ‘Always look after yourself.’

  I once spent a memorable evening with Dunlop that ended drinking in his Toorak mansion, a place where time seemed to have stopped somewhere in the 1930s. I sat on an aged, cracked leather couch and he told me of how as a young doctor in London in the 1930s he had gone into the East End and taken on Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists blackshirts at their rallies. I knew this was unusual, for Dunlop was a distinguished rugby player, capped for Australia, and Mosley recruited heavily from London rugby circles. So concerned was Dunlop by the rise of Fascism he told me he very nearly went to Spain to fight with the International Brigade.

  Was he attracted to the Communist Party then? I asked, knowing well how many of the very best had at the time been.

  ‘Not at all,’ Dunlop said. ‘I just didn’t agree.’

  After a dirty, lost decade Australia finds itself standing bewildered and slightly befuddled by the age in which it has suddenly woken up. After the most sustained boom in Australian history Australians may fairly ask: Where did the money go? It will be an interesting question to ponder when our cherished property values begin to drop and portfolios start to plummet and we stare out at our great UV-irradiated land and wonder why our public schools are worse, our hospitals worse, our social security worse, and our cities less liveable.

  How is it we have come to face perhaps the greatest environmental catastrophe since creatures even slower-witted than ourselves ruled the planet, and still, for example, happily not just endorse but subsidise with our taxes the destruction of Tasmanian native forests?

  Perhaps we have agreed with too much that was wrong for too long.

  If we look at Australia over the last several years we are presented with the unedifying, indeed disturbing image of a society whose major institutions failed. This was not necessarily so in other countries. If it is the case, for example, that the present US administration has committed crimes—at Abu Ghraib, at Guantanamo, in rendition centres—then it was US journalists who first brought them to public light, it was US legal systems and US lawyers that began bringing them into question, it was US public figures who began pressing for change. Nothing similar happened in Australia.

  If we look to another example, that of Britain, we see that they had what we didn’t: a major debate in parliament about whether they should go to war in Iraq. On the tombstone of the former British foreign affairs minister, Robin Cook, who resigned his parliamentary positions over the Iraq invasion, are his own poignant words: ‘I may not have succeeded in halting the war, but I did secure the right of parliament to decide on war.’ One after another, loyal Tory MP and loyal Labour MP stood up and said they disagreed with their party leadership’s support of the war.

  To the shame of all Australian parliamentarians, not one here could claim the same epitaph as Cook, for in contrast our parliament was quiescent. In Australia such a questioning of the party leadership’s position on any issue has become not just unacceptable, but pilloried in the impoverished political judgement of the Canberra press gallery as political suicide. To speak out is to be declared a rat, a party renegade and a political naïve.

  Yet not so long ago both parties were accepting of difference and criticism from within their own ranks. When he was prime minister, Malcolm Fraser is said on occasion to have told lobbyists that he agreed with their position, but as his senators would not back him he could not help.

  Now there are only two sins in Australian political life: being different and being charged. Thus a Labor member can be expelled from the ALP for having a cappuccino with former Western Australian premier Brian Burke, but happily photographed with current Tasmanian premier Paul Lennon, whose colonial mansion was renovated by forestry giant Gunns at, he has said, a cost of ‘well over $100,000’, but which the Australian newspaper later quoted an unnamed source as saying was worth $400,000.

  And so our parties failed us. Our parliament failed us. Our media failed us. The question as to why is difficult to answer, though it clearly is to be found in an uneasy examination of a new conformity at the heart of Australian life. There is a new censorship that involves not overt government repression, but a gradual and real capitulation by so many individuals—journalists, middle managers in the media, public figures—to the idea that many things in Australia are now better left unsaid.

  What we have witnessed is a very real corrosion of the idea of the truth and respect for those whose views differ from that of power. What we have experienced is a coarsening of public rhetoric by standover men who claim to speak for the ordinary Australian, but seem to represent the interest of government and corporate power. They are given opinion columns and radio talkback programs. They are accorded the status of minor celebrities and there sometimes seems no end to the uniquely Australian cross of their public belligerence in defence of private interest at popular expense.

  While many, for example, righteously demanded David Hicks apologise to the nation on his release, none seemed to think it worth demanding the same of Alan Jones when, in the wake of the Cronulla riots, he was found by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) to have broadcast comments ‘likely to encourage violence or brutality and to vilify people of Lebanese and Middle-Eastern backgrounds on the basis of ethnicity’.

  What we hear parroted at ever more shrill frequencies are the old mantras of Stalinism, once used to justify the great crimes of a century, being ironically recycled by the right to defend the indefensible. Those who speak out are inevitably demonised as out-of-touch elites. This pejorative use of the word elite begins with Stalin in 1948 when he used it to describe Jewish intellectuals upon whom he was about to turn his terror.

  We are being told, as the old USSR was told, that there are things that matter more than the truth and individual freedom—national security, the needs of the security forces, special international commercial undertakings. But there is nothing higher in this life than the truth and individual freedom. The striving for these two things is the essence of who and what we are.

  We now have provision for secret trials and secret imprisonment in this country. With the Dr Haneef case we have been presented the disturbing spectre of an innocent man appearing to be framed and imprisoned for what can only be seen as political advantage, in which our security forces would seem to have lied to the Australian public. Late last year a Sydney court found that an Australian citizen, Izhar Ul-Haque, had been illegally kidnapped and threatened by ASIO operatives. This blatant abuse of power by our secret police, and what it might bode for our future, seemed of little concern to either major party or the media, and the lack
of attention the case received was all the more remarkable given it happened in the middle of the federal election.

  We are no longer in the twentieth century of class and ideology, of endless economic growth, of left and right, of centre and periphery. It is a confusing new world of religious zealotry and economic uncertainty perhaps unseen since the 1930s; of competing superpowers; of politics as little more than corporate cheerleading, with various gods renascent and the sudden recognition that the earth is not only finite in its fecundity, but also in its charity towards its ultimate parasitic species.

  Internationally it is not that we are no longer capable of pursuing an independent foreign policy, it is rather that our new obsequiousness to power, masquerading as the realpolitik of contemporary international affairs, means that we cannot even dream of the possibility. We are caught between a rising superpower, China, and a declining superpower, the USA, with not so much a policy as an ingrained servility on the part of our political class that does not bode well.

  Historically the world seems to be setting upon an era of unprecedented global barbarity. This would seem an extravagant claim, particularly in the wake of the twentieth century, which was after all the most murderous in history. Yet beneath the ceaseless blathering about democracy from the White House and from our own leaders, our political systems are increasingly unresponsive to the democratic impulses in their own societies. If our economy is globalised, so too is our human destiny. We have in absolute terms far more people living in poverty than at any time in human history. Our own society is ever more stratified, and the divisions of wealth and power grow daily, and daily grow more offensive, and represent a slow accumulation of grievances that will, if not addressed, invite a terrible denouement.

  At the same time we have been taught to accept that endless change in our economic lives is in- evitable and unavoidable, but that political change of any consequence is impossible. Cynicism is the new naïvety. We believe in abstract forces too much, in human capacity too little. We have lost faith in the only real power in this world: our faith in ourselves.

  For as a society and as a polity we need to once more rediscover and reassert the necessity of witnessing and questioning as the greatest guarantee we can have of democracy. If I am left believing in anything, it is something very simple: that truth matters above all else. Anything that honours and guarantees the truth is not just good, but necessary. For the road to tyranny is never opened with a sudden coup d’etat. It is a long path paved with the small cobbles of silence, lies and deceit that ends, inevitably, in horror. In Australia we stand at the head of that road. Only history will tell us if as a people we chose the terrible folly of continuing to walk down it.

  But nothing is ever given, and hope is ever as real a possibility as despair. People have once more begun finding courage and giving voice to what concerns them. Whether it’s The Chaser—our very own Radio Free Europe—or journalists once more beginning to question and show courage, as they did with the Dr Haneef case, there is a new mood in our nation that we ought to welcome.

  I don’t mean by this the recent change of our national government. We in Australia make too much of our political leaders and their work, and too little of our own failings and triumphs. The world advances to a better place through the countless acts of everyday goodness shown by millions of people too easily dismissed as everyday.

  In the end none of these things is ever a matter of party. Dunlop most likely voted Liberal, yet it is no paradox that Tom Uren, once known as the heart of the Left, said he learnt his socialism from Weary Dunlop while a POW. Uren, like Dunlop, didn’t agree. And while a Labor man through and through, Uren has described the Greens’ Bob Brown, another man who doesn’t agree, as having the blood of Mandela flowing in his veins.

  These are matters of character, and to use a word little heard these days, courage. More than ever, in this new age, Australians need to once more recover their voice, and that power of not agreeing with power. It’s time, like Slappy Oldham, we looked after ourselves a little more, and deferred to power and its Driscolls a little less.

  The Bulletin

  Final issue, February 2008

  THIS STORY BEGINS with a Tasmanian man fern (Dicksonia antarctica) for sale in a London nursery. Along with the healthy price tag, some £160, is a note: ‘This tree fern has been salvage harvested in accordance with a management plan approved by the Governments of Tasmania and the Commonwealth of Australia.’ If you were to believe both governments, that plan ensures that Tasmania has a sustainable logging industry, which, according to Australian forest minister Eric Abetz, is ‘the best managed in the world’.

  The truth is otherwise. The man fern— possibly several centuries old—comes from native forests destroyed by a logging industry that was recently found to be illegal by the federal Australian court. It comes from either primeval rainforest that has been evolving for millennia, or wet eucalypt forest, some of which contains the mighty Eucalyptus regnans. These aptly named kings of trees are the tallest hardwood trees and flowering plants on Earth, some more than twenty metres in girth and ninety metres in height. These forests are being destroyed in Tasmania in spite of widespread community opposition and increasing inter- national concern.

  Clearfelling, as the name suggests, first involves the complete felling of a forest, by chainsaws and skidders. Then the whole is torched, the firing started by helicopters dropping incendiary devices made of jellied petroleum—commonly known as napalm. The resultant fire is of such ferocity it produces atomic bomb-like mushroom clouds visible from considerable distances. In consequence, every autumn, the island’s otherwise most beautiful season, china-blue skies are frequently nicotine-scummed, an inescapable reminder that clearfelling means the total destruction of ancient and unique forests. At its worst, the smoke from these burn-offs has led to the closure of schools, highways and tourist destinations.

  In the Styx Valley in the south-west, the world’s last great unprotected stands of old-growth Eucalyptus regnans are being reduced to piles of smouldering ash. Over 85 per cent of old-growth regnans forests are gone, and it is estimated that less than 13,000 hectares of these extraordinary trees remain in their old-growth form. Almost half of them are to be clearfelled. Most will end up as paper in Japan.

  In logging coupes around Tasmania, exotic rainforest trees such as myrtle, sassafras, leatherwood and celery-top pine—extraordinary, exquisite trees, many centuries old, some of which are found nowhere else—are often just left on the ground and burnt.

  The hellish landscape that results from clearfelling—akin to a Great War battlefield—is generally turned into large monocultural plantations of either radiata pine or Eucalyptus nitens, sustained by such a heavy program of fertilisers and pesticides that water sources for some local communities have been contaminated by Atrazine, a controversial herbicide linked with cancer and banned in much of Europe. Blue-dyed carrots soaked in 1080 poison are laid on private plantations to kill native grazing animals that pose a threat to tree seedlings. The slaughter that results sees not only possums, wallabies and kangaroos die in slow agony, but other species—including wombats, bettongs and potaroos—killed in large numbers in spite of being officially protected species.

  In 2003, an ageing Tasmanian forester, Bill Manning, was subpoenaed to testify in front of an Australian Senate committee investigating the Tasmanian forestry industry. He methodically began to unravel a tale of environmental catastrophe, of industry connivance and government complicity. His detailed evidence suggested that the Tasmanian forestry industry was not only systematically destroying unique forests, but poisoning the very fabric of Tasmanian politics and life.

  No greenie hardliner, Manning was rather a man who worked for thirty years in the Tasmanian forests, who believes the forests ought to be logged, but logged so that they remain for the future. Yet he alleged to the Senate committee that forestry management had been cor
rupted. At the hearing, he painted a picture of the illegal destruction of public forests on a scale so vast that it was transforming the landscape of Tasmania. Branding what was happening in Tasmania ‘an ecological disaster’, Manning talked of how an ‘accelerated and unaccountable logging industry’ was destroying wholesale native forests, ‘which are unique in the world for their flora and fauna’.

  ‘The clearfelling is out of control,’ he told the senators. ‘The scale of clearfelling in Tasmania is huge.’

  A whispering campaign about Bill Manning’s state of mind began, and in the four years since he ended a career he loved by standing up for what he believed, nothing has changed except for the worse. Today, Tasmania is the only Australian state that clearfells its rainforests. While the rest of Australia has either ended, or is ending, the logging of old-growth forests, Tasmania is the only state where it is secretly planned to accelerate the destruction of native forests, driven by the greed for profit that can be made from woodchips.

  As with any epidemic of madness, there sometimes seems no end to its horror. Among Tasmania’s many unique plants and animals is the endangered giant freshwater crayfish, one of the largest invertebrates in the world. Although technically protected, its very future is threatened by the frenzy of logging surrounding the creeks where it lives. When a government-appointed expert panel recommended buffer zones of forest be preserved to protect the crayfish, these zones were reduced to a bare minimum, and the areas continue to be logged. ‘Clearfelling is going on at an incredible rate in their habitat,’ crayfish expert Todd Walsh says. ‘It’s going berserk.’