Monthly Archives: January 2024

Little Old Lady

By Posted in Childhood, death, Family, Life, racism Tagged , , , , , , , 2 Comments

You’d see her on the high street every morning, pushing the walker that she really doesn’t need.

She’d walk the 1.2 kilometres to her coffee shop where the staff would welcome her as a sort of celebrity.

At the age of ninety-seven she looks good wearing fashions of women two generations younger. Her white curls are cropped short, her still pretty face opens into a smile that brightens the day. A waiter pulls out a chair for her: What will you have, Helen? The usual?

The usual is coffee and a pastry. If you asked Helen what sort of coffee – a caffe latte or a flat white – she’d look puzzled. I like it how they make it, she’d say, gesturing vaguely in the direction of  the barrista.

Her morning yoga session, a practice of seventy years, keeps her joints moving smoothly. After coffee she’d head back up the high street and make her way to the supermarket. The old lady was heading cheerfully towards her centenary.  

A long life has delivered its burdens. She’s buried partners, she’s watched her daughters grapple with their cancers, there have been the hip fractures, the blocked arteries, the eye that will not work. These burdens she has set aside. Other burdens, burdens acquired in childhood remained buried deeply. 

The old lady kept herself active and cheerful. There were her children and her grandchildren and their little ones. A total of twenty-three descendants lightened life’s burdens. Sons in law and grandsons in law joined her tribe and she embraced them all. The old lady saw her generations, saw her futurity, and life shone. She drank her coffee, she practised her yoga and she walked and walked.

Until the day following October 7 this year. That day she read how the mob in Sydney cried Death to the Jews! Gas the Jews!  Her eldest great-grandchild had told his hijab-clad workmate he was a Zionist. She had replied, You deserve death. On the TV news the old lady watched the mob in Dagestan hunting for Jews.

Now the wounds of childhood in Danzig burst open, an abscess of humiliation and terror. The old lady said, I can’t remember a single happy day in those eleven years… We were the lucky ones, we caught a boat to Australia. All my cousins who remained, perished. Cousin Josephina was burned to death in the Synagogue. And now they’re burning Jews in Israel!

If you walk the high street today you won’t sight the little old lady with her walker. She’s not to be found in her coffee shop. She awakens to a day of heaviness. The news appals. Her mind swims and fails. The new griefs and the old griefs literally drive the old lady out of her mind. She says, I have nothing to live for. There’s nothing for me to look forward to.

Little Old Lady

By Posted in Childhood, death, Family, Life, racism Tagged , , , , , , , 2 Comments

You’d see her on the high street every morning, pushing the walker that she really doesn’t need.

She’d walk the 1.2 kilometres to her coffee shop where the staff would welcome her as a sort of celebrity.

At the age of ninety-seven she looks good wearing fashions of women two generations younger. Her white curls are cropped short, her still pretty face opens into a smile that brightens the day. A waiter pulls out a chair for her: What will you have, Helen? The usual?

The usual is coffee and a pastry. If you asked Helen what sort of coffee – a caffe latte or a flat white – she’d look puzzled. I like it how they make it, she’d say, gesturing vaguely in the direction of  the barrista.

Her morning yoga session, a practice of seventy years, keeps her joints moving smoothly. After coffee she’d head back up the high street and make her way to the supermarket. The old lady was heading cheerfully towards her centenary.  

A long life has delivered its burdens. She’s buried partners, she’s watched her daughters grapple with their cancers, there have been the hip fractures, the blocked arteries, the eye that will not work. These burdens she has set aside. Other burdens, burdens acquired in childhood remained buried deeply. 

The old lady kept herself active and cheerful. There were her children and her grandchildren and their little ones. A total of twenty-three descendants lightened life’s burdens. Sons in law and grandsons in law joined her tribe and she embraced them all. The old lady saw her generations, saw her futurity, and life shone. She drank her coffee, she practised her yoga and she walked and walked.

Until the day following October 7 this year. That day she read how the mob in Sydney cried Death to the Jews! Gas the Jews!  Her eldest great-grandchild had told his hijab-clad workmate he was a Zionist. She had replied, You deserve death. On the TV news the old lady watched the mob in Dagestan hunting for Jews.

Now the wounds of childhood in Danzig burst open, an abscess of humiliation and terror. The old lady said, I can’t remember a single happy day in those eleven years… We were the lucky ones, we caught a boat to Australia. All my cousins who remained, perished. Cousin Josephina was burned to death in the Synagogue. And now they’re burning Jews in Israel!

If you walk the high street today you won’t sight the little old lady with her walker. She’s not to be found in her coffee shop. She awakens to a day of heaviness. The news appals. Her mind swims and fails. The new griefs and the old griefs literally drive the old lady out of her mind. She says, I have nothing to live for. There’s nothing for me to look forward to.

Bird, Wind, Beach

By Posted in Life, Poetry Tagged , , , , , , , , 4 Comments

Somewhere in the far north of the country, a monsoon whips and drenches the land. Here, on a beach one thousand kilometres south, the monsoon’s tail lashes sand and sea and sky. During a lull between rain dumps I take my chances and run across the hard-whipped sand. I have the beach to myself. Clouds lower and threaten. The air is warm and wet.

Something draws my gaze upward, and there – there! – a shape is held in suspension. The shape moves ever so slightly, moves sideways in the air. Closer now, I make out a white undersurface, and as the shape leans a fraction, a silver-grey shows itself. My legs find speed and power, drawn in long-forgotten fluency, towards this bird, this vision. I realise I’m gazing up at a sea eagle.

The sight is a glory. I feel a transport of joy. No sound but wind and the waves crashing, driven by the wind, the wind that this bird defies. He defies the roaring wind, and rides with such ease. Suddenly, he swings, gliding now, wind-powered, and is gone. I thrill to the mastery of the thing. “Mastery” – the word comes to me from The Windhover, that poem of Hopkins that must have hovered above my thought for two score of years.

In phrase after phrase Hopkins captures my feeling:

I caught this morning morning’s minion…

My heart in hiding, stirred for a bird…

This uplift in my spirit stays with me all day.

Simply, a bird, a beach, a wind; simple the recipe for exultation, for thanksgiving, for preservation.

A Yacht Race

By Posted in death, Life Tagged , , , , , , Leave a comment


The race had been in progress for the best part of three days. Two yachts crept down the Derwent River towards the finish line. Left behind were the brutal winds of the Start. Here there was scarcely a zephyr. The national broadcaster broke into the scheduled breakfast banalities to cover the final minutes of the race. In a race of 628 nautical miles, the giant yachts were separated by less than one-tenth of a nautical mile.

The Breakfast crew at the TV station were agog. The vision showed two yachts with their so tallmasts, black triangular sails reminiscent of wizard’s cloaks, creeping, overlapping each other, changing tack suddenly, stealing each other’s air, vying for minute advantage. You could not tell from the vision which yacht was leading. The young woman on the TV declared: I can’t tell who’s ahead! Neither could I.

It was clear to me, a mere dinghy sailor, the TV lady was all at sea. She would not know what a nautical mile was, nor the names of the sails, nor her port side from her starboard. She didn’t need to. She was engaged, she was excited and she conveyed the tension of the moment as well as her partiality. This was entertainment. She favoured the boat that had finished in second place twice. In short she cheered for the underdog precisely and solely because it was the underdog.

To cheer for the underdog is familiar to most Australians. An instinct for justice overtakes us. It’s an impulse both noble and immature. It loves the simple story. It has no time for nuance. Insteadthere is romance, a whiff of virtue.

It is this instinct for the underdog that animates the national broadcaster. This is evident in reporting many contests, both domestic and international.

At the moment there are contested narratives in the middle east. The broadcaster can’t quite resist the adolescent lure of the simple story. It sees David, it sees Goliath. It sees moral purity on one side and the opposite on the other side. And it what is clearly to be seen it chooses not to see.

In the course of the war in Gaza and Israel the broadcaster and its like-minded newspapers report the aweful suffering of Palestinian people, as they should. We see and we read and we feel. Our feelings include grief and shock and anger. What the reports seldom remind us is the fact of war both in Gaza and in Israel. Hamas and Islamic Jihad continue to rocket non-military targets in Israel.

We see much reporting of the suffering in Gaza, some of the suffering in the West Bank, much, much less of the situation in Israel.

In the weeks since mid-October, I have not come across reportage such the following. Its author is a New Yorker named ShaulRobinson:

Israel, December 2023. Not a defeated country. Certainly not a country short on resolve or determination. Or even a country concerned that it might not get through this. But, for all that, this is a stunned country. A grieving country. A country in indescribable pain.

The daily losses of soldiers. The people you meet everywhere – ’ I have a son in Gaza’. The hundreds of thousands of people evacuated from their homes. The bereaved, the shattered communities, the shattered sense of security, of safety. The wounded (there are already thousands of profoundly wounded soldiers), the scarred. The families coping with husbands, fathers, children, in the Army for months….

We learned a long time ago to stop saying the words ‘unprecedented’ or ‘unbelievable’. The precedents in Jewish history for people doing this kind of monstrous violence, born of irrational, demonic hatred, are too many to count. And as for ‘unbelievable’ – well we should have believed it could happen, but nobody wanted to. 

… the most profound moments are with the individual encounters. We met the parents of three heroes – Rabbi Shmuel Slotki whose two sons Noam and Yishai Slotki died on the first day, rushing to defend Kibbutz Alumim, and Robert and Lisa Zenilman whose son Ari, who was born in to the LSS community, died in Gaza two weeks ago. 

We met parents and family members of hostages. We met people who had survived the attacks of October 7th, and relatives of people who did not survive. We met wounded soldiers, and soldiers on their way to battle. We met parents who do not sleep at night (in fact I do not think we met anyone who does sleep at night).  We met bereaved family members sitting by their loved ones’ graves in Har Herzl military cemetery.

…we found ourselves viewing the dozens of fresh graves of heroes of the IDF at Har Hertzl, and with one of the heads of Psychiatry, and one of the head Neurosurgeons at Icholov Hospital who have a caseload of trauma both physical and emotional that is beyond belief. And finally found ourselves an almost unbearable memorial to the Nova Music Festival, with burned out cars, piles of abandoned personal belongings, the bar, the stage, tents and camping chairs staged as a reconstruction of what had been.

That last visit, to the Nova memorial, filled me for the first time with Anger. Rage, at the injustice, the evil brutality of what those monsters did to those beautiful innocent young people, who came to dance. 

I reflected on the stories of Har Hertzl. Not just stories of tragic loss, but of Heroism. Of friends who saved the lives of friends, and strangers, and gave up their lives doing so. Stories that obligate us all to fight back with all our might. I reflected on the words of the Neurosurgeon who unhesitatingly stated ‘I am proud of what we are able to do here, the lives we are able to save through our work.’ 

And I reflected on the Nova Festival. We had met one of the organizers of the October 7th Festival, who recounted what happened on the day, and what has happened afterwards – a mass effort to counsel, hold, heal, protect the survivors, remember the murdered and dream of the future.’

Everywhere in the incredibly moving memorial you see the same four words. “We Will Dance Again’.

And on that note, we sang HaTikvah. Israel is the Land of Hope. And we are the People of Hope.

WE will dance again.

We WILL dance again.

We will DANCE again.

We will dance AGAIN, AND AGAIN, AND AGAIN, AND AGAIN AND AGAIN.