Interesting how democracy ceases and we don’t notice any more.
A hundred people die at sea and their relatives and friends are not interviewed on television.
We do not see the faces on television or hear the voices on radio or read in the colour supplements of the children who survived shipwreck and saw their parents drown, or their siblings drown.
It is as if they had never been.
They are Unpersons. They are no more.
Like their relatives, the dead.
How dare any agency, any government, conceal their story from us.
How dare they.
Discuss.
Name:
How broad is the brief for Angus Houston I wonder.
As a people who haven’t experienced the events that convulse societies, like tsunamis or famines or earthquakes where thousands of lives are lost, it’s no surprise we’re a bit diffident about the matter of death.
We seem to be uncomfortable when it comes to this subject. It’s a kind of an anathema to a social consciousness that’s basically shielded from the ugly reality of sudden and tragic death on a massive scale.
A reality that as we know too well via the media happens elsewhere. It doesn’t really touch us. Not really. We don’t see it in the first person, the bodies, the smell, that visceral reality which sears our consciousness with the immediacy of it all. Not from the telly. That only dulls our senses and leaves us with something derived, a semi-complex narrative for our times.
Countless others live with political or geographic instability and in a certain sense, live much closer to death, whether that comes suddenly and on a massive scale or over agonisingly long periods of time through social violence.
We haven’t been there, as a nation, and we’re in some sort of sanitised denial because it doesn’t synch with our idea of how a society conducts itself. It’s too… ughh… third world. Not the white man’s civilized place where death is tidily dealt with by the white ladies in their sotto voce funeral parlours.
And so the death toll of those who sought to escape their proximity to death mounts, and we are without capacity to respond as we should.
And it’s to our shame, as a nation.
I have some pretty lucid dreams at times. I’ve dreamed of a nuke, a giant orange tower; All those I loved turned to shadows then nothing against the red.
I’ve had lightening strike so close I curled into a ball and just last week, the Earth shook, like a train from the distance it came and went, right under me.
I’ve never heard a bomb fall, I fear that and war in our time as a real possibility.
I think through another lens the relative innocence of Australia is something to preserve.
It’s also somewhat of a myth. Veterans have been coming home from wars and disasters and walking amongst us since Europeans landed. 1/4 of the population is born overseas and a fair portion of those folk come from horrible places, or have seen horrible things.
Personally I know an Armenian that lived through the Lebanese civil war, I’ve heard stories of him riding shotgun in the back of an old sedan nursing a crate of hand grenades. I know a Bosnian girl so intelligent she scares me; she can’t remember anything before 11/12, nothing, not a bit.
To live though the bushfires down here a few years ago, it seems callous to measure suffering or…what, in numbers? The earth burned. 45 degrees for a week running, 3 am, everything just went to sleep. Entire communities were wiped out.
I’ve heard people talking about standing over cliffs hearing the wailing of voices rising up from the valley below. Indeed the colonies that make up Australia were not built on peace but on illegality and genocide.
Though there are those that say there have always been a whispering in the hearts of white men, from the get go and there is evidence of this. In Tasmania where the white men lined up in a futile attempt to march the natives into the sea, there were those who cried foul and fought back, and wrote letters abroad, and took note of all.
I reckon Australians are deeply humane. I do think we live a life distanced from death compared with other cultures, to our detriment. Death is taboo.
I’ve seen a village in South America that has a week long annual festival in the graveyard. How wonderful. In Australia death is wrapped up in red tape and hidden behind the racket that is the white ladies and the funeral industry.
Apologies.
I think, if I lost my brother the last thing I would want would be to talk to the media.
The pictures of the Christmas Island wreck are pretty real. There’s enough of Syria to go around three times.
First chance they get SERCO and Govt. are going to start asking questions and filling out forms – beyond standing outside the processing facility/s speaking about it or somehow getting hold of Navy tapes I can’t see how any journalist could do any better. I reckon those concerned have enough on their plates than to share it with us…but I can see the value in writing in a clause that guarantees media access to all detention facilities 24/7, riots, roof tiles n’ all.
More importantly I hope Houston F&*ks off SERCO from the asylum issue altogether.
I worked with a Vietnamese chap as a younger man. He was slightly older than I and as well liked an easy going a character as you’d ever want to meet. I found after three years of striving to climb through the ranks that it was good to find myself working alongside him as an equal and that I was doing well to have achieved a certain amount for myself even though I knew my colleague was unhappy with the level of recognition denied him during the period when I caught up. One day in a quite moment it stuck me as the right time to ask the one question I’d been curious about, “how did you come to Australia”. Slowly and hesitantly he told me. I may have pressed to hard. I don’t know. But the information he volunteered about his past, the horror he must’ve witnessed, and what they did to survive the boat trip…I don’t feel it demands repeating, you can probably imagine, and I felt then as now how much less my life’s achievements were alongside his.
There will never be a reason for me to suspect that most people who arrive here as he did by boat, as refugees should so casually and prejudicially be questioned in their desire, intent or capacity to contribute to Australian society. They make us stronger, and in a lottery of life, where I don’t believe an accident of birth should be the main guarantor of privilege in the world, are they owed that chance? I’ll be damned if they aren’t!
Eloquently put chaps.
Thank you.