Good Weekend, April 1995
HELLO, JERUSALEM
There are bananas growing on the side of the Mount of the Beatitudes and Australian stringybarks a few feet from where Jesus said blessed are the meek, and they that mourn, and blessed are the peacemakers. Everywhere low hills and trees that Streeton might have painted overlook the lovely, flat, clear, silent lake that is Galilee. The rumpled grey-green mountains beyond it prove, under sonic booms, to be the Golan Heights. In Tiberias, now a holiday town like Surfers Paradise, you can eat, lightly grilled in waterside cafes, what is now St Peter’s Fish, as the Saviour did not so long ago, and feed the scraps to grimy, sly, shrill tiger cats, starved and fractious around your ankles, demigods no longer as they were in Cleopatra’s day.
In the Negev Desert barramundi grow in fish tanks twice as fast, because of the filtered sunlight, as they do in Australian rivers. The brackish underground desert water mysteriously, triumphantly encourages new sweetness in the cherry tomatoes. Camel milk when slightly altered becomes delicious long-lasting ice-cream, and cures, it seems, diabetes and maybe, touch wood, AIDS. The parachute-drops from low-flying aircraft of sterile male fruit flies to mate uselessly with the females bring down their pestiferous numbers. Anguished efforts to build tick gates throughout Israel, an agricultural necessity, fall on deaf governmental ears. So does camel milk for diabetes, because it is not kosher.
Jericho, the world’s oldest town, has a casino now. Armageddon is a flat, inviting, ever-fertile plain. The rail bridge Lawrence of Arabia blew up is broken still, and unrepaired. Nazareth is a grimy, traffic-jammed, honking nightmare of pizza parlours and pawnshops and hoons on motorbikes, worse than Parramatta Road. By the road to Cana there is an open sepulchre millennia old with a round white stone you can roll across it, as in the Bible, and an echoing amphitheatre where, our stern guide swears, Jesus may have watched the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles, which were performed year round. Galilee is shrinking, a few feet each year now, because of global warming. It is most of Israel’s water, and soon may not be there.
A Chinese bishop sings mass at dawn inside what some believe is Jesus’ actual tomb, and in the ancient gloomy church that overarches it, a bored little altar boy, like Toto in Cinema Paradiso, wiggles and dozes and sneezes out censer smoke till the whole choir chokes with stifled laughter. A didgeridoo is played in a Jerusalem street of fashionable cafes. In the kosher Mexican restaurant I ask a waitress who looks like Sophie Lee if she is from Australia. No, she says, from Belarus. An Arab taxi driver has never heard of the Mount of Olives. A female Holocaust survivor-guide at the museum reveals her name is Eva Braun.
This is the world’s most multicultural nation. Every day a hundred more assisted migrants – teenagers mostly, preceding their unconvinced parents, from Latvia, the Ukraine, Ethiopia – begin an absorption process that includes learning Hebrew, three years of college and three years in the army, perhaps in a time of war – here it is always perhaps a time of war – and a desert country’s resources are further stretched, and more so when, as they must, they give up the Golan Heights that so many died for. It is not easy. Three politicians ask my fellow traveller Mike Rann and me how a referendum works, for a referendum – Rabin vowed, alas, then Barak after him – must approve the final, shameful surrender of the Golan. It won’t get through, we tell them comfortingly, and Barak will thereby be toppled, and all hell return as it always does to the Promised Land.
It is most multinational on Christmas Eve in Bethlehem – an embattled Palestinian satellite of Jerusalem with army checkpoints and body-searches – and we had a long night walk up a dusty Arab boulevard with a wartime feel, empty of cars and full of young men with tommy guns, to hear black American gospel singers, an Italian diva and a local choir sing thrillingly ‘Oh, Little Town of Bethlehem’ under spangled trees in Manger Square, where Checkers, an Arab equivalent of McDonald’s, has just opened. The pum-pum of what seemed to be mortar fire and the squeal and thud of rockets interspersed the diva’s rendition of ‘Silent Night, Holy Night’ and it was explained that firecrackers end each day of Ramadan, coincidental this year, alas, with Christmas. It is so unfortunate, complains a desolate shopkeeper, that the two million expected have not come to this safest of towns tonight because of beat-up stories of danger by CNN, and the likes of you.
Chastened, Mike, his nine-year-old daughter Molly and I pass through the body-searchers and phone-confiscators to the Church of the Nativity, where grim old cardinals – and in simultaneous television broadcast a sickly, tottering Pope having trouble with his lines – reiterate in different, chanted languages their joy in the Holy Birth. To this repetitious pleasure Yasser Arafat wisely comes late, his beauteous blonde wife preceding him into their front pew. It continues for three hours.
All around on the moved old faces religion seems redeemed, and, however cantankerously executed, Christianity, schismatic, contentious, domestically tyrannical, seems to have a future, and here in the Holy Land at least, a proud engulfing place. In the Old City most of all. In arched and cobbled medieval subterranean crowdedness, its olivewood rosaries and spices and mints and cakeshops, its hanging sides of lamb and ancient Arabs playing chess, its glowing Jesuses and 3-D images of the Saviour with piercing blue eyes, its family shops still selling suits after four hundred years, its running children and donkeys and uniformed teenagers with machine guns and lazy smiles, a labyrinthine city intricate as Venice but older, the feeling of eternal magnetism (Lord, I believe: help Thou mine unbelief) is always there. In Jerusalem, an old judge told us, ‘God is only a local call away.’
You stand on the Mount of Olives above the crowded, almost jostling graves of those Jews who hoped, on these holy slopes, to be resurrected first at the Latter Day and look across at David’s City in sunset’s golden, hanging dust, the late light etching its towers, domes, ramparts in a noble Arthurian way, and the slashes of red cloud rising like Gabriel’s wings over it, and you see why down millennia differing faiths would struggle and fight and die to possess it. Street lights under the ramparts come on, and headlights race around its massive walls, but it persists, a dream, a goal in the mind, ever there, ever beckoning.
Next year in Jerusalem? You bet.
Previously unpublished
9.
PEOPLE
BARRY HUMPHRIES, DECEMBER 1985
My father-in-law taught English at Melbourne Grammar to both Barry Humphries and Malcolm Fraser. Humphries he remembered vividly. Fraser he couldn’t remember at all.
Vividly is how most Australians will remember Humphries, long after Fraser has dwindled in memory to a surly, simmering, stumbling Punch in quest of an athlete to stomp on. For Humphries, though a Tory too – and, as such, a testament to Melbourne Grammar’s power, and my father-in-law’s, to mould young minds, even that one – he is something other than either Fraser the diminisher or Whitlam the enhancer … He is something else again.
We all recognise and exalt in what it is – only ten more performances, hurry hurry. The Dickensian power to transcend caricature, fill up types to the brim with such brimstone that they radiate like deities. The (oh well) Shakespearean capacity to whip old words into new and pregnant music, and then, like Lewis Carroll, cause the language, once baited, to rise up foaming and bite you on the leg … The stifled-volcano capacity, like Olivier, to fill a theatre so full of crackling danger that murders, miracles and acts of God seem imminent – and sometimes occur, like when in this show he levitates and appears in two parts of the stage at the one time.
I finished reading Nikolai Tolstoy’s The Quest for Merlin in the interval of Humphries’ show and I was glad I did. For in it, Tolstoy, among a lot of jargon about druids and shamans, defines Humphries’ function, along with Merlin’s, exactly. The prank-pulling, face-pulling trickster who is also the wise man of the tribe, the conduit of the culture, the custodian of the language, the prophetic intelligence by which all the past and all the future is known. The magician who transcends the cen
turies, and makes them acquainted the one with the other, and cannot help making mischief. So total is his understanding, he must make mischief or he will die of the pain.
In his most painful sketch – this time, as always, the Sandy Stone – the long-dead old man’s ghost returns with his couch, which is his sacred site, to 51 Gallipoli Crescent, now lately purchased by fecund Greeks, and there, among his few surviving heirlooms – a wedding photo, a lock of his mother’s hair, his well-loved hottie – he ruminates on the state of the neighbourhood, now ugly and multicultural, with all the long-tended gardens uprooted, the old trees down. One of the bungalows has been cancerously expanded into a maximum security twilight home, and from one of its windows an old woman looks out at the one remaining tree, a peppercorn, she swung from as a girl. Where’s my swing? Where’s my swing? she asks over and over. She thinks she’s a budgerigar, says the Sri Lankan nurse, laughing heartily.
Sandy, like Merlin, sees it all. In the house across the street there’s a girl with green pointy hair like a cocky who wears the suit I was married in. He takes comfort, though, in the pregnant young Greek wife, whose baby, he knows – unlike the child he never had – will at least be able to look up at his heirlooms and receive some emanation of his kindness from them. At that point the Greek wife comes in and puts them all in the rubbish bin, including his mother’s lock of hair. But not the hot water bottle. That has a use.
I know of no better statement of our nation’s fate, the fate of our tribe, than this. One has to reach for high names to compare with the power of this one sketch. Gogol perhaps. Gorky, Rembrandt? Well, I think so, for what that rush to hyperbole, my family curse, is worth.
Humphries’ other sketches – Sir Les, Lance Boyle, the audience-persecuting Dame Edna – scuttle and grimace like trolls around the giant slippers of Sandy. Works not so much of the left hand as what might be called the right fist, they give vulgar vent to the uglier, Tory, Thatcher half of his bicameral furious twinset. The persecutions of course are delicious – at my matinee a cheerful bulky housewife was moved by the garments he swathed her in to swirl into a gratifying striptease – but they belong, like Les, and Lance and Edna, more to Private Eye than Rembrandt. Or is it Hogarth I mean? It probably is. Not only the northern light but the total darkness as well. Like all great artists Humphries goes to where the pain is and does not avert his gaze. Sandy, our sorrowing seer, speaks of the Twilight Home as: full of little old ladies with tubes up their noses watching Perfect Match. Merlin, had he lived, as Sandy does, would have been proud of that sentence. Sandy, our national consciousness, observes the Great Change that is coming over our tribe, and our species, and cannot be helped, and articulates our grief.
Humphries will not be with us always – men of his stamp, like Waugh, and Thomas and Dickens, and Shakespeare have often pegged out early – and it is unlikely that this neverending Labor government, which, unlike its forebear, knows the words but not the tune, will accord him the knighthood or the gold pass he deserves. So something should be done or said about this man, the one authentic genius of our flabby provincial nation – thus far, the watcher at the gate of our race memory – before the great skyhook takes him from us, and silence and darkness fall on the national details within his care.
Maybe no more should be said than See the show, or Thank you, Barry, or Merlin lives, said especially to those pompous lefties who think they can easily imagine the lineaments of this Humphries evening, and therefore need not see it. They could not imagine it in a lifetime. My curse on all who miss it, especially for mere Christmas drinks.
See the show. Thank you, Barry. Merlin lives.
Letters to the Future
(first published in Sydney Morning Herald, December 1985)
LINDY CHAMBERLAIN, APRIL 1987
In the dock Lindy Chamberlain – erect, resolute, drab-voiced, her face thinner now that she was out of gaol, and more like a ravaged Judy Garland, with the memorable, magnetic, defiant, ash-black eyes that assured, I judge, both her media stardom and her initial conviction – carefully answered her earthly tormentor, word by word, hour by hour, with the same embittered precision that I recalled in other Adventists in my childhood and my youth, when I was one of them. God’s peculiar people, we called ourselves with pride. Some things about her were different: her eyeshadow, plucked eyebrows and light lipstick would not have been tolerated in my day, not in a minister’s wife, but the tone, the sharp and weary tone, in which crashing logic, distance and martyred resignation contested for supremacy, was very familiar. God’s peculiar people. And you will be tried and convicted in those latter days, but the bullets will melt in their muzzles and the padlocks dissolve on their prison gates, and the Lord descending will summon you up to be with him in the clouds and dwell with him forever in the golden city of light.
Martyrdom was built into our expectations then, and, I guess, I embrace it still. Adventists could easily see her trial as a foretaste of the final Persecution, when the righteous will be tested for their faith, and see her courage as their example. They could see her too, very easily see her, as a female Christ accepting and embracing punishment on behalf of all those women who had had abortions, killed their children in the womb and loathed themselves for that primal sin. Such women, I noticed, were the ones who were always more convinced of Lindy’s guilt, because they shared it. And she, like the Adventist saviour on Calvary, suffered for them, took away that fraction of their self-loathing that they then accorded to her.
In the ordinary courtroom, as usual, proceedings were civil, tense and absorbing. The dashboard bloodstains that were not blood. The scissor holes in the jacket that may or may not have been fang holes. The forensic tests destroyed. The dingo tracks that were dog tracks, or were they? The baby’s cry in the night that was heard by all, or was it? How many camels could dance on the point of a needle, or was it angels? What a welter of psychological and theological inexactitude she summoned into being, and what a tidal swamp of journalistic prurience and myth and gossip and race memory she conjured up by that one cry: A dingo’s got my baby! Had she merely said, My baby’s gone! Someone’s taken my baby! none of it would have happened. Nor would it, likewise, had she been the agnostic wife of a supermarket manager, for agnostics, as we know, are sane, and supermarket managers’ wives do not kill newborn babies, or they own up if they do. Or they do it decently a while before, on Medicare, like civilised human beings.
No weapon, no body, no motive, no opportunity … Being of sound mind, she did cut the throat of her healthy child and then copped twenty years in chokey rather than plead post-natal depression and get three months. Of course she did. Why wouldn’t she. She was an Adventist. An Auslander. A moral savage. God knows what they do in those little wooden churches. I’ve seen her eyes, Brett Whiteley said to me, and she’s evil, man, she’s evil.
I took my little daughter Jenny to the courtroom the second time I went. She was six and three quarters then, exactly Azaria’s age, and she didn’t like Lindy much, but thought her innocent, and got very bored in an hour. I tried to imagine enduring Lindy’s burden, that death and that blame, for all of Jenny’s lifetime, and I couldn’t. Poor little woman, to be so mocked and buffeted by a God so cruelly taunting. A dingo’s got my baby … Someone’s taken my baby. Let’s print the two, shall we. No, no, too late, too late.
It’s possible Azaria’s alive, of course, and in the uncertain care of some lone madwoman, black perhaps, whose own baby was once wrested from her by the caring white authorities, perhaps one moonlit night when she was drunk. But it’s probable she’s dead and buried under sand somewhere to preserve the reputation of some half-bred German Shepherd, loved by its owner, loved like a child.
Lindy’s lack of grief on the following day, and Michael’s taking of pictures, was normal of course in Adventists. A baby that dies goes forth without knowing sin and will of a certainty arrive in heaven. Her parents, if numbered among the righteous, will see her there, and rejoice in heaven that she died unt
ainted by sin. On the day of my sister Margaret’s funeral we all played cricket. We knew that Margaret was all right and would make it through the pearly gates. I wish I had such certitude now; Lord help my unbelief.
Religious persecution does not cease, it only finds new excuses. That Lindy suffered for her faith and nothing else is evidenced by the fact that they let her go home between her trials, go home to her other children, who should logically have been in danger. Home to her second baby girl, who should logically have been in mortal danger from a mother who, without motive and without cause, had slaughtered her elder sister in the front seat of a car. But they knew the kids were in no danger, they knew she hadn’t done it. They knew that Michael could not have got her pregnant if she’d done it, and he must have known. They knew she was innocent, and they also knew she had to be punished. The reasons lay beyond the reach of words.
Letters to the Future, April 1987
FRANCIS JAMES
FRANCIS: (sings) Where finds a man his battleground in such an arid world?
Where finds his guiding star in such an empty sky?
Or shall he from each tattered flag to broken lance be hurled?
And is that wastrel I?
Bob Ellis and Patrick Flynn, The James Dossier, 1975
Few who did not know Francis – Spitfire pilot, churchman, double agent, prisoner of conscience, gigantic mocking intellect at large on the great stage of the world – can picture even from his tallest anecdote what he was like. The large, heavy, scrutinising eyes with mocking devilry and divine sympathy ever at contest in them; the blurred, grey, once-handsome features burnt off in his plane crash and by German surgery patchily replaced (it’s not my face you’re looking at, Ellis, it’s my bum, but I can grow whiskers through it); the milk-bottle shoulders and bantam-size air of general menace; and most of all the Voice. Dark, royal and portentous, Oxford modulations over flayed Australian vowels, courtly, mock-epic and hypnotically persuasive, it bore you on its deep tides towards adventures you did not seek. On one majestically deadpan occasion, when I was writing my musical about him, The James Dossier, he told me with unflinching relish of his first escape attempt from German prison camp in, he said, a fire-powered, hot air balloon fashioned out of five hundred Red Cross contraceptives.
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