Tag Archives: genocide

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.

Fellow Australian Citizens

By Posted in First Australians, Life, Opinion, racism Tagged , , , , , , , 3 Comments

My Fellow Australian Citizen dismounts from his bicycle at the intersection. Here, where the bike lane ends, trams, cars and pedestrians converge. Some turn at this intersection, others race through at speed. It’s a tricky crossing, the roadway here unsafe for a cyclist.

My fellow Australian Citizen wheels his bike carefully along the footpath. He finds himself following close behind a Fellow Australian Citizen (FAC) who. oblivious of man and bicycle, is engrossed in her phone conversation. FAC, male, decides to alert her to his presence: Pardon me, he says. FAC, female, looks up, sees her fellow citizen, looks angry.FAC, male, feels he’s interrupted the other’s conversation. He apologises: Excuse me, he says, I am sorry. FAC, female, speaks. He thinks he hears, You don’t belong here.

Does she mean, you and your cycle don’t belong on the footpath? Pardon me? – he asks.

YOU. DON’T. BELONG. HERE.
FAC, male, is no longer in doubt.
I ask FAC, male, How did you feel, once you understood her meaning?Water off a duck’s back. I tell FAC, male, I feel sick. Sick and sad. Like I did when they decided Adam Goodes didn’t belong. FAC, male, explains: Sticks and stones. Back in Rwanda one half of our population decided the other half didn’t belong. They equipped themselves with machetes. I survived and I ran. My family went into hiding. To this day they hide in a safe house. They’re still after me. I ran to Australia and Australia gave me asylum. I stayed, I worked, I studied. I graduated and I became a citizen.
A hopeful thought: I ask, What did she look like, your Fellow Australian Citizen? Ordinary. Nothing remarkable. I persist: Describe her for me.FAC, male, is puzzled: She looked like anyone else: mid-forties, perhaps. Light brown hair, slim, medium height. (What I want to know, what I’m hoping to hear, is she’s Aboriginal. If she were indigenous she’d be within her rights. Rude perhaps, but within her rights, certainly.) I mean what was her race?Oh. She was caucasian.


Fellow Australian Citizens have rallied in their thousands, in their tens of thousands, in a time of danger, risking greatly, searching, trying to find a way of showing how black lives matter in this country too.In this country citizens are feeling conscious that we might not belong here, not by ancient right. We arrived here in the last century, or two or three. We are new here.We lack the legitimacy of antiquity.
The First Australians might reasonably challenge us. They might say, you don’t belong here. But they don’t say that. Instead they say, let’s share country.
I’ve heard them, I’ve heard it everywhere that I’ve travelled to work – in the Pilbara, in the Kimberley, in the Ngaaanyatjarrah lands, in the Adnymathanha lands, in my home country of the Wiradjuri, in Bigambul country, in the country of the Darug, the Yamaji, the Arrernte, the Warlpiri, the Bininj, the Nangiomeri, Marimandinji, Marithiel, Maringar, Mulluk Mulluk.
These dark times are also times of hope. Times of searching of a nation’s soul.But at that crossing, at that intersection where Fellow Australian Citizens meet, hope slackens. Fear, feeding on a deep ignorance of the nature of an immigrant nation, flickers into hate. Elsewhere in this country, fear flickers into hate against Chinese Australians. And there’s always the Jews to hate too.

From the Heart 3

By Posted in Faith, Life, Running Tagged , , , , , , , Leave a comment

 
0600. The rock squats, silent, a massive cupcake among the grasses. Moment by moment the light changes: dark gives way to deep blues, to a steel blue, now to a primrose glimmering. All is quiet, still. Life suspended, the plain broods, foreknowing sunrise.
 
0621.The rock as image is too familiar. The rock as concrete reality forbids familiarity. I emerge from my small car, and regard the great terracotta thing before me: after all these years its immensity, everfresh, astonishes me. My car winds its way to the carpark. At every bend the rock changes; every aspect surprises and evokes the overpowering question: what immortal hand or eye? My question and the custodians’ questions are the same as Blake’s. The very greatness demands a myth.
I glance at the steep wall at my side and the slope flings my gaze up, up, upward beyond my range of cervical extension. The human neck cannot accommodate the reality; only if I lie on my back can I take it in. The human ant needs a postcard.
 
0623. Time to start: I am alone, the sole ant. The base walk used to be nine kilometres in length. Now it’s 10.6 kilometres. The rock hasn’t grown but the people who manage the Park have decided to keep us at a distance. And I need to finish my circuit by 0730: time to start.
 
Every one of my years finds voice and protests in my lower back as I shamble into movement. I intended to run but for now this hobbling is the best I can do. The gravel path underfoot is soft and red. It cushions and retards. Slower going and harder. But with only a hundred metres behind me slow going and aching back are forgotten. The rock compels, demands all attention, with its folds and bends, its clefts and pits, its elegant curves, its sweep and breach, its sudden secret shades and sulci.
That face – those many faces – prefigure every expression of humanity. The rock gazes down with idle incuriosity, here it is a pockmarked teenager, here a gaunt pensioner, now a lady, elegant in her long dress that falls and sweeps and moves gracefully in concert with my passing. The rock shows the many faces that are human faces: here is calm, here inscrutability, here obduracy.
Three great gouges side by side at great height, these are eye sockets, empty: what is this sight that sears her eyeballs?  The rock gazes out at our killing fields, at Crusades and Inquisition, at Babi Yar, Rwanda, Cambodia, at Holocaust, at the Armenian Genocide. The rock’s eyeless sockets see all. She has no tears. No mouth here, no words.
 
0630. Right on time the sun comes up, shining, burning directly in my eyes as the rockface heads me due east. The wind comes up too, blowing hot hard warnings of today’s forty degrees: you step outside from your cooled habitat, you breathe, your palate dries and you gasp. The second breath confirms the first impression.
For now the hot headwind is welcome: an early headwind promises a following wind in the later stages when I’ll head west and home.
But the sun, this sun, this blaze, this interrogator’s light right in my eyes: son of man, why have you come?
My innocent run is no longer blameless.
Son of man, what business have you here?
What? Why? What do I seek – peace? Innocence?
The light glares: What gift do you bring?
Consciousness. It is all I have.
The bright light relents, winking now, filtered by thin foliage, broken by gentle rises and bends. 
At this point the run might become a chore; the vista is relatively unremarkable, the rock radiating yesterday’s stored heat, the glare, the difficult going underfoot, the headwind – all might sap a runner. Instead the mechanical affair of placing one foot before another feels charged, significant. Plod, plod, breathe, breathe, the ordinary is transmuted. It is said of William Blake that he took a visitor outside, directed him to look at the midsummer sun and report what he saw. “Bright sunshine”, said the visitor. Said Blake, “I see hosts of fiery angels surrounding the Throne, singing Holy, Holy, Holy.”
 
Fires in my throat. I sip my iced water. But first I recite the customary blessing over the water, an act in which this mortal congratulates his Maker on His good idea in creating and providing the mortal with water. Water never tasted better. Like everything here it is charged, touched with the sublime.
 
I have passed twenty minutes alone in the company of Uluru, an uncommon privilege. At my left, hidden in the scrub, is the village of Mutitjulu. Its people live in the lee of immensity. Daily they awaken to the view of deep terracotta that earlier was mine. At sunset, fire flames from the rock’s margins, the rock purples. Echoes follow me – another place, another colour scheme:
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
 
 
Around the bend now, heading south, the greens and greys relieve the eye. I can’t complain of sameness. More faces in the rock, caves that grimace, bluffs that lower, red rock that slopes down towards my feet, down, down, a slow, shy approach. The rock is within a metre of my shod foot. To step on it a profanation. I do not walk this rock. Not now.
 
Around another bend and another, tracing waving folds, the rock shapes here are emphatically, anatomically feminine. Inescapably feminine. Curves that flow, flow, ineffably graceful, to deepening clefts, soft in the gentling light. These mother forms beckon, embrace, call me home.
 
My old legs move fluently, easily. They swallow the miles. My mouth burns, it sends messages – drink, drink – messages you receive only when it’s too late. Above me rockmouths gape toothlessly, vast, cavernous, inaccessible. My eye searches the sheer face; only a mountaineer equipped with hammer, piton and ropes could reach those high hollows. But in their depths ochreous markings, patterns, declare themselves; these impossible deeps are painting sites.  No white foot might imaginably intrude. Good!
 
Nearing the beginning of the end, here is the Mutijulu pool, a cool, shaded dell between three high surrounding walls. Its waters are permanent. But no, not so today, not in this heat. I gaze amazed at naked sands. Even dry they keep their cool, concealing water close to the surface. This dryness is a mirage; at all hands the growth is green, tender, silvan.
 
0715. Nearer the end and I am not alone. Cars pass on the bitumen that runs unseen, parallel to my path. Above me the rock has mouths with calcific projections, teeth that do not smile at what passes below. I look ahead: there, formicating on the slope, scores, hundreds of whitefellas climb hand over hand along a chain that will take them to the top. They will climb Uluru, they will conquer, they’ll be able to tell everyone.
At the top they’ll see the pits and gullies, the moonscape no-one below imagines, the scales and plaques of red; and the smallness of humans below.
I know what they see. I know the climbers haven’t seen or haven’t understood or haven’t cared what the owners write on the notice: Anangu do not want you to climb the rock.
I am not happy to see them climbing. It seems disrespectful. I feel it as if it were a personal sIight. I know and I care about it because I too have climbed the rock. A quarter of a century ago, I drove up, leaped from my car and ran up the slope. I did not see the notice. Hubris sped my feet: I would conquer Uluru; I would do it at the run, I would not stop.
Of course I did stop – after only fifteen metres – stopped and gasped, ran again, stopped, fought a breathlessness I had not known before. I made it to the top, saw how small we are and descended. I do not climb now.