MONDAY, 5 AUGUST 2002
We drove up to the Woomera Detention Centre and parked outside. I was officially a paralegal because the barrister Jeremy Moore, a tall, blond-headed fortyish man with uneven teeth who headed the boys’ defence team, had gamely said, ‘Well, the definition of a paralegal is pretty broad’, and could include almost anyone who he said was a paralegal and was not in the journalists’ union; like me. I would therefore use my own name, Robert Ellis of Palm Beach, present as identification my actual driver’s licence, and see how it went.
Pushing my luck, I brought no briefcase or shoulder bag but put a notebook, a tape recorder, and three audiocassettes in my inside jacket pockets.
The young man at the desk in the entry room, as I remember, had a short goatee beard and was almost excessively mild-mannered. I signed myself in. The briefcases of the others went through the X-ray machinery. I offered – pushing my luck – to put my jacket down on the moving belt, but the young man said it wasn’t necessary. We waited in a kind of outdoor corridor of cyclone fencing over red dust, and after six or seven minutes were taken in …
I looked around. There were tall bars made of metal that could be bent with a spanner or jemmy and were cheaper, I suppose, than stronger ones. There was razor wire hanging over the top of them like cloud, like atmosphere above them. There were prefabricated grey buildings everywhere, in different compounds, and a lot of red dust and occasional mud. No grass. No trees. In one compound that housed the ‘family units’ the buildings were brightly painted – in expectation of the visiting UN busybodies – behind cyclone fencing. A single sign on the cyclone fencing said ‘What is my crime?’ Bare walls. No cartoons pasted up, no newspaper stories.
We were in a grey, prefabricated corridor off which were many ‘interview rooms’, eight by ten feet. In each room was a plastic table, and a variable number of plastic chairs. There was a wire-reinforced window through which any guard could look to see if you were, say, fucking your interviewee. Or recording the conversation. There were practically no refugees about. There’d be more round lunchtime. A tiny little boy in a pink parka, like Kenny in South Park, wandered unaccompanied in the red dust looking for a friend, a life.
The guards, I was told, were often kindly, especially the Maoris, who were like big cuddly uncles to the littler children, though they terrified the inmates one night with a haka. There was a sadist or two, a few thick-witted male bullies, a lot of ordinary young men from Whyalla earning eighty thousand dollars a year for unskilled work, the sort of money that could buy them a home outright in a year, a year they didn’t much like, and a lot of testy overweight females. One of these came up to us and said, in a gasping, asthmatic smoker’s voice, that we’d have to wait a while for the Bakhtiyaris. Montezar had insulted his schoolteacher and she’d had to ‘settle him down’. This was done, I heard, by locking little offenders for an hour, or half an hour, in a blank, featureless, windowless room.
As we waited, a few adult asylum-seekers – Palestinians, Afghans, Iraqis – drifted by and greeted Father Frank Brennan, who was with us and who introduced them to me, and they told their stories. Their complexions were all pretty much like white Australians, or Greeks, or the darker Irish, and the Afghans were very beautiful – descendants, some say, of the blond Macedonians who came there with Alexander the Great and in thousands intermarried in 336 BC. What a political miracle, I thought, that a race election could be run against a group of people who looked pretty much like us.
No wonder they kept the cameras away from them.
None of them complained too much. Their attitude was rueful, humorous, self-mocking, courteous. They copped it sweet and spoke of ‘Mr Ruddock’ as a jokey bogeyman. I quoted a line from a Labor leader who said, ‘Philip Ruddock is not a man without a heart, he has a very big heart. But it’s a long way from his body, on a life support machine’, and they laughed a good deal at that.
Delicately brought-up Muslim women when menstruating, said Father Brennan, must go to a male official here once a month and ask him for sanitary pads, which he can refuse. If on the pill they must go to him once a day to ask for their contraceptive medication. This he can refuse as well.
Mrs Bakhtiyari came into the room with red-stained hands: the boys had been disruptive, she said, and so, as in Afghanistan, she put henna on their heads. Your boys must swear on the Koran, she was told, and tell the truth. They will tell the truth, Mrs Bakhtiyari said, they are Shi’ites, they believe in the Koran. ‘First of all their faith is in God, and secondly the lawyers.’ Beside her Montezar, like an ordinary little boy, grew bored and looked at his fingers, blew on his fist.
It was explained to Mrs Bakhtiyari that the legal tactic was to say that she, their mother, had put them in an abusive situation, this detention camp, and they and their three sisters should go and live with their father in Sydney, out of physical danger, and leave her here in the camp alone.
‘I don’t matter,’ she said. ‘Get the children out. I only care that the children are free.’
So it then had to be proved that the boys had memories consistent with their story that they were Afghan refugees, and that they had been physically abused in the camp. They talked to my tape recorder; some of what they said occurred when I was out of the room, but Jeremy gave me a transcript later from which I quote.
‘I do not know the date of my birth,’ Montezar said, ‘but I know that I am twelve years old. In Afghanistan the way we count our ages is by the winters passing … In Afghanistan I lived with my family in the village of Cherkin. Our family lived in a mud brick house. I always lived in that house since I was born … I remember leaving my village with my family. I remember travelling through the night and hiding during the day. We travelled by foot … My uncle was with us. He is in the camp with us … In Afghanistan my dad was a farmer. I do not know what kind of farmer. Sometimes my brother would take bread to the farm. I visited him there sometimes but I don’t know what they made there.
‘I remember the Taliban would come to our village. When they came all the people would hide from them. We would not go anywhere near them to see their faces. If they see us looking at them they would kill us … I remember that some children went missing and I knew when they didn’t come back that they were killed. The Taliban drove cars into the village. They had money. They wore turbans and had long beards. They were all men. There were spaces underneath the house where we kept our animals. I remember hiding from the Taliban there. I piled manure on top of me so that they could not see me … The Taliban did not ever find me. My brother told me that they did find him once. They whipped him with a cable. We were all terrified.
‘When we left Afghanistan we went to Pakistan. My family and I were hiding in a room all the time. We were there a long time and we did not go out very much … I went in an aeroplane with my mother, uncle and brother and sisters from Pakistan to Indonesia. Then we went somewhere by bus very late at night and we got a boat … The boat got a hole in it on the way. I was terrified … The hole got bigger and the boat stopped moving. All the people were very afraid … Then some very fast motorboats with a steering wheel like a car came and picked us up … We got on these fast pointy boats. We did not know where we were.’
Alamdar then came in, looking tough and wise, like Truffaut’s street kid in The Four Hundred Blows. He was fourteen and had been through a bit, and was angry, articulate, despairing and cynical. He was very charismatic, almost like the young Marlon Brando, the cast of whose face he shared. It is terrible, I thought, that one so young should be so wise.
‘In the morning at 9.30,’ Montezar said, ‘they take us to school. They give us a piece of paper and say colour it in and then they take us back to the camp …’
‘We said we are not learning,’ Alamdar said, ‘and they say this is all we can do. I want very much to learn … We only go to school for two hours or two and a half hours.’
‘Detainees can work in the kitchen,’ Montezar said. ‘You must work very hard
and outside you would be paid I think a hundred and fifty dollars, but here you work ten hours and get ten dollars. One hour for one dollar.’
‘There are many fights in here,’ his brother said. ‘A fight started a couple of days ago when one guy, who had taken his two sugar rations to his room, was told by the officers that they want to search his room. The officers went in and … took the sugar and smashed the television. The guy said, “I am only sitting here, why are you doing this?” So the officer said, “These things belong to us so we can do whatever we want.” And so a fight broke out, and the officers got hold of two guys and beat them a real lot. We were all very scared. The guys were Afghanis. One of them had to have six stitches on his jaw because he was beaten.
‘It seems to me that when the officers hit us there is no problem with that. My shoulder has been hurting since an officer hit me with a baton. Then when I went to the medical centre they said there is no problem, it is okay, just go back to your room. They did not want to hear about what happened to me.’
Later on Montezar said, ‘If you take a fly and put him in a bottle and close the lid tightly, then just watch and see what that fly will do inside the bottle, he will struggle. We are just like that fly in here. They have put us in prison and we can’t do anything but harm ourselves.’
‘I dream about a Hazara country,’ Alamdar said. ‘Hazara people are in every country, they all refugees, they have no country of their own … What is our crime? I do not think I will grow up. I spoke with one of my friends on the telephone who has been let out. His English is so much better than mine. They say that outside everything is good, the school is good. I say you are very lucky you got visa. I have not got visa in two years. My English is still not very good, theirs is much better.’
‘I do not think I will grow up,’ said Montezar.
Night Thoughts in Time of War (first published in HQ)
BILL MAIDEN
FRIDAY, 4 JANUARY 2008
On the ferry to Ettalong where my schoolteacher in 1952, and then again in 1957 and 1958, who steered me first on my course as a writer, Bill Maiden, now eighty-three, met me at the ferry wharf and spoke with me over lunch at the RSL. His prostate operation had ‘gone well, real well’ but one knee was lately aching because, his doctor said, it was ‘just worn out’. He dreaded, though, further surgery to fix it because ‘I’m getting too old for operations’.
Looking into his face over the oysters, beer and fish plate, I saw hints of my dad: the thin hair and watchful brown eyes, and the generation that saw armed action and lived, as he did, to teach Ancient History, old folk songs, English grammar and spelling to many subsequent generations. Us ten-year-olds he made write a novel in weekly chapters, A Journey to the South Seas. Mine involved an island of dinosaurs, and was complimented by the headmaster Bill Lickiss, and burnt by my parents when they were cleaning out the garage. But it got me going, and here I am.
And here was Bill, and we talked, as always. Politics first (as always) and Howard’s dwindling, and how racism works only when the thing despised is unseen and unmet, because when it is seen and met – Sidney Poitier in movies, Satchmo on stage, Wes Hall on the cricket field – the harsh mood vanishes like mist in the warming day. Howard’s trick was to keep the boat people unseen, and largely unimagined, since film of their children walking ashore with dolls in their arms would instantly render them human, and so ensure they remained the Other, the threatened Swarm, the Aliens, until election day.
We then watched the cricket on a big television whose sound could not be adjusted upwards to suit his deafness: Laxman got out at 109, Tendulkar neared his century. Then he drove me to the ferry where, while waiting, I taped this conversation:
ELLIS: What do you miss most?
BILL: Oh, Bob, not today. That’s a hard question. What do you miss most?
ELLIS: Oh, the sense of possibility. The sense of infinite possibility that comes with being an educated youth.
BILL: Do you? I never thought about that.
ELLIS: What … disappoints you about Australians most, lately?
BILL: Probably their materialism.
ELLIS: Give examples.
BILL: The exact examples I just can’t give you. There are plenty of them, I know. But everybody seems to me to be after something in a material sense. Bigger house, bigger car, anything you say. The consumer society, I suppose that’s the reason.
ELLIS: What were you after? What were you looking for?
BILL: I was looking for a fair society where people thought more of their neighbour than they do these days. ‘Neighbour’ of course in inverted commas. They’re too self-satisfied now. I think it’s something that’s occurred lately. When I was young I went to the war and it actually didn’t apply then. When I came back from the war I was surprised how little the people in Australia were worried about the war. That amazed me. That amazed me! You wouldn’t have known there was a war on. Everybody just did what they’d wanted to do as they’d always [done]. I went to Melbourne and went to the Caulfield Cup. Unbelievable. I suppose there’d been five years of worrying about the war and I guess they were bored stiff with it, even though they were fighting in Borneo and those places, but nobody cared. For them the only people who cared were those who had sons or husbands away at the war.
ELLIS: Did you go to the war gladly?
BILL: Mm.
ELLIS: You did?
BILL: Yep.
ELLIS: What did you think it would bring?
BILL: I don’t know but I just thought I should go. I suppose it was patriotism. I can’t remember. I really can’t remember why. I suppose it had begun to get very serious in the year I went away. 1942. That was a very bad year. The Coral Sea, the submarines in Sydney Harbour, the bombing of Darwin, all those things. Patriotism then was a different kind of patriotism, I think.
ELLIS: Well, it was survival of a … known society, wasn’t it.
BILL: Well, we’d had the Battle of the Coral Sea off the coast of Queensland, Singapore had gone just after Christmas 1941. The war was very dangerous in ’42, ’43. It took a long time to turn around …
And then the ferry came, and the tape was left unfinished.
And So It Went
LES MURRAY, FEBRUARY 2015
We discuss, early on, plunging in, the death by red-hot poker up the arse of King Edward II and the defenestration of Gaveston, his lover, and Peter Ackroyd’s view that the Plantagenets invented organised crime. ‘Oh, I doubt that,’ Les Murray says. ‘Everything good comes out of Italy, sometime or other.’
He sips his drink. ‘We had a king for a neighbour when we lived in Scotland. Duncan, buried under a petrol station. He was killed in battle by Macbeth, not when he was a house guest – that was a lie, that was propaganda.’ He muses on Richard III, under a car park, and what would have happened if his cousin Richmond had lost, not won, at Bosworth. ‘He would have gone back to Wales, and raised his son the wife-killer more strictly, probably, and kept him away from Bullen, and thereby prevented the modern age.’
Murray abjures the computer and writes still with ‘five and one: five fingers that write, and one that can type’. And he thereafter types it up ‘five, six, ten, twelve, lots of times till it’s perfect. I want the pain. I want to have to think. And each time I botch it, I have to think more.’
We have a Jim Beam each, and I a Big Breakfast, in a Jewish restaurant I like to go sometimes, unfamiliar to him. We have come back to Bondi where we shared a room in 1959 and 1960 and Abe Saffron, the prominent Sydney gangster, was our landlord, and on bad nights Les burnt his poems on the bathroom floor, and I protested, and he scooped them up and flushed them away; and we argued about religion, had a fist fight about it, and the rest of it; and how my sister’s ghost came for me when I slept under the ping-pong table, asking how I was going. But those are other stories.
His next book is called Waiting for the Past, about how ‘we remember things differently, each time we remember’. I recall an essay by Susan Sont
ag about how the same photo of, say, a fashionable woman in the 1890s looks different to the same observer as years go by. ‘There’s a set of rules about that,’ he says, ‘about obsolescence and how things become unfashionable, and then almost ugly, and then they start to take on a kind of … timelessness.’ The ugly/unfashionable phase takes thirty years, he reports, timelessness, a hundred.
We drink some more. He was depressed for a long while, he admits, but he’s never thought of killing himself. ‘I’ve never been tempted that way at all. I was gonna beat it. I was always defiant.’ Could he sleep, I asked. ‘No. When I was bad, and that was for years on end, it’d wake me up at four o’clock and put me through my paces, the real miseries. Then it would say, “All right, we sign off now, have a little more sleep and by four o’clock this afternoon we’ll meet again, upon the sofa.” Total time for being in hell, eight hours, divided into two regimes of four.’ It was, he had told me twenty years ago, ‘like cutting off your head, boiling it in a saucepan of water, and eating it, and then saying, “I’ll do that again in four hours.” Talk about laugh.’
His classic book on the subject, Killing the Black Dog, (‘I’m a depression pioneer’) is coming out again this year, and I ask where the phrase was from. ‘Goethe’s Faust’, he says. ‘Mephistopheles took the shape of a black poodle dog. Not a benign breed of dog at all.’
I ask where his dog came from, and he needs no prompting. And I hear, again, and I wish I hadn’t, a familiar, terrible family story, as dark as a Grimm’s fairy tale. His grandfather bade his father cut down a particular tree. His father refused because it was hollowed out with white ants, ‘and if you try to fell it, it’ll fall all over you.’ And his grandfather, ‘a furtive old bastard’, bade his Dad’s brother Archie do it instead. ‘And Archie didn’t know nearly as much about timber felling as Dad, and it fell on him and killed him. And the two of them held it against each other, it was your fault, no, it was your fault, and Grandfather, being the paymaster of the two, he kept Dad poor as a punishment.
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