Sean Chaffer – who looked like a big, bulky, Boston Kennedy, thirtyish, with wide grey eyes and curly hair – said it wasn’t over conditions: he got fifteen dollars an hour and, if he worked night overtime or Sunday overtime, for seventy or eighty hours a week, on forklift or packing or sweeping, when he wasn’t on the crane, he made, sure he made, seventy or seventy-two thousand a year, twenty-seven thousand of which went on taxes. But the $2.1 million Corrigan made in share movements in the past few days, he added, was the equivalent of the average wharfie’s average wage for thirty-two years. Funny how waterfront efficiency never counted the cost of money ripped off by the central corporate raider, or pushed in tens of thousands at his lawyers, or his security guards, or his dog food, or his cancelled army manoeuvres in the Arab Emirates, or his plane fares to Canberra to talk tactics with Reith or Webster or Howard, or his midnight phone calls to his old dad assuring him he was not the slimeball his brother and sister lately said he was to broadcast organisations and cheering crowds. No, it was always only the wharfies at fault – moving things too slow, with old rundown cranes, off ships that had to be intricately repacked before they sailed on, with holds half-empty, to Brisbane or Townsville. As if the ships would sail out any faster anyway – why would they? – when the seamen wanted their shore leave, their two nights in the pubs and nightclubs, catching up on old girlfriends. Not a thing would change from ‘waterfront reform’ but the wharfies’ wages, and the numbers of them – there used to be thirty thousand of them in regular work, and there are four thousand now – and that was all that was happening.
MONDAY, 2 MAY
My little son Tom was beside me as we drove in drenching, lashing rain from Palm Beach to the pickets at Port Botany. It was the day the High Court decision, after a week of portentous deliberation, was due to come down at 11.30. It was Tom’s first glimpse of things like this – of men at bitter odds in great and angry numbers and history unfolding – and he came to it apprehensive and eager, as if to a football final, bringing schoolbooks in case he got bored. The rain was tremendous, the electricity failing, the police at a respectable murmurous distance, and I was straightaway grabbed, given a bull-horn and stood up and made to orate. The men and women gathered there listening, in yellow raincoats under umbrellas, were eager for ‘victory’. They had no idea of victory’s loopholes; the word was enough.
It hadn’t gone well for Corrigan thus far, it was widely thought – with the black balaclavas and guard dogs and the pale puff of mace and the commando-style attack at midnight on the night before the Federal Court was to decide if they could be lawfully sacked, an attack on men who were not on strike but at work, in their legal place of work. Men who weren’t – it was tortuously explained by the sombre, implacable, tedious Corrigan – being sacked exactly, or not entirely sacked, but somehow weirdly, miasmically deprived of their right to their tools and their work. This work was now paradoxically being done by others, done in defiance of their duly executed contracts, now somehow in abeyance, inoperative, gazumped, along with the wages owed them …
Howard’s exultant smile when Reith announced the sackings to a snarling parliament didn’t go down too well either, and Reith’s repeated sweating and smirking and yapping about the rorts and scams and workplace inefficiencies of the ‘thugs’ in the MUA, though no thugs, however provoked, had gone to gaol yet and all were behaving very mildly considering. He seemed crazier and crazier in the nightly facedowns on television with Jennie George and the energetic, ageing John Coombs – a member, I decided, of the Bunyan Left of old England, chapel-bred, ferocious, dauntless, sure to life’s end he was in the right – and the nation grew, at least for a time, confused.
The price of work was falling in 1998
And Peter Reith determined he would seal
the workers’ fate
‘We will break the wharfies’ union,
we will do the wharfies down
And we will please our masters
at the big end of the town …’
Over the Port Botany loudspeakers at 11.30 on that rainy morning, the news from the High Court was first delayed, then garbled: it was five votes to two, we heard first, then six to one. The thankful oratory began – It was never in doubt, was it? No? Bullshit – before the critical proviso, about the company administrators now having the power to pursue a company profit and to act in the interest of the company’s creditors, was heard or understood. Joy and victory swirled round the wet and roaring crowd as in a football stadium. This was the story they were in. It was victory; there were no complications. There couldn’t be complications.
Mick Dolan from the little dais paid tribute to the wives and mothers, for keeping a brave face and putting food on the table, then said, ‘And while I had intended not to pay any recognition to the lowest form of life, the lowest form of life on earth, I now say to the scabs out there, you have failed! You backed the wrong horse. We’re the victors.’ He then said Corrigan should shove his proposed new individual contracts where the sun don’t shine, right up his clacker. Dennis Kevins then sang ‘Solidarity Forever’ unaccompanied in a strong, heartbreaking Celtic voice – I was to speak next and it was a hard act to follow. But through the eternal melody, and the encrusted and long-honoured archaic sentiments, through the buffeted family feeling and tribal feeling and national feeling, I felt a chill rising. For this indeed was another world now, a world ruled by Moloch and Midas, a world that would not be stayed by song.
In our hands is placed a power greater
than their hoarded gold,
Greater than the might of armies magnified
a thousandfold.
We can bring to birth a new world from
the ashes of the old
For the union makes us strong …
John Coombs turned up looking exactly like a character played by Stanley Holloway in an Ealing comedy, then with him and Jennie George, and Mick Dolan, and with Tom, puzzled and a little fearful at finding himself in the front row, we marched at the head of the jovial army towards the cyclone gates shouting ‘MUA here to stay’ with increasing tedium.
But the rain kept coming down, and doubts were rising, and forces more determined than we knew or could imagine were massing for the final showdown.
So It Goes (first published in Labor Herald, August 1998)
THE OLYMPIC GAMES, 2000
It was a victory like no other for Sydney and Australia, a sweet and eloquent act of laconic traffic management and organisational shrewdness, applauded worldwide within a day or so of its launching, that somehow came as a big surprise to all. To Australians, especially.
For we’d all thought less of ourselves till then. We’d predicted failure and assumed it, and were already, scowlingly, looking for someone to blame. We already half-believed John Clarke had got it right in The Games, and we were a pack of self-mocking long-lunchers and back-stabbing bunglers, and there was nothing much really for us to do but wait for the traffic snarls, the impossible crowds, the double-bookings, the angry foreign dignitaries, the lashing rain, the hurricane winds, the train crash, the road collisions, the multitudes of children lost and starving, the lavatory queues, the ministerial sackings, the Royal Commission and the scandalous headlines recurring decades on.
But it didn’t turn out like that. From the galloping entrance of the horseman on Opening Night, it was clear that we were in good hands and, from the wonderful mysteriousness of the Aboriginal Dreamtime sequence, that our culture’s depth would not be sold short. Then from the wit of the toppling boxes, and the Victa mowers, and the corrugated iron, and the sassy multicultural dancers, the fuming Chinese dragon and the immemorial magic of Cathy Freeman in the fire and the water, and then the image – courtesy Kubrick, 2001 – of the climbing canister of flame igniting (at last, at last) at the top of the interpenetrated Olympic circle of fire, it was clear that we knew a fair bit of what we were doing, and doing it pretty well. And so the first night became, as Paul Keating might have said, the s
weetest concert of all or the miracle we had to have. And it all came right after that – the trains, the weather, the lavatories. Success was assured, even triumph, and couldn’t be easily stopped.
It depended a bit on the wood-nymph beauty of Cathy, and a lot on her Aboriginality – just as the race, religion, politics and personal tragedy of Muhammad Ali added much to Atlanta’s flame-lighting – and a lot on her connection, lately stated, with the Stolen Children and her angry spat with John Howard. But her image in that hour unified and enhanced the nation, as did in another country and century the Statue of Liberty newly unveiled. She became our tribal goddess, our ghost of things past and to come …
And what followed was a kind of two-week national honeymoon, or a protracted Mexican wave, that enriched and pleasured all of our memories and all who came as witnesses. The joviality of the volunteers and the transport workers – Passengers, do not panic, said a mild ironic voice over the loudspeaker at Redfern station, you are in the caring hands of State Rail – was remarked around the world. The broad-boulevard feeling of the Olympic city – a mild-mannered amble of hundreds of thousands unimperilled by cars or buses or trams, unpolluted, unharrassed, yarning, neighbourly – was like the pilgrim road to Chaucer’s Canterbury, and the great food court under the Coca-Cola umbrellas was not too expensive and never overcrowded, and the women’s lavatories so plentiful the queues were short.
And the city was much the same. To have watched on a big screen at Circular Quay, as I did, Susie O’Neill win amid the multitudinous cheers – and the crowd get up from where they sat or lay on blankets and pillows to sing the national anthem word perfect – was astonishing. And to later wander back from the Opera House through the lamplit colonnade and to look across at the blond Olympic rings on the Bridge, the cabin lights of the Crystal Harmony, and the violinists playing ‘La Vie en Rose’ under palm trees, was to partake of a welcoming magic, a kind of glittering Narnia, or a Great Gatsby party that was always there but never before known or tasted. It was the flavour of the way things always ought to be – unfussed, unviolent, unthreatened, many-hued, multicultural yet familial. And it could be that way again, everywhere, as the Olympic ethos recommends: one gathering, one joy, no barriers, one great inclusive game of life, the way the Constitutional Convention unexpectedly was a year or so back, and the Walk on the Bridge. One humanity, many opinions, many quarrels, but at peace.
There were flaws of course, and a lot of weird good luck. A New Zealand prime minister struck by lightning on the Bridge who narrowly survived with only a singed minder. Weather generally so good that it seemed that Richo had slipped the Deity some dodgy Aussie dollars a few months back. Perec’s panic and her flight home to Paris, which guaranteed therefore Cathy’s win, a win so arousing it accelerated her people’s cause by, probably, ten years.
And the flaws, though few, were significant ones. The officious disqualification by John Clarkeish bureaucrats of Jane Saville in the moment of her apotheosis. The nitpicking pedants who commentated the diving. The fools who delayed the rowing until tempest was assured. The absence of one-day cricket, an inexcusable blasphemy in a festival that included baseball. The anticlimax, too, of the Closing Night – its noise and smugness and bopping pointlessness – whose hectic nullity shrank everything back to, well, human size at last. A good thing too, perhaps; but let that pass. For we proved a lot in these two weeks and, as a nation, learnt a lot.
We proved we can take on a task as complex as the Gulf War and do it as well as – no, better than – anyone else, without a hitch, and without losing friends. And if we can do this, is there anything we cannot do, or may not attempt? And we’ve learnt that people in their organised thousands do things better than traffic lights or telephone computers. That no machine that says ‘If you are lost, press one’ is preferable to a friendly human face.
We’d learnt that cars are humankind’s bitter enemy, and regular trains and light rail and big broad walking boulevards are places where people find a lot of neighbourly happiness. We’ve learnt to talk again to strangers, and not to fear. We’ve learnt our cities are mainly safe, and our politicians not all fools. We’ve learnt – or perhaps we always knew – that the genial mocking of Roy and H.G. is preferable to American hype. We’ve learnt that if everyone actually liked us, and it seems as if they did, then we’re not necessarily losers or also-rans.
We’ve learnt as well, I think, a good deal of the folly of these times. We’ve learnt that money lavished by government on big ideas and tribal symbols can bring in profits greater than all the trimmings of the downsizers and the cost-cutters and the sackers of loyal employees. That government sometimes does things better than corporate free enterprise – World War II, for instance. That Olympic generosity can win big economic victories while Telstra-style slashing-and-burning can fail. That no human passion is altogether pointless, even long-jumping, and many of the arts, even tap-dancing, are worth a government grant or two. For after the Opening Ceremony it will not be the swimming that future tourists will be flying here to see, but our dance theatre, our stage design, our music, our acrobats, our architecture and painting.
We all had our favourite moments. Mine were Cathy’s win, and the hug of Thorpe and Klim, and Eric Moussambani flailing, out of his depth, and our well-beloved Fast-Arsed Wombat’s buttocks dousing the flame, and the guitar-strumming victory snarl of our boys at those ghastly Americans. You will have others.
Overall, however, it was that old-fashioned thing camaraderie, and magnanimity in victory and courage in defeat. It was heroes hiding in ordinary people, and what in the end our heroes are for: to share their pain and ecstasy with us, to run and jump and swim for us, to be there for us when the chips are down. We’ve learnt from them, and from this fortnight, a good bit more of what we are. And that is not so bad.
Goodbye Babylon
(first published in The Australian, 5 October 2000)
TASMANIA: THE VALLEY OF THE STYX, 2000
SUNDAY, 24 DECEMBER
I took a few steps off the road and suddenly, silently, all around me was a place I remembered, or half-remembered – the broad, brown flaking trunks and pale green ferns, and the mossed and mushroom-barnacled logs of the original Forest that for an eternity covered most of Europe. The green, caressing, ominous Otherworld that Hansel and Gretel were lost in, and Puck the mischievous fairy taunted young love in, and black-cowled Death would wait in for the next footsore traveller, with his scythe and his smirk and his mortal bargainings. It was all still there, it seemed, in south-west Tasmania, just off the dirt road out of Maydena – the Woods, the dark seductive habitat of childhood’s bedtime stories and old men’s waking dreams, where Tolkien’s elvin creatures scuttered and Merlin slept.
And in it, suddenly, silently, there was what I had come to see: a big tree, pale, with straggling bark, tall and straight, tall as three railway carriages stood on end, old as Will Shakespeare would be now if he were still alive, wide as a city tenement, and deep in its roots as an underground train station; then another near it, and a little way off, through undergrowth, a third, in shadows deepened by their own immensity. Eucalyptus regnans. The tallest flowering plants on earth. The highest hardwoods, and the second-largest living things after, yes, California’s redwoods – though one of them, felled a century ago in Victoria, had measured a hundred and fifty metres (lacking trigonometry, the admiring axemen could measure it only by cutting it down), and so was the biggest living thing on earth, till they cut it down. Toadstools and lichens and butterflies around them, moss and mouldering peace. A clinging, attentive, buzzing silence all around. We took our photographs: Ellis arms outstretched in crucifix mode against the trunk’s grey freckled enormity; Ellis communing with sprouting pre-Cambric toadstools. And then we walked on, through the Woods, the ever-hypnotic and soothing dappled panoply, crunching the undergrowth, towards … what? I both knew and didn’t want to know.
And soon, too soon, we saw it, the next thing on the map. The Desolation.
Clear-felling they call it, but no words are big enough for this vast and tedious panorama of splintered nothingness, this mile on mile of stricken and shattered mountainside that used to be green, embracing Arthurian forest – how recently? a year? a month? a week? – and was now like Dresden the morning after, carpet-bombed, burnt out, lifeless, no birdsong, no skirring insects, no animals, the bushland equivalent of what the Biblical prophet Ezekiel called ‘a valley of dry bones’. Oblivion. Holocaust. Extinction. In a region wondrously, tellingly named the Valley of the Styx.
‘And after they chop them down, of course,’ my companion, Charles Wooley of 60 Minutes, noted as we posed together on a stump as wide as a Manly ferry, ‘they have to poison what life remains – what a good old forester mate of mine once called “the vermin”. And I said, “Vermin, you mean, rats, mice …?” And he said, “No, Charlie, possums and wombats and wallabies and potoroos.”’
Maybe half a million animals a year, Wooley estimated, died a slow and painful death from a deciduous monofluoroacetate mix known as 1080 that quickly vanishes from the ecosystem leaving no trace, like a neutron bomb. After which the new-planted corporation forests could grow untroubled by pesky animal life in healthy, thrusting, skyward silence.
I thought of the phrase then, and told it to Wooley: ecological totalitarianism. He liked it, because it contained within the sweep of its ugly meaning all the information people weren’t told. How you couldn’t, for instance, discover through Freedom of Information what money Tasmania made from wood-chipping; what, in dollars and cents, this ongoing, unceasing, willed catastrophe was finally worth. That information was ‘reclassified’, unknowable, not fit to know.
‘This year they’ve produced more chips than in any other years,’ he said. ‘We’re up to somewhere between five and six million tonnes per year. And yet they’ll never crow about that, no way. Now, if we were selling apples again – which we can’t give away – the Minister for Apples would say, “We’ve sold five million tonnes. This is fantastic.” When we do so well in wood-chipping, they don’t mention it.’
Bob Ellis Page 7