Away.

I’m on holiday. I’ve gone away. To Broome, as it happens. A very long way away. Well over 2300 kilometres. On the plane it took 2½ hours to fly from Perth. This a journey within one state and not even from one extremity to the other. Like I said, a long way away.

Why do we do this? Why travel great distances to some other place from where we normally live? Many reasons. Often more than one applies to a particular situation. As it does this time. I’ve come away to have some respite, a change from the usual. To relax without the burden of the everyday urgency of living which always seems so present in our normal biding. In addition, spending time with loved relations, my brother-in-law and his wife. So, definitely a complexity of reasons.

Being away implies some notion of a base, somewhere that isn’t away. Although I’ve spent around two thirds of my life mostly in various locations around the city of Perth, it doesn’t yet feel like my home. But if you ask me where that would be, I would still be hard up for an answer.  Most people unhesitatingly ascribe a city, a town, a suburb, as their home. Not me. I was born in Sydney. I lived in the city for the first three years of my life and then the next eleven within a radius of less than 100 kms. That was a long time ago.  Since then I’ve only visited the city for brief periods. Those early years and the collection of short subsequent visits are not enough for Sydney to qualify as my home. And if that doesn’t count, nowhere else is going to fare any better.

But I’m not stateless. I’m still in the country in which I was born. I have an unequivocal right to go on  living here, in Australia. Whether I can specify somewhere in the country as my home town or not is irrelevant to the political fact that Australia counts officially as my home. I have somewhere to live. I’m not threatened by anything more than politicians who want me to believe they’re always acting in my best interests, and business people who assure me “your call is important to us”.

According to an item on SBS News this evening, there are 15 million refugees in the world right now. People who are away. People who are not at home. People who no longer have a home. Or if they can identify a place which they call home, they cannot live there, cannot go back there. These are people who are away not from choice but because they’ve been driven from their homes by war, murder, rape, torture, starvation, terrorism, or some other hideous provocation from a long list of possibilities.

In the meantime I live in a country in which I can freely choose to go away. I also live in a country whose politicians — there’s no distinction in this case between government and opposition members — pretend that we are somehow seriously threatened by a few hundred refugees , virtually all of them bona fide, who arrive on our shores, or at least in our territories, by boat. These illegal immigrants, so-called boat people, who have come away in order to save their lives, are apparently a dire danger whereas the thousands who come by air and overstay their visitor visas pose no problem.

I would like to extend the hospitality of my home, my country Australia, to these homeless people, these people who have come away from their forbidding homelands . But my government, those politicians elected to represent my wishes and to act on them, has chosen to ignore me and deny any welcome to this particular category of refugees. And I cannot get away from this despicable policy and its inhumane application. Even if I go away from the country, which, as I’ve already said,  I can freely choose to do, I cannot get away from the shame. There is nowhere away from this.

 

IMMIGRANT

 

The boat rides on, over the harbour,

Pushing beyond the headland,

Soon it will sail over the horizon;

Soon it will lie beyond memory.

 

I came here on that vagrant boat,

Though I would as gladly come

On the back of a great bird in the sky,

Or carried in a chariot of the gods.

 

On this voyage there was no fantasy,

Only a mundane and miserable passage,

Dragged across wilful currents and tides;

I should not have hoped for more.

 

Yet I dreamt of a different journey,

And for a time the dream was real,

Fragments remain, vaguely calling me;

I still hope, long for them to be true.

 

The boat rides on, over the harbour,

Pushing beyond the headland,

Soon it will sail over the horizon;

But I have come to stay.

Ruari Jack Hughes

Bitter Was the Night

This is the night when you wash each other’s feet. The night when you remember the Passover. The night when  you share the hasty meal before the  deliverance from God’s wrath. This is the night when God struck down the first born of all living things, human and other animal life. This is the night when God’s son prayed and wept in the garden. The night when the others slept instead of keeping vigil. This is the night of betrayal. This is the night of premonition  of horror.

So go to your beds to sleepy rest. But don’t dream. Don’t let your memories invade your unconsciousness. Turn off your minds to the call to stand vigil. I’ll join you. I’ll wait for the cock crow and wonder if, in my sleep, I’ve been guilty of three times of denial. I’ll wake certain that it happened. Somewhere, sometime, I know that I turned my back, didn’t listen to the plea, shrugged off the need. Tomorrow I’ll be there in the church, sorrowful for the death of my God. Repeating the prayers of lamentation and commiseration. An onlooker, not a true participant in  the passion. Not yet. Maybe next year.

Happy Easter!

 

barAbbas

And did you do anything

When you were crying out

Your injustices, your complaints

Against the occupying forces?

 

Wasn’t it all just an excuse

To pillage the villages,

To steal a few girls,

Pretending you were a freedom fighter?

 

Sure, the king turned a blind eye

To your shenanigans,

It suited him to let you

Annoy the foreigners, didn’t it?

 

When you were rampaging

Across the weary land,

There was another calling for change,

Did you never hear him?

 

While you were murdering and tearing,

Marauding through the hills,

He was healing and mending,

Did you not cross paths?

 

You and your ragamuffin band

Were little more than a nuisance,

You couldn’t think you mattered,

Or were you so deluded?

 

What did you think

When you were chosen by the mob,

That the governor had a good

Sense of your worthiness?

 

Not even a political prisoner,

You were just in the right place

At the right time,

Were you destined or merely lucky?

 

People are forever fickle,

They didn’t care a fig for you,

They just wanted the other one dead,

Was it possible you didn’t get that?

 

If you thought the crowds were cheering

Because you had been released,

You surely didn’t understand the situation

Or did it just not matter?

 

Like the governor washing his hands,

You wandered into the story,

He didn’t know what he was doing,

Did you have any better idea?

 

In the end, they say

That even the man’s god abandoned him,

Anyway that’s what I heard,

Was that really right?

 

In any case, how could you walk from prison,

Right past that innocent man

As if you had that right,

When you had no right?

 

Then they killed him, above a rubbish tip,

While you quickly got out of town,

While you got to live

What more did you do, did you?

 Ruari Jack Hughes

 

 

Sometimes…

I’m sure you’ve had those days. The ones when you plan what you’re going to do with the next 24 hours and then the whole lot goes to crap in one easy move. Sometimes it’s me; sometimes I just can’t get myself into gear; sometimes I have so many things on my ‘to do’ list that I get overwhelmed and can’t see where to start first.

But sometimes, quite a lot in fact, it’s other people who muck it up. Sometimes that’s a nice thing (like a friend phoning or calling in); sometimes it’s just plain bloodyminded. Business people trying to flog you something you don’t want are just a nuisance — time-wasting but soon dismissed.  Worse are those whose  incompetence requires you going over matters already supposedly complete but you have to spell it out all over again in words of one syllable. Even more worser is when they still can’t comprehend what they should be doing in return for the typically serious amounts of money they are charging to do it.

Why is it, I wonder, that sometimes we can see things so stunningly obvious yet to others they are apparently more opaque than stygian darkness? This morning it was a financial company unable to see that a new contract to extend a situation in operation for the past five years — and in which there will be no change in the next five years — should be able to be maintained as status quo.

And while I was grumpily reflecting on this piece of nonsense which had occupied an hour on the phone, I checked on one of the news-feeds on my computer and read a number of postings related to the imminent withdrawal of armed forces from Afghanistan. Now, with the wonderful advantage of 20/20 hindsight vision, all the pundits are pointing out the utter senseless waste of more than ten years warfare in that sad country and the most likely outcome being an immediate descent into tribal violence and destabilisation as soon as the withdrawal of the USA, Australia and all the other gung-ho military adventurers is complete.

Sometimes your own problems become rather insignificant when you lift your eyes and re-focus on the broader scenario.

Here’s a couplet which may be worth pondering.

The biding is done, there will be satisfaction for the longing;

The night comes down, and the sun ascends in the dawning.

Ruari Jack Hughes

The Things You Don’t See

I went to the Ozconcert last night. This is an annual event held in Perth to celebrate multiculturalism. It’s been going for 25 years and takes the form of a series of performances in music and dance by a variety of individuals and groups representing many different ethnic and national bodies. This year’s concert included, for example, singers from Australian Aboriginal, PNG, Indian, Chinese, Middle Eastern backgrounds and dancers from China, Indonesia, Aboriginal Australia, Croatia, Egypt among others. There were also groups and bands, sometimes playing traditional material and at others, fascinating fusions of Western and non-Western music, several with a jazz underlay.

On a beautiful early Autumn evening in the grounds of the equally beautiful Government House, some seven thousand people spread blankets or sat on low chairs with picnic dinners and drinks of choice set before them, to share in this musical reminder of our hugely varied backgrounds.

We also had a reminder from Dr Eric Tan, the originator of Ozconcert, about his vision in setting it up, of a nation which could move away from historical resistance to others (i.e. non-British) which had often been expressed in outright racism. Ozconcert began in 1989, the year after the bicentenary of European (settlement, occupation, invasion, choose your own denominator) of Australia.

Both these reminders aimed to demonstrate the positive qualities of multiculturalism. The recognition of what each different ethnic group or nation has contributed to the overall mix that is contemporary Australia; the realisation that it’s only complexion and sometimes facial configuration that distinguishes second and third generation Australians from each other since spoken accents and lifestyle behaviours are mostly quite congruent.

Yet, as I looked around me, it was obvious that the audience was frequently composed in smaller groups which represented specific ethnicities and that there weren’t many groups made up of a haphazard mixing of people from obviously different backgrounds.

And also, although I didn’t go into the city last night after the concert, I know that had I done so, I would soon have been confronted by more examples than I cared to see (because one would be too many) of bigotry and racial intolerance. Police patrols which can too easily pick out aboriginal kids and harass them; gangs of particular ethnicities antagonising each other; taunting comments thrown at those who are deemed different and therefore less.

When I turn from the streetscape, there are immediately attitudes (such as “Turn back the boat people”; “Put foreign workers last in the job queue”)   by governments and politicians, business interests and  media pundits, those who like to be heard on radio talk-back programs, and a plenitude of other sources, all telling me that I must be wrong, that multiculturalism is just an idea, style without substance, like so much more in our 21st century Australia.

I enjoyed the concert last night. I went home feeling pretty good about it. I’d like to believe that the concert was a good picture of where we’ve got to in Australia in 2013. If it had that impact on me, perhaps it did also on the rest of the seven thousand who were there, and perhaps that can become the dominant view of who we are as a people.

Here’s another way to see the picture:

There was a time when…

There was a time when dragons flew in the skies,

Ice castles shone in the bright sunshine

Of fabulous tropical lands,

Birds called to each other in descants,

And animals spoke in poetry.

 

A time when people tall as houses

Walked the town roads, the country lanes,

And tiny ones, little men and women,

Stood easily on their giant neighbours’ palms.

 

All these things were quite ordinary,

Though you might be amazed to hear it.

If you had been there, you would not have wondered

For it was not something to wonder.

 

There was a time when people similar to us,

With skins of many different colours

Lived together in the towns,

Where people wore veils shielding their faces,

And their uncovered neighbours smiled.

 

A time when people worshipped their God

In church, synagogue, temple and mosque,

And everyone, children, men and women,

Were freely welcome in each other’s lands.

 

All these things were quite ordinary,

Though you are amazed to hear it.

If you had been there, surely you would not have wondered,

Surely it should not be something to wonder.

 Ruari Jack Hughes

Rage Against the Machine

You might have noticed this is the first post in three days. I’m no Luddite, but there are times when I really get fed up with machines and technology. Two nights ago the computer and the printer decided to have joint hissy fits. A simple job of setting up some new business cards (done it several times before) and then printing them should have taken perhaps half an hour tops. Instead we were still battling the confounded machines nearly three hours after we started.

The old opinion that “insanity is doing the same thing over and over when it obviously doesn’t work” was totally ignored and we battled on in a combination of ignorance and brute insistence. It wasn’t exactly that we beat the machines into submission; more likely they just got tired of the joke. Do I believe there are evil little green meanies hiding in the back niches of machines and appliances? Damn right, I do! I don’t think they’re as ‘at home’ in Apples as they are in PCs, but they’ve certainly also managed to colonise Steve Jobs’ little toys.

Back in the day when we acquired our first computer, it was a PC. Through several generations, and at least one complete re-build, I struggled to do anything at all without having the whole system crash on me. I’m sure I was a candidate for entry in the Guinness Book of Records for the idiot who managed to crash a computer every time I sat down to the keyboard. Without the very able assistance of my wife, and later on my daughters, I would probably have petrified before the VDU before ever figuring out how to make the viciously recalcitrant gadget work.

There came the moment when it was necessary to buy a new computer, the old one having finally worn itself out in its constant campaign to thwart any attempt by me to make effective, productive use of the thing. In desperation I accepted someone’s opinion that Apples are much more user friendly. (By this time I think I had come to believe the moon is made of green cheese; all basis for rationality had disappeared from my universe.) So we got ourselves our first Apple computer, a bench-top iMac. And suddenly I entered a new world, one in which most of the time I could get the result I desired from a session with a computer! However, as Monday night demonstrated, I may have entered a new world, but not yet paradise. There are enough of the green meanies hanging about that my efforts can still be seriously sabotaged.

I must reconfigure my mind and focus on more positive things. Let’s try this poem for a change of view.

Poem for the New Day

The sun rises from the dark earth
Light seeps slowly across the land
Birdsong cracks the sky in joyful sound
Children drift from caverns of dreams
To the hours of rowdy frivolity
Everything fits its purposed design
And we can be, just be, one more day.

Ruari Jack Hughes