On Diggers and Other Issues
Babette Smith; 26/4/08
Once again, Australians have gathered in their thousands at Gallipoli. Some opponents of this annual pilgrimage by a younger generation claim it glorifies war. Others blame politicians for overemphasising the commemoration of Gallipoli. Young Australians remain steadfast in their determination to mark Anzac Day with the journey, however, despite claims that their faith and their interest is misplaced. At Gallipoli in 2006, one young Australian explained quite clearly what it meant to them, telling a journalist, “It’s not about empire. It’s about us.” And they are right. The qualities that this generation identifies with in World War I Diggers run deep in Australian society, right back to the convict era. No connection is generally recognised between the colonies’ prisoners and their military heirs, but evidence for the link is not hard to find.
See: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23580314-26063,00.html
Convicts’ golden age
David Andrew Roberts; 264/08; David Andrew Roberts lectures in Australian history at the University of New England and is a committee member of the NSW History Council - No Internet Text
Australia’s Birthstain: The Startling Legacy of the Convict Era; By Babette Smith; Allen & Unwin
Freedom on the Fatal Shore: Australia’s First Colony; By John Hirst; Black Inc
There are two common avenues that lead Australians back to their convict past.
One is a visit to historic sites such as Port Arthur, with its eerie gothic structures crumbling amid the fragrance of cut grass and blue gums, and where the quaint, park-like ambience is saturated with restless ghosts and unsettling shadows. If one compounds the experience by reading Marcus Clarke’s riveting historical novel For The Term of His Natural Life, or its late 20th century equivalent, Robert Hughes’s The Fatal Shore (1988), we are branded with an indelible image” of brutality and torment. The senses are titillated by the gruesome violence, but the mind is perplexed and disturbed by the description of our nation’s origins.
The other avenue, now just as popular, is through family history research, which usually reveals a quite different image of the convict experience. One typically learns that “our convict” whittled away his sentence on a pastoral estate or in an office in Sydney, far from the terrors of Port Arthur. We find them relatively well fed and tolerably housed, seldom flogged and protected from neglect or abuse by a surprising array of checks and balances.The convicts were generally a contented folk, justifiably indignant, habitually irreverent, but rarely rebellious. Finding themselves not only rehabilitated but also rewarded by their forced migration, they married, acquired property, lived with dignity and autonomy and spawned a vast progeny.
The discrepancy between these two images of convict Australia has propelled historical inquiry for more than 30 years. Generally, the quest has been to comprehend just how and why convict society was so successful and so surprisingly normal.
How did the inmates of a hazardous penal experiment collectively forge one of the most prosperous, optimistic and self-confident societies of the New World? We therefore seek to understand how popular memory of the system came to be distorted by sensationalised stereotypes and tropes of torment, epitomised by chain gangs, flagellated backs and the sinister cells of Port Arthur.
Moreover, why is it that for so many years Australians found this heritage so embarrassing that they conspired to erase it?
Why did we wilfully destroy documents and relics, falsify our histories and censor our research? Why did we howl at the faux pas of visiting dignitaries and invade the pitch when visiting English cricketers alluded to our inauspicious origins?
John Hirst addressed these questions in his 1983 study, Convict Society and its Enemies, re-released this year as Freedom on the Fatal Shore (which includes his 1988 classic, The Strange Birth of Colonial Democracy).
Hirst’s innovation was to demonstrate that the penal colony was characterised by its freedoms, such that its transition to a free society in the mid-19th century appears natural and straightforward.
Hirst’s influence on the popular imagination was undone by Hughes’s gothic blockbuster (much to Hirst’s chagrin, as he notes in the preface to the 2008 edition), but Hirst has profoundly influenced a generation of professional historians.
The quest to normalise the convict experience has reached an apotheosis in Babette Smith’s Australia’s Birthstain, the first full-length treatment of the “startling legacy of the convict era”. Smith takes Hirst’s thesis and stretches it to extremes. She normalises the convict period to the extent that it becomes a golden age of egalitarianism and camaraderie, when convicts and emancipists made the place their own.
And, as with Hirst, she traces the malignant version of convict history through the hysterical hyperbole of those middle-class immigrants and clergymen, journalists and lobbyists, authors of popular fiction and purveyors of pseudo-anthropology who in the late 19th century sought to fundamentally redesign the society that convicts had built. Their self-righteousness, and particularly their frenzied homophobia, cut a deep psychological swath through the mentality and self-perception of colonial Australians. Eventually, even convicts grew deeply ashamed and became complicit in a conspiracy to eradicate “the birthstain”.
This, Smith argues, was the origin of the “convict stain”, a strange, collective amnesia that bequeathed a “legacy of national self-hatred”. We have been blinded to the unique ethos and precious heritage of our reluctant pioneers, with the vacuum filled by cowering mendacity and puffed-up lies. And so Smith’s plea is that we must reclaim the lost world of convict Australia, to finally end that morose introspection over our national identity and better understand ourselves as a distinctive people with proud traditions.
That mission is well under way in the archives of family history societies. The soldiers of genealogy are the heroes of Smith’s book, the saviours of Australian history. They have reconnected with our convict ancestors and they understand how the truths of the convict records belie the false caricatures of sensationalised fiction and the anomalies of Port Arthur. The extraordinary skill and depth of Smith’s re-search, and the compelling and authoritative examples of her many case studies, suggest that she may be right.
With its broad scope, combative tone and the startling originality of its argument, Australia’s Birthstain is naturally a flawed and vulnerable piece of scholarship. Its contribution will come in the further research and intense criticism it will inevitably generate.
But that, as with Hirst’s and Hughes’s books, will mark it as one of the most important books written about 19th-century Australia. It will doubtlessly achieve its stated aim of rescuing convict history from the margins.
Cardinal militant
John Wilkins; The Tablet,12/4/08: Editor of The Tablet from 1982 to 2003.
God and Caesar; George Pell; Catholic University of America, Eurospan
With Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney, you know where you are. At the time I visited Australia with Fr Joe Komonchak in 2002 to address the Catalyst for Renewal movement, the archbishop was away. Meanwhile, I heard through others, he could not say I was welcome, because I wasn’t.
Those meetings organised by the Catalyst movement were hugely well attended. It appeared to me that so many lay people well instructed in their faith and raring to go must be a valuable resource for the diocese. True to their convictions, they sought dialogue with the archbishop, but it cannot be said that the response was warm. They were too pluralistic for him. They did not believe that the voice of the Catholic Church should be like a single blast on the trumpet.
George Pell left them to wither on the vine, an opportunity rejected. The Sydney cardinal is a John Paul II bishop, as he makes clear throughout his book God and Caesar. He sees his job, first and last, as proclamation. In line with the late Pope, he is wary of Western pluralistic democracy. Fair enough: as Winston Churchill famously remarked, democracy is the worst method of government, except for all the others. The task of the Catholic Church towards these advanced industrial societies, Cardinal Pell says in the book, is to recall them constantly to the truth, on which freedom depends. He appeals to the Second Vatican Council’s declaration on religious liberty, but the “feel” of his book is far from identical. For the Council, human freedom is to be “respected as far as possible, and curtailed only when and in so far as necessary”.
From his standpoint, it is natural that Cardinal Pell should have become known as an opponent of any idea of the primacy of conscience. He speaks as though truth were above conscience, which he seems to regard as like a radio receiver which needs a good kick when it is off message, rather than as a debating chamber in which truth is apprehended. It is simply unthinkable, for him, that anyone who understands Catholic teaching correctly could possibly disagree with any of it. In this respect he is an ideologue.
He rejects president-to-be John F. Kennedy’s stance in 1960 while running for the White House. “I believe in an America where separation of Church and State is absolute,” said Kennedy. “Whatever issue may come before me as President … I will make my decision … in accordance with what my conscience tells me to be in the national interest.” George Pell quotes that in his book, but will have none of it. What Kennedy proposed, he declares, was basically “the privatisation of belief”.
As a result of hierarchical opinion as exemplified here, Catholics in public life find themselves in an acutely difficult position. Any suggestion that they are placemen and -women for Rome can be fatal to their chances, as shown by Rocco Buttiglione’s failure to be confirmed as Justice Commissioner for the European Union in 2004. On the other hand, an exercise of prudential judgement as representatives of their constituencies may in certain cases bring down on them the public disapprobation of their Church. The damage this can do to them was evidenced by what happened to John Kerry in the United States. He lost essential ground in the 2004 presidential race because of statements by some American Catholic hierarchs that they would refuse him Communion because of his voting record on abortion.
In New South Wales last year, Cardinal Pell opposed a stem-cell research bill that contained similar provisions to those being debated today in Westminster. He wanted to recall his fellow Australians to ethical principles that they must not override. But when the New South Wales government offered dialogue through the Minister for Science, the cardinal refused. For him, there was nothing to dialogue about - and he warned any Catholic politicians who voted for the legislation that there could be consequences for their place in the life of the Church. With a nod towards what in the United States has been called “eucharistic terrorism”, he later specified: “For good reasons a Christian Church, somewhat like a political party or even a sporting club [note the comparison], has the right to exclude a person or persons from membership, and to recommend that they abstain from receiving Holy Communion or even, in some instances, to refuse to give them Holy Communion.”
These are burning issues. No one can read this book without gaining a greater appreciation of what is at stake and how the cardinal sees his Christian responsibilities. There are many Catholics in Australia who welcome a champion who rides out against materialism and utilitarianism in this way and who lays about him with such confidence that he has the answers.
But there are many others who keep their heads down. They want a more nuanced approach. They want spiritual help to live as Catholics in a pluralistic society where the absolute value is love of neighbour. They want to see Vatican II’s recommendation of “respect” towards difference put into practice. They want the Church to listen and learn as well as to teach. Cardinal Pell’s support for human rights will hearten them, but this is not their book.
Church a dictatorship not a democracy: Bishop’s response to petition
23/4/08; http://www.cathnews.com/article.aspx?aeid=6809
The Church is “a dictatorship not a democracy”, Bishop Terence Brady is reported to have told a parishioner from Fairfield in Sydney’s west after 800 people signed a petition not to replace a popular parish priest.
Parishioner Peter Murdaca is asking why the petition to keep Our Lady of the Rosary’s parish priest was ignored and a different minister appointed, the Fairfield Advance reports.
But a spokesman for the Catholic Archdiocese of Sydney said the appointment followed proper protocols. Mr Murdaca told the paper that the parish had been in disarray after the previous parish priest Fr Jason Camilleri left the priesthood last December to get married.
“When Fr Camilleri left the parish it was a very hard time for everyone, we felt dejected and guilty as if we were to blame,” he said. “But when we got Fr Martin Monaghan it was like a ray of hope. Attendance and donations picked up again and he helped to rebuild the parish.” Mr Murdaca said Fr Monaghan was only brought in as a temporary replacement, but many at the parish became convinced he was the man to lead their church. They felt so strongly that he should have been appointed the parish priest, they started a petition to be sent to Cardinal George Pell.
After two weekends there were 800 signatures supporting Fr Monaghan’s appointment. However Mr Murdaca said instead of Fr Monaghan being appointed he was moved to the Enmore parish and a different priest, Fr Terry Bell, was appointed to Fairfield.
He told the paper that when he asked Bishop Terence John Gerard Brady whose jurisdiction the church falls under why the petition was ignored, he was told the church was “a dictatorship, not a democracy”. “I walked out of the meeting there and then,” Mr Murdaca said. “The church should be about the way Jesus taught us to be, not dictators making decisions for us.”
Bishop Brady declined to comment on the issue. Fr Bell said people were entitled to their thoughts about who should be priest. Fr Bell who was previously national director of Catholic Mission, said he had enjoyed his time in Fairfield so far. An archdiocesan spokesman said the position was advertised and Fr Bell had the most experience of the applicants.
Mr Murdaca has since resigned from his voluntary positions at the church and is no longer donating money. “I am giving my money to other charities instead. I’m still attending the church but it’s in body only,” he told the paper.
Sources;
Hopes dashed (Fairfield Advance, 22/4/08)
Our Lady of the Rosary parish, Fairfield
Catholic Mission
Beneath The Southern Cross
Louis McManus; This song is in “The Second Bushwackers Australian Song Book” (1983) where it is credited to Roger Corbett, Louis McManus & Dobe Newton; Bushwackers website at http://www.bushwackers.com.au/
Seventy hours of misery,
Fifty weeks of pain
Six days a week of slavery
For some rich boss’s gain
They’ve found gold in Australia
If rumour has it true
I’ll work those seventy hours or more
I’ll be a rich man too.
Chorus:
This flag of blue and silver stars
Says we’re prepared to die
For our right to freedom
Beneath the southern sky.
The blood of those poor working men
Who didn’t count the cost
Flows strong and red forever
Beneath the Southern Cross.
Chorus;
Walked a hundred miles,
Fought the rock and clay
Six days a week of slavery
No luck, no gold, no pay
Still seventy hours of misery,
Still licence tax to pay
I saw the diggers raise a flag
I heard the diggers say:
Chorus
Then men held guns, not shovels,
Poor men forced to fight
Then soldiers came and shot us down
To prove they had the right,
And we who carry on the fight
Remember what it cost
To raise the true Australian flag
Our flag, the Southern Cross.
Pope rejects garment design
Sian Powell; 12/4/08
The Pope has decided he will not wear the vestments specially designed for World Youth Day and billed as “chic clergy couture” on the WYD website. The “earthy-red” coloured vestments feature the Southern Cross constellation on the front and an indigenous feature titled “Marjorie’s Bird” on the back. The Pope is known to dislike vestment symbols that are not explicitly Christian. He may, though, wear some variation on the vestment design, a WYD spokeswoman said. The snub may be the first of many in the clash of cultures between the liturgically and theologically conservative Pope Benedict XVI and the exuberance of the youth day.
See: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23526177-26040,00.html
Letter
15/4/08 - http://blogs.theaustralian.news.com.au/letters/index.php/theaustralian/ comments/what_the_pope_will_wear
I was amazed to read that the Pope has decided not to wear the vestments designed for World Youth Day in July (”Pope rejects garment design”, 12-13/4). The vestment design for priests, bishops and cardinals - including the so-called “not explicitly Christian” symbols - has already been approved by the Pontifical Council for the Laity (which is responsible for World Youth Day) and also has been shown to the Papal Master of Ceremonies. The Holy Father has made no decision about what vestments he will wear during World Youth Day. It is likely the Pope will choose to wear a variation of the chasuble designed for the cardinals and bishops attending WYD (as he did in WYD 2005). The “clash of cultures” is a figment of your reporter’s imagination. Rev Peter Williams; Director, Liturgy, World Youth Day 2008
Homily: 6th Sunday of Easter - Acts: 8: 5-17; John: 14:15-21 - Luke Rawlings OP
At this time we are being pulled more and more into the coming feast of the Advocate - Pentecost Sunday. But today’s readings are still on about where we came from and Luke doffs his cap back to Jerusalem.
When Jerusalem discovered that the Samaritans had accepted Jesus, Peter and John are sent off to (a) confirm it by observation, and (b) publicly acknowledge that reality.
But today is more than Luke, or Peter or John, simply doffing caps to Samaritans, or to Jersualemites. It’s about Samaritans world-wide.
For some it would seem to be impossible for Samaritans, of any time, to produce Christ-like signs without having been in the presence of Jesus. After all they never knew the real Jesus. I suspect that this is why those in Jerusalem are amazed.
Luke is making sure that people understand the critical Jesus nature of the growing number of his followers.
As John says: “I shall send you a lawyer, to be with you…anyone who accepts the commandments and keeps them will be one who loves me, will be loved by the father, and I shall love them, and show myself to them”.
In fact, Peter and John are sent to confirm a reality that is already present in the Samaritans without them having “known” Jesus. That reality is the Spirit. And so we have the “confirmation”.
The emphasis is upon - in the gospel - knowing that the commandments Christians follow are not a product of Jerusalem, or Peter, or John, rather they are the commands of Jesus who, it is true, indeed walked with Peter and John but now walks with Samaritans.
It is really important to understand this. The power to follow Jesus, and work wonders in Jesus name, is not the result of acknowledging Peter, or Paul, or Josephus, or Mary…or a modern-day Benedict’s wishful Petrine command, or choice - but of obeying Jesus’ commands.
Let there be a lesson in this to those who would put their faith in expensive World Youth Days and the presence therein of a person of choosy dress appearance, who does not seem to accept that for a large number of Australia’s faithful and Samaritans, Jesus’ presence is very real, or, at a minimum, trivialises it. [Pope rejects garment design; Sian Powell; 12/4/08; See: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23526177-26040,00.html]
Tags: Australia, Cardinal George Pell, Characteristics, Fairfield Parish NSW, History, WYD