Christmas and the New Year all done and dusted.   Birthdays celebrated, and we have basked, baked, and bathed in the sure knowledge that our Government is doing the best for us, and don’t we all feel grateful? Never in my life has the world been so out of step with Australia, one can only hope they see the light and catch up.  Maybe a new world-wide curriculum?

On my sister’s fridge was the following

See it
Want it
throw a tanti
Get it!

I’m not sure if this is a political slogan of great currency, or a Buddhist Chant

Well, our first week back and don’t we see Passive Complicity all about?  In this weather that is not unexpected.

The week commenced with Tarquin O’Flaherty continuing his series “Man as Machine”.  He wrote of  “The ‘Tory’ party (from the Gaelic; ‘toire’ to pursue, later; outlaw, lawbreaker, etc.) were always the henchmen, the cronies, the courtiers of the King.” and explained the origin of the Whigs.  Read more here

Paddy o’Cearmada  reported on another week in politics in which ‘Cory Bernardi, publishing his book The Conservative Revolution (wholeheartedly endorsed by Andrew Bolt) (in which) general thrust seems to be that heterosexual Christian families are the basis of a good society……’ here

‘Giving them oxygen’ was the title of Cecil Poole’s piece in which he argued for even more oxygen in order to get a more complete burn and allow a fresh start.  (There is no known image of Cecil Poole – please help find one)

‘This is shameful conduct, and in any other western democracy would have been greeted with outrage.” wrote Tarquin O’Flaherty in reference to the arrest of five men holidaying in Queensland with their families.  These men rode motor bikes and were members of a motorcycle club.  That they were together seems to be the ‘crime’!  more here

‘The Australian Education Minister (Pyne) says students should learn about Aboriginal history, but adds that the current curriculum has not sold the ‘benefits of western civilisations’. Tell that to Indigenous Australians’ says  Paul Daley of The Guardian.  It also seems Christopher Pyne is helping Australian Foreign Affairs Minister Julie Bishop in her efforts to repair relations with Indonesia by telling the world of the benefits of benefits of Western Civilisation.  Read it here

“If colonisation was the intent to take land away, to impose foreign laws and to disrupt culture, if that would define colonisation in the year 1609 (then) it pretty much defines the relationship today.”  Saturday’s MDFF is a transcript of Professor Taiaiake Alfred’s Naarm Oration given in Melbourne in late November 2014  Read the transcript here for a far better understanding the “Indigenous Problem” is in fact a “White Problem” (and why this blog exists.)

To lighten the week Poetry Sunday brought “A choice collection of brief trifles, including inscribed tombstones and other railleries complied by IRA MAINE, Poetry Editor”

Good reading, join the conversation.

Cheers
Cecil Poole

In today’s post Ken Boston argues that that the Australian Education Minister’s Curriculum Review is really an attempt to shore-up an education system that entrenches inequality.

by Ken Boston, former director-general of the NSW Department of Education and was a member of the Gonski review panel. He was also the chief executive of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority in Britain.  

If there had been no Gonski report, there would be no review of the national curriculum. The purpose of the review is to allow Education Minister Christopher Pyne (pictured) to divert attention away from the inequality of opportunity which is the real cause of decline in educational achievement in Australia, and which it suits his purpose to maintain.

The game plan is to convince the Australian community that our poor educational performance is due to a low-grade politically-correct national curriculum, lacking both challenge and aspiration, having been foisted upon an unsuspecting nation by a supposed clique from the ”cultural left”. Together with poor-quality teaching (in government schools only), this is the reason our national educational performance is below countries such as Japan, Korea, China and Finland. Fix the curriculum and the teachers, and we’ll be up there at the top of the international league table.

This is a preposterous misrepresentation, but Pyne is banking on it having sufficient traction to diminish the strength of the argument to address inequality of opportunity by targeting funds strategically at areas of need. This he does not want to do.

Why is Pyne so against Gonski?

It is because he understands that Gonski is more than a new approach to allocating recurrent funds to schools. It is a fundamental re-imagining of Australian education. It asks: ”What kind of country do we want Australia to be?” And he does not like the answer to that question.

The correlation between poor student performance and aggregated social disadvantage is much stronger in Australia than in any other comparable western nation; indeed, stronger than the average for all 34 OECD countries. By consigning our disadvantaged children to the bin of under-achievement, we are failing to maximise our potential stock of human capital. It is primarily this, rather than any differences in curriculum and pedagogy, which puts us behind our international competitors. So long as aggregated social disadvantage continues to have such a significant impact on educational performance, our national decline will continue.

The essential thrust of Gonski is to target strategically our investment in schooling, from both commonwealth and state sources, in order to reduce the impact of aggregated social disadvantage on educational outcomes. As has been shown in NSW with the application of the Resource Allocation Model in government schools, the strategic targeting of resources on a school-by-school basis according to need is readily achievable, and cannot reasonably be opposed on the grounds that it is too complex to implement.

Pyne is shrewd enough to understand that strategic targeting of resources according to need will do much more than reduce the impact of disadvantage on educational outcomes. He knows that it will also reduce the impact of advantage and privilege. If school performance is neither advantaged nor disadvantaged by parental income, ethnic background, religion, school size and location, or whether a student attends an independent, Catholic or public school, success at school will be determined essentially by the student’s ability, application and hard work.

In other words, Gonski will create a genuine meritocracy.

At present, it is mainly the hard-working and talented children of the privileged who have access to the very highest levels of educational achievement. If Gonski is implemented, such access will be available increasingly to the similarly hard-working and talented children of the socially disadvantaged. This is equality of opportunity, not equality of outcomes: differences in outcomes will inevitably exist between children, but they will no longer be the result of factors such as poverty, religion or sector of schooling.

The Gonski vision of a fair go for all young Australians means that, in due course and over time, a hard-working talented young girl will come to have the same real prospect of winning a place in the university and course of her choice regardless of family circumstances and background, or whether she attends Tara Anglican College, Rooty Hill High School, Brigidine College Randwick, Auburn Girls High School, Queenwood, Abbotsleigh, Mary MacKillop College or Cabramatta High School. And our national performance will improve accordingly, regardless of any tinkering with the curriculum.

Is Pyne up for that? A meritocracy? Devalue private schooling? Of course not. Hence his need for a diversion. What better than a provocative review of the national curriculum?

[First Published in The Age 17 January 2014]

A choice collection of brief trifles, including inscribed tombstones and other railleries complied by IRA MAINE, Poetry Editor

Let’s begin, at least in a geographical sense, in Scotland;

Here lie the bones of poor wee Charlotte,
Born a virgin, died a harlot.
She was aye a virgin at seventeen,
A remarkable thing in Aberdeen.

Now, on the off chance that you might suspect that a page or two of coarse scurrility is in the offing, let me assure you that nothing could be further from the truth.
This from the man who watched the tumbrils pass his window on the way to Tyburn;

When Sir Joshua Reynolds died
All Nature was degraded;
The King dropped a tear
Into the Queen’s ear
And all his pictures faded.

This is William Blake (‘…and was Jerusalem builded here…) poet, painter and ardent reformer, dipping his lid to the finest portrait painter of his time.

At approximately the same time, in the last decade of the 18^th Century, Richard Court, an obscure blacksmith died, having survived a lifetime of heat and hammering.  He is remembered thus;

My Sledge and Hammer lie reclin’d.
My Bellows too have lost their Wind;
My Fire is out, and Forge Decay’d,
And in the Dust my Vice is Laid.

A good play on the word ‘Vice’ and a good joke to end the verse on.

For those with an interest in how words change, not only in their  meaning but in how their sound changes, look how in the 18^th Century, ‘wind’ rhymed with ‘reclin;d’.  It seems likely that at that time ‘wind’ rhymed with ‘chimed’ or ‘wined’ rather than the other way round.  Despite all this, you can still ‘wind’ a clock, should you get ‘wind’ of one through the ‘window’ on a ‘winding’ and ‘windy’ stairs, but take care; I might just be winding you up…

The only information to hand concerning the next gravestone inscription is that the stone sits in ‘Sutton Parish Graveyard’, somewhere in England.  There is a ‘Sutton’ in Surrey, near London, but I hardly think a stone as splendid as this would have survived the depredations of suburban ‘respectability’.

The epitaph gloriously suggests that the husband was perhaps somewhat less than devastated when his wife finally handed in her dinner pail.

Here lies my poor wife,
Without bed or blankit,
But dead as a door-nail,
God be thankit.

In the same vein, and again towards the end of the 18^th Century, there was Arabella Young, a shrew of some considerable reputation, if the taut and almost teeth-gritted inscription on her gravestone is any indicator;

Beneath this stone
A lump of clay
Lies Arabella Young
Who, on the 21^st of May
      1771
Began…to…hold…her…tongue.

Now in this valedictory funerogeny, lest I be accused of misogeny, I’ll take up my pen on the condition of men, and blind you with utter Codswogeny!

Politicians nowadays regularly break election promises.  It was ever thus.  David Lloyd George, a Welshman, was Prime Minister of England in the years after the Great War. (1914-1918)  This anonymous (and premature) epitaph, penned for the Welshman, could as easily be hung round the necks of Clinton, Blair, Fraser or John Howard.

Lloyd George.
Count not his broken pledges as a crime;
He MEANT them, HOW he meant them—at the time.

And now, for a flourish, a bit of a dash, to finish this ‘ere with a bit of a smash, I’ll offer you something that’s (not quite) sublime, but most of the lines and the rhythms should rhyme.  It’s mostly composed of flotsam and jetsam but this one will end with the Doc. Isaac Letsome;

When’s people’s ill they comes to I,
I physics, bleeds and sweats ‘em,
Sometimes they live, sometimes they die;
What’s that to I? I Letsome.

I know, oh, I KNOW, that which has passed was the perfect opportunity to sign off but that would not allow me room to include four lines of premature epitaph by a hero of mine, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester.  He is, of course, in this four line verse, referring to the English king, Charles the Second.

Here lies our mutton-eating King
Whose word no man relies on,
Who never said a foolish thing,
Nor ever did a wise one.

Charles, largely because he was the King, inevitably had the last word.  His reply to Rochester’s insultingly bitchy observation is a good-humoured, clever and witty response;

‘My sayings are my own, my actions are my Ministers’!’

Ka-boom.

Professor Taiaiake Alfred, Founding Director of the Indigenous Governance Program at the University of British Columbia, Canada. This is an edited transcript of a speech delivered as The Narrm Oration, University of Melbourne 28 November 213

One of the central questions for all of us who live in countries with colonial histories and a colonial presence is how to transcend the relationships that have gone into forming the societies that we have inherited.

How do we transcend the histories of racism, dispossession and injustice as opposed to just the relationships that we all hope to have in the countries we inhabit?

Colonisation is seen as something of a historical period.  People think of colonisation as a time in the past when ancestors from Europe came and did things, both positive and negative, that resulted in the formation of the societies that we call Canada, the United States, Latin American countries, and Australia.

People think about colonisation in terms of european peoples coming and with a pioneering spirit getting a foothold in the continent and putting the work into developing these societies, which are now paying off in terms of the prosperity and the level of comfortable lives that such people have today.

People think about colonisation in the past, and it’s true that it’s an historic period and it’s an historical phenomenon.  From the 1500’s onwards [in Canada] people came from Europe and in effect dispossessed the indigenous peoples.  People came and imposed belief systems and imposed ways of being.  They came with the intent of imposing their own law and their own sovereignty on this area of the world that we call Canada and the United States.  Those things happened.

But the problem in using this framework of colonisation as a framework for resolving issues and for understanding issues today and for making arguments today, is when people imagine that it is a strictly historical concept.

It’s a problem if people imagine that because now there are indigenous people in universities, that we speak English, that we’re Christian or post-Christian, that we drive cars, and have houses that are single family dwellings that resemble everyone else’s, that colonisation is in the past.

This is a fundamental problem for us who are still living with the legacy of colonisation in terms of the fact that our land was dispossessed, our belief systems and our cultures were disrupted, our families were dispersed and all of the other things that people associate with that historic era.

If colonisation was the intent to take land away, to impose foreign laws and to disrupt culture, if that would define colonisation in the year 1609 it pretty much defines the relationship today.

Therefore colonisation is not a historical reality but it’s a contemporary political, social, cultural and psychological framework for the relationship between indigenous peoples and non-indigenous peoples in countries like Canada.

In fact we’re not in a post-colonial society, we’re in a contemporary colonial society which the settlers have redefined in such a way that releases the burden of colonial guilt, by creating new words, new frameworks, new understandings that create a legitimacy for not only their presence on the land, but also for the things that happened in relation to culture, for the kind of privileges that they claim in relation to native people and the land.

And our society does this without acknowledging that today these processes are just as vital, just as ongoing, just as harmful and just as present in the lives of the indigenous population as they were in the 1600’s.

The fundamental problem is the fact that these societies are built on an ongoing re-colonisation of peoples that allows these societies to enjoy the privileges and the proserity that non-indigenous people have, and admittedly some of us indigenous people enjoy as well.

If we’re not looking at the dispossession, the continual occupation and the separation of indigenous peoples from the fundamental essence of who they are, we have a massive engine generating social, cultural and psychic discord.

It leads to more and more problems that need to be addressed by institutions of the society, and tragically the institutions are finding themselves unable to keep up the the issues that indigenous people are living, because that engine is rolling.

That engine is continuing to produce discord and harm, continuing to produce psychological effects of dispossession.

We’re fooling ourselves if we think that we can resolve the problems of colonisation without addressing the fundamental need to put people back on the land.  That’s not simply a matter of dealing with the effects of colonisation, which we all agree need to be dealt with.  You can’t let people suffer in that regard.

But we have to look at the fundamentals and we have to recognise that the disconnection from the land is more than just an economic deprivation.  The disconnection from the land is more than just a political injustice.   The disconnection from the land When native people are in that situation means they cannot be indigenous, they are prevented from living out the basic responsibilities of their nation in terms of their original teaching, and in terms of what it is to speak as an indigenous person.

Unless you are able to live out your culture and have the connection in your own homeland and to relate to that in a meaningful way, there is really no justice in the relationship at all.  There’s really no justice in that person’s life.

To view this speech go to www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwJNy-B3IPA

The Australian Education Minister says students should learn about Aboriginal history, but adds that the current curriculum has not sold the ‘benefits of western civilisations’. Tell that to Indigenous Australians

By Paul Daley theguardian.com, Tuesday 14 January 2014 15.45 AEST

Sometimes it’s difficult to tell if education minister Christopher Pyne is genuinely torn about Australia’s bleak and violent colonial history, trying to be politically pragmatic or just confused.

Last week when he announced a supposedly independent review of the national curriculum by experts clearly hostile towards the status quo, it was framed in terms of competing aspects of Australia’s past – Indigenous history and “western civilisation”. Of course, these two elements of Australian history have been inextricably linked since 1788. Good history teachers and scholars know that they are not mutually exclusive and should not be treated as such.

Here’s part of what what Pyne said:
There are two aspects of Australia’s history that are paramount. First of course is our Indigenous history because for thousands of years Indigenous Australians have lived on this continent. The second aspect of our history is our beginnings as a colony and therefore our western civilisation, which is why we are the kind of country we are today.

Students should, he said, learn “the truth about the way we’ve treated Indigenous Australians” but also the “benefits of western civilisation”. The problem with the current curriculum, he added, was that it had “not sold or talked about the benefits of western civilisations in our society”. By inference, then, there was an imbalance in favour of the Indigenous story.

The truth is that since 1788, the “western civilisation” of this great southern land has come at the profound expense of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander inhabitants. There is Indigenous history pre-1788, and an Indigenous history post-1788, that is indelibly shaped by white settlement, extreme violence, resistance and continued activism. By conservative estimates 20,000 Indigenous Australians were killed by British troops, colonial militias, police and vigilante settlers as the colonial frontier expanded across the continent. At least 2,000 new Australians also died in such battles, often in ugly reprisal attacks.

Then, of course, there was the disease and the poverty that accompanied banishment from traditional lands, not to mention the cruelty of state-by-state, territory-by-territory and later federal policies and ongoing denials of human rights.

For some years now, Pyne has been agitating for the repatriation from London’s Natural History Museum of the skull of Pemulwuy – an Aboriginal warrior of the Eora people who fought the settlers and soldiers of early New South Wales. The colony executed Pemulwuy in 1802, cut of his head and dispatched it to England. The collection and export of Aboriginal body parts is another abhorrent element of Australia’s white settlement inextricably linked to the oppression of the continent’s Indigenous people. The desecration and export of Indigenous dead has ensured the violence of the frontier continues to resonate in some communities today.

Shamefully, such practises continued well into the 20th century – but then again, so, too, did the massacre of Aboriginal people. Thousands of Indigenous bodies and body parts were exported to medical and cultural institutions across Britain, continental Europe and America. Many – including Pemulwuy’s – are yet to be returned.

In 2011 Pyne wrote to the Duke of Cambridge, Prince William, who had vowed while in Australia in 2010, to help repatriate Pemulwuy’s head:
Pemulwuy is a hero for modern day Indigenous Australian and a rare example of recorded Aboriginal resistance. The return of his remains would be an important symbolic recognition of Aboriginal culture and history. It is also an important step towards reconciliation with Indigenous Australians. I am quite eager to know whether His Royal Highness would be interested in helping to expedite the matter.

Notwithstanding that Pyne guilds the lily with his claim that Pemulwuy’s resistance was “rare” (Indigenous history post-1788 is replete with resistance heroes), Pyne indicates his familiarity with the disturbing reality of the violence that characterised the Australian colonial frontier. More conservative thinkers might dismiss this “black armband” preoccupation with an element of Australia’s past that has been exaggerated.

But hang on. That seems – or at least seemed – to be Pyne’s attitude too, barely a year ago when he flagged from opposition his curriculum review that would reconsider elements that presented a “black armband view”. He said: “we think that of course we should recognise the mistakes that have been made in the past. But … we don’t want to beat ourselves up every day.”

Then, as with last week, Pyne argued more emphasis should be given to the importance of Anzac Day, which is central, he insists, to understanding Australian character.

It’s hard to argue against a proposition that students should explore precisely how, when and why Australia’s politicians settled on the birth of nationhood at Gallipoli – rather than at Federation in 1901 following, as it did, the violent struggle across the colonial frontier. But that’s not really what Pyne seems to be thinking. Though sometimes it’s pretty hard to tell.

TARQUIN O’FLAHERTY

In her biography of Voltaire, published in 1906 entitled; ‘The Friends of Voltaire’, Evelyn Beatrice Hall attempted to explain Voltaire’s view on free speech by saying; ‘I disapprove of what you say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it’.  Only by guaranteeing your right to free speech, can the same guarantees be applied to myself.

Sadly, Australia pursues mediocrity relentlessly.  Are we so unsure of what we think that we make no objection when, time and time again, these rights are ignored?

A few blokes on holiday in Queensland with their families, were arrested and put in jail as part of what that state describes as ‘…coming down hard on bikie gangs…’.

These arrests ignore completely the blindingly obvious fact that not one of these men was being pursued by the police.  There were no outstanding charges against any of them.  They were not involved in any criminal activity at the time of their arrest.  They were, in the end, incarcerated simply because they all belonged to motorcycle clubs.  This is shameful conduct, and in any other western democracy would have been greeted with outrage.  Not here.

Here we have newspapers and TV, largely owned by News Ltd and it’s clones.  Despite the fact that News Limited staff have been found to be involved in major criminal activity, Mr Murdoch’s fitness to go on monopolising Australian media has never come under scrutiny.  Not one of his ‘News’ outlets has taken up the cudgels on behalf of the men arrested.  Not one has insisted that these arrests might be unlawful.  The only intelligent conclusion to be drawn from this is that News Ltd cannot see, or are unaware of how the rights of every citizen in Australia are being usurped in this matter.  If bikies can be arrested just for being there, so also may journalists, judges and just about anyone.  If our media cannot see this, then I suggest that they are unfit for their job and should be replaced.

David Hicks spent years in Guantanamo Bay Jail.  The then Australian Prime Minister, John Howard left him there, having abandoned his fawning allegiance to England in favour of a fawning allegiance to America.  Why do we insist on this pursuit of mediocrity?  New Zealand suggested the US might take its nuclear ships elsewhere.  The Americans agreed and the sky didn’t fall, NZ didn’t expire or sink in the sea.  The only outcome was a grudging respect for the minnow who’d stood up to them.

And now we have Senator Cory Bernardi spouting laughable infantile tripe and being taken seriously by this same media who have no opinions at all but those of their masters.  At least in the old days we had good old bright right-wingers like Bob Santamaria, and in the UK, Enoch Powell who was formidably bright and well informed.  But Cory Bernardi…?  The man is an intellectual jackass, a disaster zone, a buffoon and should be treated as such.  That the media affords him any time at all, or indeed take him seriously, tells us as much about the media as it does about Bernardi.

I will, I promise, defend to the death his right to spout tripe.  Just give me a minute to stop laughing.

by Cecil Poole

I lived and farmed in Southern Australia (Western Victoria) for the driest decade since rainfall records were first kept (1870’s).  Southern Australia is reputedly one of the most fire prone areas in the world, with periodic wildfires of extreme severity.  My story is not one of extremes.

A smallish grass fire broke out one afternoon on a neighbouring property, burning a narrow strip of land in a southerly direction, fanned by a strong northerly.  Thus far typical of grass fires in the region.  Fortunately when the expected westerly change came late in the day the eastern flank of the fire had been reasonably well contained and the fire controlled.   From memory the fire destroyed some fencing and perhaps a thousand sheep had to be destroyed as they had severe burns to legs, hooves, lips, noses and eyebrows.  I was part of a team euthenasing these sheep, and a distressing task it was.

An interesting part to this fire is how it started.   The fire itself occurred in late summer.  The previous spring a neighbouring landholder had burnt the debris from a fallen tree, the debris having been stacked on top of the stump, in order to burn it also.  The heap of debris and the stump had burnt well, over a period of a few days.  Each morning the farmer would start his front end loader and push the heap together again, each time pushing it up over the stump.  Each time he pushed a little soil was also laid over the stump and more importantly the roots.  This soil layer largely excluded oxygen from the roots and the base of the stump, damping the fire almost, and I say almost advisedly, completely.  The farmer left the heap when he felt the job was done.  Unfortunately he was not to know what was going on underground.  For days, then weeks, then months the roots and stump base smoldered away underground, very slowly, imperceptibly.  As summer replaced spring so to the soil started to dry out, soil particles shrank, air replaced the moisture.  The smoldering continued.  Then after some three or four months the smoldering – very slow burning – of the roots reached the surface.  The north wind would have blown away some of the covering soil, and fanned the smoldering root into red hot coals.  From there dry leaves, bark or grass, probably blown by the wind caught fire on the roots then were blown to nearby taller dry grass – and the fire was away.

Now why would a story like this be of interest to Passive Complicity?  Purely because of the debate about ‘giving oxygen’ to those with repressive (and repulsive) dogmas – the Pauline Hansens, the Corey Bernardis, the Christopher Pynes, the David Irvings  of this world.  Many believe that ‘giving oxygen to these people and their views in a sense publicises and legitimises them.  Professor Denis Altman of LaTrobe University argued that discussing Bernardi’s views helped promote his views and increased sales of his book.   Others such as Phil Cleary would argue that views such as those need to be vociferously denounced for what they are, that by doing this denouncing provides tools and armament for those normally passively complicit to fight back in bars, at barbecues, at sporting events and in every social situation.  These views should never go unchallenged ‘through to the keeper’.

Passive Complicity would like to add to the sum of oxygen in order to complete the burn, to stop the smoldering and to provide a better start.  We see this as fundamental in all cases of sexism, racism, prejudice and injustice.  This is not a conversation, this is a duty for every member of a free and just society.

“Gratuitous unprovoked violence is being perpetrated by individuals looking for victims” Tony Abbott.  Given his Government’s recent performance he should know, says Political Correspondent Paddy O’Cearmada

Last week was a low point in Australian political discourse.

It began with a narcissist in limelight, Cory Bernardi, publishing his book The Conservative Revolution (wholeheartedly endorsed by Andrew Bolt).  I have yet to read the work, although a copy is on order, but the general thrust seems to be that heterosexual Christian families are the basis of a good society, that capital should be allowed to hire and fire labour without interference from minimum standards, and that all expressions that might offer alternatives to this view are simply wrong.  From accounts in the press Bernardi asserts that non-traditonal families, which in his definition includes blended families, single parent familes, same sex couples raising children or parents with surrogate children, produce promiscuous daughters and criminal sons.  Just with whom the daughters are being promiscuous and why this is restricted to one gender is not yet clear.

Bernardi unleashed a cacophony of criticism.  The Opposition Leader, a partner in a blended family, was understandably offended, and Bernardi’s conservative colleague Warren Entsch wondered aloud about whether his protesting about homosexuality betrayed a deeper suppression. Bernardi responded with a threat to sue for defamation.  Just how you can be defamed for suggestions over something that is not illegal is an interesting point, and should such an unlikely action be successful it could yet unlock a lucrative avenue for gays assumed to be straight.

Bernardi could be laughed off as a ratbag on the right and properly he is, only the danger remains that his louder claims could mask a more subtle prosecution of his cause.  Tony Abbott’s muted response leaves it open to see these ‘conservative values’ given more bite.

Not to be outdone, Scott Morrison extended the punishment of asylum seekers who arrive by boat by refusing access for any found to be refugees to the family reunion program.  The decision applies retrospectively, so any genuine refugee, who happened to arrive by boat, cannot make such an application.  Sarah Hansen-Young did her best to make the injustice of this cruel policy clear, but she was a lone voice.  The merest murmur from the opposition, and a shrug from the press.

And in a final act Christopher Pyne announced a two person panel made up of conservative critics to revise the National School Curriculum.  Anticipating a report in June the panel will unpick a curriculum that has been framed after four years of consultation.  Cries of political interference were brushed aside. Pyne even said that since we all go to school we are all experts on education.  I wonder if he would like me to extend that thought to surgery and on him?  Predictably history was in the firing line with a desired emphasis on European Progress and the triumphant success of such events at Gallipoli.

Successive studies have shown that Australian students are bored to death with Australian History and as soon as they are given the option cease to study it.  Current policy would suggest we have learned it too well.  We now have our own system of transportation for life and places of secondary punishment under the banner of border protection, and Afghanistan continues a tradition of heroic failure in the service of a greater imperial power.

To cap it all, Tony Abbott, ever mindful of the hot topic in talk-back radio weighed in to the controversy over street violence and the spate of deaths accompanied by heartbreaking pictures of beautiful young men and grieving parents.  Calling on State Governments to act he said: “Gratuitous unprovoked violence is being perpetrated by individuals looking for victims”, given the performance of the government he leads, he should know.

Tarquin O’Flaherty continues his exploration of what it is about Western Society (Britain and her Empire in particular) that so excites the Australian Tory Education Minister Christopher Pyne

by TARQUIN O’FLAHERTY.

Up to the 18^th Century, political life in Britain remained simple, unchanged and, not to put too fine a point on it, uniformly corrupt.  Basically the country was ruled by an elitist, landowning aristocracy whose seats in Parliament were passed from father to son, or were simply a commodity to be bought and sold.  A thriving town, or a port might have been granted a Royal Charter which entitled it to send two members to Parliament.  If, over the years, the importance of that town or port diminished, as trade moved elsewhere, the Royal Charter did not move with it.  The landowners simply went on enjoying the right to those two Parliamentary seats.  The port town of Dunwich, in Suffolk was still sending two members to Parliament in the early 19^th Century, even after most of the town had collapsed into the sea.

The importance of owning land during this time cannot be overstated.  The more land you had the more power you had.  If your landholdings happened to include two or three Royal Charters then the ‘Parliamentary boroughs’ (boroughs with votes) on your property were referred to as ‘pocket boroughs’.  This literally meant that you as the landowner had these boroughs ‘in your pocket’.  Secret ballots did not exist then.  How you voted was open to scrutiny by your landlord.  Failure to vote for your landowner’s chosen man and you could find yourself quickly deprived of your tenancy.  Out of more than 400 elected members of Parliament about 140 were ‘pocket’ or ‘rotten boroughs’.  In lots of ‘rotten’ cases, because trade, commerce and population had moved elsewhere, this left so few voters that some members were voted into Parliament on less than one hundred votes, and in some cases, less than fifty!

The ‘Tory’ party (from the Gaelic; ‘toire’ to pursue, later; outlaw, lawbreaker, etc.) were always the henchmen, the cronies, the courtiers of the King.  The Whigs (reputedly the name deriving from the call of the Scottish drovers as they urged their animals on to market) were no real alternative to the Tories, but perhaps a tiny bit more tolerant.

In England, at least, people believed in ‘the divine right of kings’.  Traditionally power had rested with a land-owning aristocracy who believed absolutely in their own God-given right to rule.  Because of Magna Carta, individuals did have a court where grievances might be aired but basically the peasantry were just another commodity to be bought and sold.  In continental Europe, where the aristocracy ruled and there was no Magna Carta, a landowner could, with impunity, have any one of his peasants flogged to death.  There was no redress.

Alongside all this land-owning and peasant bashing and high faluting aristocratic ‘divine right’, another force was insidiously gathering pace.  It was of course, the Industrial Revolution.  The Tories were appalled.  Uncouth louts who owned no land at all became inexplicably rich and powerful.  How could anyone called ‘Arkwright’ for God’s sake, with not a single connection to either the King or the aristocracy suddenly, without so much as a by-your-leave, assume such importance?  It had to be stopped.  Huge taxes were imposed on the raw materials necessary to industrial production.  The Tories regarded the industrialists as absolute upstarts, beneath contempt really, a group who needed to be reminded who was really in charge.  The Whigs, with a better sense of the realities, and a reasonable idea of which way the wind was blowing, began to take on the idea of electoral reform.  The Whig idea of reform still maintained the idea of a ruling aristocracy, but with a Whig aristocracy instead of a Tory, and with the backing of the emerging middle-class.  Swirling all round this were people like Cobbett and Bentham, who wanted real reform and didn’t for a moment believe that the Whigs would deliver on their promises.

To add to this mix there was the constant fear of revolution.  Real, French Revolution style revolution.  After the Napoleonic Wars the ruling classes became very jittery each time there was a downturn in the economy.  Starving people rioted all over the country and uncontrolled mobs rampaged through the streets of London.  This was met by appalling, uncompromising savagery which simply could not be allowed to continue.  If real revolution was to be  avoided then concessions must be made, big concessions.

Right throughout the social scale there was movement for reform.  This so frightened political leaders that they became convinced that the only way to avoid real revolution and to save their own skins was massive compromise.

As if this wasn’t enough, Daniel O’Connell’s Catholic Association in Ireland was making things very difficult for the British.  This Association, founded in 1823, had been quashed in 1825 but three years later it was back on top.  In 1828 O’Connell was returned as the Member for Clare.  Because he was a Catholic he was not allowed to take his seat in Parliament.  This created such an agitation that either concession or all out war on Ireland became the grim choice.  Rather than risk even more disasters the British Government, in 1829, passed the Catholic Emancipation Act.  It is the general opinion of historians that without this Act, England would have lost control of Ireland.  This crucial piece of historic legislation ripped the Tory party asunder, so much so that, at the election of 1830, the Whigs were swept into power.

TO BE CONTINUED

“The Armistice” by May Wedderburn Cannan

(In an Office, in Paris)

The news came through over the telephone:
All the terms had been signed: the War was won:
And all the fighting and the agony,
And all the labour of the years were done.
One girl clicked sudden at her typewriter
And whispered, ‘Jerry’s safe’, and sat and stared:
One said, ‘It’s over, over, it’s the end:
The War is over: ended’: and a third,
‘I can’t remember life without the war’.
And one came in and said, ‘Look here, they say
We can all go at five to celebrate,
As long as two stay on, just for to-day’. 

It was quite quiet in the big empty room
Among the typewriters and little piles
Of index cards: one said, ‘We’d better just
Finish the day’s reports and do the files’.
And said, (it’s awf’lly like Recessional,
Now when the tumult has all died away’.
The other said, ‘Thank God we saw it through ;
I wonder what they’ll do at home to-day’.
And said, ‘ You know it will be quiet to-night
Up at the Front: first time in all these years,
And no one will be killed there any more’,
And stopped, to hide her tears.
She said, ‘I’ve told you; he was killed in June.’
The other said, ‘My dear, I know; I know . . .
It’s over for me too . . . My Man was killed,
Wounded . . . and died … at Ypres . . . three years ago . . .
And he ‘s my Man, and I want him,’ she said,
And knew that peace could not give back her Dead.

Comment by Ira Maine, Poetry Editor
The poet, May Wedderburn Cannan (1893-1973) was the daughter of Charles Cannan, Dean of Trinity college, Oxford.  Her father’s friends included Arthur Quiller-Couch who, in 1900, produced ‘The Oxford Book of English Verse’ which was to remain the standard until the 1970’s.  John Dover Wilson, the remarkable Shakespearean scholar was also part of this group, so May Wedderburn Cannan grew up and revelled in an extraordinarily rarified intellectual atmosphere.

The poet spent time at a canteen in France preparing and serving food to soldiers, worked for her father in England, and finally spent the last few months of the war working for MI5 at their Paris office.

During this time the poet had fallen hopelessly in love with Quiller-Couch’s son, Bevil.  Bevil survived the war, won the Military Cross, and was equally in love with her.  So much so that, when the Armistice was signed he came to Paris and proposed.  The poet was delighted to accept.  Bevil then returned to his unit in Germany.  Sadly, the young Quiller-Couch did not survive the Influenza pandemic which swept across Europe following the war.  Within a month or two of the war’s end Bevil died of pneumonia in Germany.  The poet was devastated, inconsolable.

Just listen to the loss in the voices of her female colleagues.  The women are at first stunned to realize that the war is over.  Then slowly they begin to realize that all that’s left to them now is time, plenty of time now, the rest of their lives now, to mourn their losses and to count their dead.  This is heartbreaking stuff and handled superbly well by the poet.  There is no recrimination here, no hatred, no thirst for revenge.  There is only loss, empty, inconsolable loss.  I defy anyone to read the last half-dozen lines and not be moved by them.