The Meaning of Recognition (35 page)

The consensus will die hard in Australia, just as it is dying hard here in Britain. On Monday morning the
Independent
carried an editorial headed: ‘Unless there is more justice in
the world, Bali will be repeated’. Towards the end of the editorial, it was explained that the chief injustice was ‘the failure of the US to use its influence to secure a fair
settlement between Israelis and Palestinians’. I count the editor of the
Independent
, Simon Kelner, as a friend, so the main reason I hesitate to say that he is out to lunch on this
issue is that I was out to dinner with him last night. But after hesitating, say it I must, and add a sharper criticism: that his editorial writer sounds like an unreconstructed Australian
intellectual, one who can still believe, even after his prepared text was charred in the nightclub, that the militant fundamentalists are students of history.

But surely the reverse is true: they are students of the opposite of history, which is theocratic fanaticism. Especially they are dedicated to knowing as little as possible about the history of
the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians. A typical terrorist expert on the subject believes that Hitler had the right idea, that
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
is a
true story, and that the obliteration of the state of Israel is a religious requirement. In furthering that end, the sufferings of the Palestinians are instrumental, and thus better exacerbated
than diminished. To the extent that they are concerned with the matter at all, the terrorists epitomize the extremist pressure that had been so sadly effective in ensuring the continued efforts of
the Arab states to persuade the Palestinians against accepting any settlement, no matter how good, that recognizes Israel’s right to exist. But one is free to doubt by now – forced to
doubt by now – that Palestine is the main concern.

The main concern of fundamentalist Islam is with moderate Islam, and especially with those Islamic states which, if they have not precisely embraced democracy, have nevertheless tried to banish
theocracy from the business of government. That fundamentalism loathes the Western democracies goes without saying: or rather, it goes with a lot of saying, at the top of the voice. But the real
horror, for the diehard theocrats, is the country with a large number of Muslims that has been infiltrated by the liberal ideas of the West. As a rule of thumb, you can say that the terrorists
would like to wreak edifying vengeance on any predominantly Islamic country where you can see even a small part of a woman’s face. Starting with Pakistan, you can see more and more of a
woman’s face as you move East. It was therefore predictable, after September 11th, that the terrorists would bend their efforts in the same direction. I only wish that I had predicted it
straight away: we would all like to be blessed with as much foresight as hindsight. As things happened, it took me a few days.

A few days after the towers collapsed in New York, I flew East myself, from London to Sydney, thence to keep a speaking engagement in Adelaide. I flew by Malaysia Air, on a flight in which the
crew outnumbered the passengers. The transit lounge in Kuala Lumpur was where I had my revelation. There was a prayer room for the faithful and an open bar for the rest of us. The two schools of
thought were getting along fine, but it wasn’t hard to imagine another breed of traveller who wouldn’t stand for it. Here was an obvious target, and there were plenty more on the way to
Australia, including the whole of Indonesia, where the fundamentalists were getting a lot better hearing than they were in Malaysia, but only because the Indonesian government was even more scared
of what they might do.

My speech in Adelaide was supposed to entertain several hundred Australian businessmen, but I threw in a few sentences designed to register on a different kind of laugh meter. Making jokes about
the Australian intellectuals is a dangerous business when your audience is anti-intellectual anyway, which, I think it fair to say, my audience was: there is too good a chance of flattering a
prejudice. I had to make it clear that I was joking about my fellow professionals, not my enemies. But compelled by the memory of my revelation in Kuala Lumpur, I couldn’t resist caning the
Australian
gauchiste
commentators for their persistence in representing Australia as racist, exclusionist, illiberal and immature. I did my best to make my message funny, but I also tried
hard to make it clear. Australia, though it certainly had the tragedy of the Aboriginals to haunt its conscience, was one of the most mature, generous and genuinely multicultural democracies on
earth. For that reason alone, Australia would be in the firing line.

Well, now it is, and sadly our best hope will be that some of our neighbouring countries to the North and West will draw most of the fire. Next month I have to be in Australia again, to deliver
a speech in Sydney and Melbourne: a speech about libraries. In the speech, which I am composing now and have put aside to write this, I will propose, among other things, the founding in Australia
of an Islamic library to which all the world’s genuine Islamic scholars who are free to travel might come, there to continue the work of bringing a critical scrutiny to the sacred texts
– the very work that was forcibly interrupted by the theocrats in the nineteenth century, an interruption that led directly to the disasters of today. But to get there in time I will have to
fly there, and I can’t say I’m looking forward to the trip. I will be an old man soon, and the fact that I will be flying home through a long war-zone will bother me less than it would
once have done, because I have had a life. But nobody wants his certainty of death pre-empted by a bunch of maniacs impelled by their certainty of Heaven, and the thought of all those slain or
maimed young Australians, so full of life because they were too young even to realize what it means to be born and raised in a free country, will bring me home in despair.

Guardian
, 16 November 2002

Postscript

The above words were not easy to find at the time, but something needed to be said. Later on, at the ceremony in St Paul’s Cathedral, I had only to read out the short
lesson set down for me, and that should have been easier. But some of the bereaved parents were present. It was hard to look them in the eye. The
Guardian
gave my article a title I would
not have chosen myself: ‘The Day My Country Lost its Innocence’. I didn’t believe that modern Australia had ever been innocent in the sense that was obviously meant. In that
sense, Australia hadn’t been innocent since Gallipoli; and there were plenty of bereaved loved ones after World War II who were well aware of what had been at stake; and the European
immigrants who helped to enrich Australian culture post-war brought hard knowledge with them. But in the legal sense Australia was certainly innocent of the Bali bombing, although the attempt to
pronounce it guilty began almost straight away. Australia was an ally of the United States; and the United States backed Israel; and Israel oppressed the Palestinians; and the terrorists were
consequently doing their bit for justice. Thus went the line of reasoning. Perhaps there was something to it – a lot of intelligent people believed it – but it was notable that the
terrorists themselves, when apprehended, said little in its support. They smiled a lot, as if they had even bigger things in mind.

This year we celebrate the two-hundredth anniversary of the first book to be printed and published in Australia. Though our first book was snappily entitled
New South Wales
General Standing Orders Selected from the General Orders Issued by Former Governors
, it is unlikely that very many people were madly excited even at the time, and today the anniversary of its
first appearance is scarcely front-page news, although the book contains at least one permanently newsworthy item of information, which I will get to later on. For now we need merely note that an
all-Australian book is no longer a novelty. Today we are quite accustomed to buying books that were written, printed and published in Australia. If we wished to, we could build a personal library
of Australian books and if we wanted to own them all we would need a house as big as all of Kerry Packer’s houses put together. In my own personal library in London I started an Australian
section about twenty years ago. Every time I make a visit home to Australia I bring an extra, empty holdall. By the end of the visit it is full of Australian books, some of them dating back to
beyond the time I left for Europe in late 1961. They were the Australian books I wasn’t reading when I was a student because I was too busy reading British and American ones. I didn’t
find Australian books so interesting then. Now I do. So back they go to London to be added to my Australian section, which by now is crowding out a whole wall of its own. My apartment is on the
sixth floor of a warehouse conversion in the Butler’s Wharf area south of Tower Bridge, and I have already been advised by the mortgage surveyors that if I add many more books to my library
the day must inevitably come when the beams under the floor will give way and my whole apartment will collapse into the apartment below, which will in turn collapse into the apartment below that,
and so on until about fifty people are wedged into the underground car-park with plenty to read while they await rescue.

The book that tips the balance could well be the
Collected Poems
of Les Murray, which our splendidly independent publisher Duffy and Snellgrove brought out this year. It is a big book,
just as its author is a big man. I already have one copy that the publishers kindly sent to me, but I have bought another while I am here. I want to keep the first copy clean and use this second
copy to make notes. This second copy, when I squeeze it into the Australian poetry shelves in my apartment, might be just enough to crack the creaking beams. It would be a fitting way to go. My
dying thought as I descend, however, might well be the opposite. In the days when I was young and healthy, I never saw myself as a bookish person, just as Australia didn’t see itself as a
bookish nation. In fact it already was, but the fact had not yet become clear, and even today it has still not become as clear as it ought to be. If I have a single aim in this address, it is to
try to bring that fact further into the light. But I would not have the aim if I had not begun in darkness, at a time when I saw myself as an athlete, in a nation of athletes.

There are good reasons for our being more immediately excited by physical prowess than by spiritual refinement. Our children want to play in the sun or run to the surf more than they want to sit
down to study, and we want them to want that. When we say ‘He’s always got his nose in a book’ we might say it proudly, but even today we are usually a bit worried about the
‘always’. When I was young, ‘He’s always got his nose in a book’ was a confession of desperation about one’s own son’s physical constitution and an
accusation of weirdness about someone else’s. ‘She’s always got her nose in a book’ was less troublesome. Reading was, after all, women’s business. Heroes were men and
men did things. If occasionally they wrote things, it was because they had done them first. The excitement was in the doing: the excitement was in the action. There was, there always had been, and
there still is, something to that emphasis. Finally it’s the life of the mind that counts, and all other forms of life must lead to that: after all, the mind is the last thing we will have,
if we are lucky. But I would be the last to deny that in the sentence
mens sana in corpore sano
it’s the
corpore sano
that has the first appeal. Certainly it was the way I
felt when I was still in fighting trim, and I want you to know, as I stand here before you – you bursting with sun-drenched vigour and I visibly the wreck of a human being – that it was
only by an accident of fate that I did not become an Australian sporting hero, a successor to Murray Rose or Lew Hoad, a precursor of Ian Thorpe or Lleyton Hewitt.

The accident of fate was lack of sporting talent, but it took a while for that to become manifest. Growing up in Kogarah, on Botany Bay, I was within easy cycling distance of Ramsgate baths. I
would spend the whole weekend at the baths, telling my mother that I had no time to mow the lawn because I was training for the 110 yards freestyle. In those days the races were still measured in
yards instead of metres, Australia not yet having separated itself from all the other English-speaking nations including America by converting its measurement system in order to make it easier for
the Japanese and Germans to sell us cars. Unbeknownst to my mother, when I was at Ramsgate baths I rarely completed the full 110 yards freestyle. What I completed was the ten yards freestyle. I was
among the first of my generation to perfect the tumble turn. I mean among the first of my generation of amphibian dabblers, the boys who hung around the pool and occasionally dived in, but
didn’t do much of all that swimming from one end to the other over and over for hours at a stretch that the serious swimmers did. But my tumble turn was almost as convincing as theirs.
Unfortunately, instead of employing my tumble turn to increase my speed over a given number of laps, I employed it to impress girls. For this, ten yards of freestyle was all that I deemed
necessary. Starting five yards from the end of the pool, I would execute a tumble turn, swim another five yards in the opposite direction, and stop, trying to look as if I had been engaged in
polishing a minor technical point in my otherwise impeccable tumble turn.

One of the girls actually was impressed. Her name was Alison and she looked very beautiful in a Speedo. Eventually I found that it was easier to go on impressing Alison by escorting her to the
sandpit for a long discussion of my future as a swimming star, a discussion in which, you will not be surprised to hear, I did most of the talking. But her eyes shone, and that was all that
counted, even if they shone with the porcelain glaze of boredom. The full story of what happened in the sandpit can be read in my book
Unreliable Memoirs
and I won’t bother you with
a précis of it now. The book is still available in most good bookshops and some bad ones, and if you want to consult the original manuscript you can find it in the archives of my kind host
for this address, the State Library of New South Wales. Turn to the paragraph about what happened in the sandpit and you can see that the page is stained with tears of happiness. Sufficient to say
now that almost nothing happened in the water, and that the results of my intensive training were finally revealed to my mother at the Boys’ Brigade swimming carnival at Drummoyne in which I
did indeed complete the 110 yards freestyle, but only after all the other competitors had left the pool. Let me assure you however that, hard though it might be to believe, I had the physique, I
had the strength, and I even had the ambition. What I did not have was the true desire, except the desire for Alison, which was a different matter. Sitting beside my mother, Alison was at the
Boys’ Brigade swimming carnival too and I never saw her again.