And What Do You Do Mr. Gable?

by Richard Flanagan

  Unlike Latham, who has a large rhetoric but not always the measures to match the language, Howard talks small even when what is being proposed is large. Much with John Howard tends to sound and seem insignificant, but it rarely is. His success is somehow bound up in his seemingly innocuous personality masking large ambitions.

  Later, Howard, who like Latham always travels separately from the media in Commonwealth limousines, decided to jump on the media bus on the return from a visit to a Brisbane removalist company’s offices.

  It’s reported as a spontaneous act of informality. Perhaps it was meant as that. Or perhaps it was in response to a front-page article in the Australian denouncing the excessive control of the media by Howard’s staff on the previous day. Whatever the motivation, it turns into one more set-piece press conference with more interesting images than those on offer from the removalists, and it gets good mileage the following day.

  On the bus, at the surreal heart of a rolling, swaying jellyfish of journos and boom tentacles, a smiling Howard told us he felt happy with his campaign launch speech because it caught something of his philosophy.

  Howard and his supporters often talk about his philosophy, and how his actions are always consistent with it. When asked what that philosophy is, you are invariably given a handful of meek words such as choice and family, or the more abstract but hardly threatening individualism, and sometimes, more daringly, compassion and a fair go.

  A scattering of words doesn’t equal a philosophy. It doesn’t explain what has happened to Australia since 1996. Beneath little things, big things sometimes hide. These words seem inadequate, say, as an explanation of children held behind razor wire, or of exactly why we are in Iraq.

  But perhaps they serve to obscure what John Howard is about: power. How he is about power’s practice, about its obsessive desire, and how he looks sleek and assured with its invigorating tonic. Power seems to infuse him with energy, allows him to leave puffing journalists and sweating cameramen in his wake every morning, a daily humiliation of the media that one suspects is not without its small pleasure, and power animates his every utterance and action.

  With Howard, unlike most modern politicians, the medium—the man—is not the message. The man has simply become the honed expression of political ambition.

  And so Howard absents the story of his own personality from the podium and the studio. Everything he says and does is for a political point, not to romance himself. Like an artist about whom the only interesting thing is their work, into which they have poured their very essence, perhaps there is not that much else to John Howard other than what he has done as a politician.

  Unlike many politicians, Howard gives no evidence of wishing to be loved, and not seeking it, it doesn’t manifest itself around him. His place and his success are grounded in something different: at the friendly functions and events staged for him, the faithful like him. Yet, like its object, their support and admiration is neither effusive nor demonstrative. As one Liberal supporter put it to me: ‘You don’t cheer your funds manager because he makes money for you.’

  Elsewhere people seem to neither like nor despise him. If there is an emotion it is indifference, and one senses that suits John Howard, allowing him to get on with the business of power.

  On my last night on the trail of John Howard, the media and Howard’s party were encamped at the Adelaide Hilton. The Hilton bar filled with nattily attired young men and evening-dressed women from a South Australian restaurant and hotel chain who were having a big night out. As the waiters and waitresses and chefs and barmaids and barmen smoked and loudly chatted each other up, a small entourage bustled down the side of the mob.

  A few journalists noticed that it was John Howard, but no one else. No one jeered and no one waved. It was Australia, it was 2004, and the man no one seems to know was returning to his hotel suite unnoticed to continue working as he for so long had; patiently, carefully, precisely ensuring that he would win an historic fourth term.

  I had Howard wrong; I have always had him wrong. Like many—though by no means all—Australians, I always dismissed him as marooned in the past, a captive of outdated prejudices. But he had been to Australia what rohypnol is to a waiting drink.

  In the bar the children of Howard’s Australia played and drank and flirted, and it was hard not to think that, win or lose, Howard had somehow won. It was true that these prosperous, docile and fearful times had been his, but it was harder to credit how much he had shaped a time and a people to his own smallness. But shape us he had. Latham, touted as Whitlam’s anointed, was really Howard’s spiritual heir who would, should he win, do much to continue Howard’s idea of Australia into the future, and he would do it to Labor applause. How Howard had done all this was even more of an enigma than the man himself. There was about him a genius of mundanity.

  By the end, I was glad to leave the campaign. In truth I felt I had spent too long on the media bus now, sensing the inadequacy of what I was doing, and the impressive capacity of Howard to give nothing of himself away, the futility of trying to discover anything in a place and time that is completely about the pursuit of power.

  Waiting for a taxi to the airport, I had a beer in the bar with a few other journos. Out there beyond us something was happening, but if you wanted to know what it was, the last people in Australia to ask would be the coach-load of journalists and hangers-on such as myself. We asked many different questions, but the truth was we always got the same answers, and in the end we heard them so often we had started believing them ourselves.

  So many of the journalists, left or right or apolitical, appeared imprisoned in wisdoms that seem to be received from Howard: that elections are about the economy. That no one wishes to hear about Aborigines. That the right if difficult thing was done about refugees. Most of the journalists thought the hatred of Howard just silly. They see him as an ordinary man who had luck and over the years learnt a formidable tenacity and great wile. And this too is Howard’s long-term achievement, this confusion with his own personal smallness and the immense changes he has brought to Australia.

  When I got home there was a fundraising letter asking for help to keep an eighteen-year-old student refugee called Ruth Cruz in Tasmania. Ruth Cruz arrived in Australia four years ago, having fled criminal gang violence in her home of El Salvador, and now lives in Hobart with her sister, Daysi. Denied a refugee visa by Howard’s government, a large public campaign succeeded only in eliciting from the government a visa to finish high school. Now her only option to stay is to become a full-fee-paying international student, hence the fundraising campaign.

  There was much in Ruth Cruz’s story that seemed to accord with Howard’s loose ideas of choice and family and individualism, that invited the compassion and a fair go he so often talks about. But if $50,000 cannot be raised by next March, the federal government will deport Ruth Cruz.

  The letter was a dash of reality in contrast to Howard’s grey and ultimately fictitious sense of the world. Like the nation since 1996, I felt I had sleepwalked through my time with Howard. I believed none of it, yet after a few days with Howard I understood something of his soporific power. Like some dull, inert force, he simply overwhelmed you until you retreated to anything other than engaging with what he was saying and doing.

  Only now, it was time to wake up.

  The Age

  2 October 2004

  AT A MOMENT WHEN AUSTRALIANS seem once more prepared to voyage forward, there has arrived a book for these new times. In one of those moments of coincidence that a novelist is rarely allowed but life frequently offers, we have, in the same week in which history is being made with the apology to the Stolen Generations, a remarkable history being published that offers a new and mature understanding of our origins.

  For after what was falsely termed ‘the history wars’, but which was rather a perverted attempt to politicise the past in order
to justify the renascent bigotries of what already seems a strange, lost decade, we have, in James Boyce’s Van Diemen’s Land, a landmark of historical scholarship that suggests a largeness and openness in our origins as a nation of which we need not be scared, nor ashamed, far less divided by bitterness and hate.

  Though Boyce’s story is frequently terrible, this is not a work of accusation, but a history of hope. It suggests that we are not dispossessed Europeans, but a muddy wash of peoples who were made anew in the merge of an old pre-industrial, pre-modern European culture with an extraordinary natural world and a remarkable black culture.

  As much as a process of colonisation, Boyce’s work suggests a history of indigenisation—a strange, uneven, frequently repressed, often violent process in which a white underclass took on much of the black ways of living. It suggests we have a connection with our land not solely based on ideas of commerce, and that there are continuities in our understanding of our land that extend back into pre-history. It is an argument, never more timely, that we are our own people, not a poor imitation of elsewhere.

  Boyce’s Van Diemen’s Land is for a time a land where many, according to a contemporary witness, ‘dress in kangaroo skins without linen and wear sandals made of seal skins. They smell like foxes’. They live in ‘bark huts like the natives, not cultivating anything, but living entirely on kangaroos, emus, and small porcupines’. No less an authority than John West, founding editor of The Sydney Morning Herald, wrote in 1856 that the whites living outside of the settlement ‘had a way of life somewhat resembling that of the Aborigines’.

  Boyce details at length how this Van Diemonian peasantry along with black Tasmania was defeated—but not destroyed—by the colonial authorities. If the individual testimony of the bounty hunters and adventurers who bring the nascent Van Diemonian world to heel sometimes begins to feel like a Heart of Darkness journey into madness, it never descends into the grotesque or the Gothic, clichés behind the bars of which the rich, human truth of Tasmania—at once terrible, beautiful and extraordinary—has been kept gaoled for too long.

  For Boyce is a historian of the intimate, and through the detail of gardens, clothing and diet he makes us question so many assumptions we take for granted about that time, about our relationship with the land, and with each other. Be it the suppression of fiddling and dancing in Hobart pubs in the 1840s or the popularity of the Tasmanian Aborigines’ most prized decoration, red ochre, amongst whites in Launceston in the 1830s, Boyce constantly makes us see the past fresh and anew. We are given not an invasion nor a happy history of noble pioneers, but a messy, inescapably human response to extraordinary times and places, out of which emerged a new people. It is brutal, confused, and a place of shifting alliances and understandings; a landscape of revolutions in which occurs a transformation of sense and sensibilities so extraordinary that it will be some centuries before we will be able to fully compass its liberating dimensions.

  This is no accident. Tasmania was invented in 1856, the new name an attempt to erase the already well-known history of Aboriginal war, convict hell and homosexuality. The old name of Van Diemen’s Land was to be erased, and along with it an idea of not only what was worst about us as human beings but also the possibility of what might be better; the manifold rebellion, not just political, but social and cultural, that had ensued in coming to understand how to live in this strange new world.

  This is not a romanticising, but it does go beyond the idea of apportioning blame, which has poisoned historical discussion in Australia for too long. In Boyce’s Van Diemen’s Land, the white with most sympathy for the black may well be the man who murders a black in another place, while the man with best intentions, such as Governor Arthur, may be the one guilty of the worst crimes. An Aborigine such as Black Mary may be a black bushranger and police informant, the lover of an outlaw as well as his fatal betrayer. It is above all else a relentlessly human account that takes into its thinking the way in which good and evil lurk in every human breast.

  For Boyce the past is not a prize of politics like the Lodge, to be fought for and won. For the truth is not relative. It is absolute, and though our interpretations are infinite, we must try to understand, as much as it is possible, that truth on its own terms.

  And his exploration of what was described, not by a 1960s academic, but an 1830s attorney general, as ‘a war of extermination’ of the Tas- manian Aborigines is gripping in its terrible, human unfolding: the way it was avoidable, the way it became inevitable, the tragedy of a land where the English, as ship’s captain’s wife Rosalie O’Hare confided in her diary in 1828, ‘consider the massacre of these people an honour’.

  Boyce’s compelling account of the bushranger Michael Howe, whose authority equalled that of the early Van Diemen’s Land governors, is a potent reminder of how much the vaunted Australian traditions of revolt had Tasmanian origins. For good reason did the Victorian government legislate to prevent Van Diemonians emigrating during the 1850s. Ned Kelly’s father was a Van Diemonian convict, and the Jerilderie Letter has sections that strongly echo the writings of Frank the Poet, the Van Diemonian convict bard whose odes to liberty were the first writings to be banned in Australia.

  So much that is so rich is contained here that it will be misrepresented by both its supporters and detractors. But how good it feels to read a history that is not politics, but an act of enquiry applying intellect, empathy and a fresh curiosity to trying to discover all that from which we are torn. We have possibilities in Australia with our unique land, with our indigenous people, with our own particular response to our world, that suggest our future might still be worth dreaming.

  This is a history that will be challenged, rebutted and shown to be wrong in various places. All works of largeness and innovation invite such a fate. But its generosity of spirit exploring the possibilities of what we once were suggests all that we might yet be. It is the most significant colonial history since The Fatal Shore. If it is not as rollicking a read as Hughes’ masterpiece, it is perhaps more original. In re-imagining one aspect of Australia’s past, it invents for us all a new future.

  The Sydney Morning Herald

  16 February 2008

  LEST WE FORGET, we reverentially intone every Anzac Day and yet we forget all the time. We forget that out of the 102,000 Australians who have died in wars since Federation, only 40,000 died during World War II.

  We forget that all those other wars in which the majority died were not because we were threatened, but because we were involved with empires elsewhere threatening others. We forget that all those Australians who died often died bravely or honourably, or wretchedly or terribly, but they did not die for our country but for other countries.

  We forget we asked the Americans to be in Vietnam and we don’t even know exactly why we are in Afghanistan.

  We say we remember the fallen, and if we do that at best sporadically and inadequately, we hardly give thought to the many, many more who did not fall, but who returned home maimed, sometimes not only in body but also in mind and soul.

  We forget the great truth of the ages: that war, even if it is sometimes necessary, is always evil. And we forget that the essence of its evil is that it inevitably demands of some soldiers that they do terrible things that would horrify and repulse them in any other situation.

  We forget that Australians—like all other nations—have committed atrocities in numerous wars, from World War I onwards. This doesn’t mean Australian soldiers are any more or less dishonourable than soldiers of any other nations. It simply reflects the realities of war and what war does to us all as human beings.

  We forget that the horror of an atrocity is not just that visited on its victims, but also on the people who commit those atrocities. Not necessarily bad people or psychopathic people, but ordinary human beings who must live with the horror of their actions for the rest of their lives.

  And we forget the
se ordinary human beings are young men who have friends and families, that the horror within them comes to affect many and passes like a shot through the decades and sometimes generations.

  And because we forget all these things all the time, we sent young Australians off to Afghanistan without debating any of this. No politician should ask any soldier to go to war, with all that means for those young men, without the very, very best of reasons.

  Historically, though, our politicians’ reasons have in such matters rarely been the very best. Mostly they have been self-serving actions dressed up as national interest. We forget that young men’s lives are useful to them in helping secure influence and stature in international forums.

  We forget too that the prosecution of distant wars has always made weak leaders look strong domestically. For what defence minister, sleek as a well-fed goose, doesn’t look a little more of a man overseeing war games? What prime minister doesn’t feel a little more of a real leader talking troops and missions and materiel?

  But beyond the high moral tone and ersatz grandeur, our politicians have been careless. They need to answer to the dead—our dead and the dead we killed. They need to answer to the living—those soldiers who return, whose future lives are blighted and the lives of whose families and friends will be scarred irrevocably, decades after the 24-hour news cycle, the three-year parliamentary term, the two-term government, the near decade-long war.

  Between January and June this year, according to a recent United Nations report, 1271 civilians died of violence in Afghanistan, with the Taliban responsible for 76 per cent of the deaths. We—the West and the government we support in Kabul—are responsible for the other 305 deaths.

  Three Australian soldiers presently face manslaughter charges over the death of six civilians, five of whom were children, in a night raid. Whatever legal judgement results, those men carry the burden of five children’s deaths with them for the rest of their lives. No politician should ask that any Australian carry such weights without the most compelling justification.