Table Talk: Bob Ellis on Film and Theatre

(From And So It Went)

Monday, 11th February, 2008, 10.10 a.m.

Joe Ramos Horta has been shot and may be dying.

12.05 p.m.

It turns out he was on his morning jog, and insurgents shot their way into his ill-guarded residence when he wasn’t there. An Australian fellow-jogger, hearing the shots, offered to get his car and give Joe a lift to safety but he said, ‘No, it’ll be all right’ and jogged into a hail of bullets. Two went into his chest and one, by the sound of it, his arse. He lay on the ground making phone calls but no-one came to help him for, perhaps, twenty-five minutes and he lost sixty percent of his blood. UN troops a few hundred yards away dared not assist him. Finally an ambulance came.

3.20 p.m.

Mike Rann rang in some distress, since he, I and Joe were supposed to be carousing together in Adelaide soon at the Festival. He asked for some words he might say and I wrote the following:

Among Nobel Peace Prize winners only Martin Luther King, Yasr Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin have thus far attracted assassins, but peace is always a risky business, and Jose Ramos Horta, Nobel Peace Laureate, has been for thirty-two years on that pilgrimage, patiently, assiduously, delicately, shrewdly, for the long, long years of the Indonesian conquest and occupation when it seemed that hope was gone, in second-class airline seats and cheap motels and punishing jet-lag and uninfluential gatherings, persistent in his wearying quest for freedom, democracy, independence and at least the hope of prosperity in his native land.

Two brothers and a sister died in that same pursuit, and his mother often begged him to give it up, but he had by then no other choice, no other spiritual nourishment but this arduous road to national justice, this patriotic imperative, this unstaunched vision, this audacity of hope, that no selfish reasoning, no lingering thought of a quiet life could diminish or deny.

He is a man I know and admire and, yes, love. And today, as he hovers between life and death in an Australian hospital in a town agog with murmurs of civil war, the stricken leader of a nation, and a resurrected culture, and a way of local thinking that he in no small measure helped create, I extend to him, if he can hear these words, my esteem and my government’s anguished prayers for his recovery, and our thanks for his magnificent life on earth.

It is the best of those who strive for the good, it seems, who are thus cut down in the moment, the very moment, when they are most needed, and I hope, I pray, that this great, good man will soon come back to us in the health and strength and wit and jollity I remember, and if not this week, as was planned, and if not this month, and if not this year, I and he and his Adelaide friends will meet and carouse and share jokes and furious opinions and at evening’s end say thank you, thank you, Joe; we imagine the world without you as a cruel and desolate place. Jose Ramos Horta, President, laureate, hero, cunning politician and roistering companion, good luck, be well, and note if you can our unending gratitude that you were here, and we knew you.

Mike’s son David was working with Joe till a fortnight ago but came home for Christmas. He could have been under fire beside him. And so it goes.

Friday, 15th February, 2008, 3.10 pm

We drove back to Goulburn and the same motel, woke at 5.30 a.m., ate a McCafe breakfast and made our way to Sydney. Joe after long delays was flown to Darwin, operated on and put into an ‘induced coma’ from which at one point he woke and shouted ‘Don’t shoot me! Don’t shoot me!’ He may die, or recover. They’re not sure.

Joe is, was, a tremendous womaniser, Rich married women go to his hotel room at inconvenient hours in surprising numbers. The attraction, Mike Rann thinks, is his voice — that calm deep crumble-bar-brown monotone that women go towards like moths to a candle flame or iron filings to a magnet. ‘Men fall in love through the eye, women through the ear,’ Mike said, slyly deepening his own voice as he said it.

Whatever its incidental clitoral effect it is one of the better voices in world history. Not as good as Robeson’s, better than Martin Luther King’s, FDR’s, Churchill’s, Reagan’s, its deep, rough-stubbled organ tones emit a godlike tranquillity and confidence that most politicians would kill for, even Bob Carr, who agrees it’s the best on earth. When people die, it strikes me as most amazing that I won’t hear their voices again. Joe’s, whose hand I shook once in the State Theatre foyer, had a voice you would think outlives death, hovers in the cosmos waiting for a fresh earthly larynx to nest in. Pray God it will not be absent long.