Goodbye Bussamarai: The Mandandanji Land Wars in the Maranoa

I have just finished reading Goodbye Bussamarai, about how Europeans displaced the Aborigines in the part of Australia I live in. Subtitled less evocatively “The Mandandanji Land War Southern Queensland 1842-1852”, the book is simultaneously a work of great research, and a difficult, dense and sometimes dull read. Author Patrick Collins laments the fact that most Australians have heard of the Apaches heroes like Cochise and Geronimo but few have heard of tribes such as the Mandandanji and their leaders such as Bussamarai.

The problem is the record is patchy, written by whites and with the most awkward bits left out. It doesn’t help that a sense of Bussamarai the man does not emerge from Collin’s book. What does emerge is that early Europeans were tolerated as adventurers but not as a permanent and disruptive presence. When explorers Mitchell and Leichhardt drifted into what Collins calls East Maranoa in the colony of NSW (the current Queensland local government region of Maranoa plus all of the Balonne shire north of St George), they were followed by a handful of whites determined to take advantage of the fertile lands suggested by Mitchell’s descriptions of “mount abundance” and a “champagne region”.

Mitchell and Leichhardt also described their meetings with “the blacks” so the settlers knew the land weren’t empty. But they were not occupied in a way the new settlers understood. So with a sense of entitlement allied to superior firepower, it gave carte blanche to mass murder as the competition for territory expanded. The white arrived with “too many dreams and two many cows”.

After NSW surveyor-general Thomas Mitchell came to East Maranoa in 1846, he recounted his adventures in Sydney to William MacPherson, secretary to the NSW parliament and William's son the grazier Allan. Mitchell gave Allan maps and encouraged him to set up a land claim there. Macpherson Junior would be the first farmer in the Roma region setting off with men and livestock from his headstation in the Gwydir in 1847.

Without an inspection of the land, MacPherson was taking a large leap of faith with Mount Abundance near Muckadilla some 200km from the nearest white settlement at Moonie. Mitchell and MacPherson weren’t the first whites in the area. Clarence River area squatter Finney Eldershaw described his search in 1842 for suitable land after he heard of “luxurious downs” in the region. But it wasn’t the Aboriginals that stopped Eldershaw, it was economic conditions. Australia was in depression and East Maranoa’s remoteness from white settlement made it a difficult financial prospect.

Five years later, conditions were improving. While MacPherson was setting off, another friend of Mitchell, Edmund Kennedy was back in the region to do more exploration. He was joined by Archer, Blyth and Chauvel who explored the region from the north. MacPherson started his run in October 1847 with 20 men working the property. While we know a lot about the early whites, the Aborigines are more inscrutable. The character of the warrior “Bussamarai” who gives his name to the book is particularly problematic.

Collins claims that a tribal leader called variously by different whites as old Billy, Eaglehawk, Possum Murray and Bussamarai was the one and the same person but the evidence is not always convincing. Collins said the elder who helped Mitchell find Muckadilla Creek and the Maranoa River was “probably” Bussamarai. All Mitchell said was the blacks were not covetous and asked for nothing. But by the time Kennedy got to the region, relations had gone downhill and he had to use “one or two shots in the air” to frighten 200 Aborigines away from his camp. As the decade went by the Mandandanji lands became untenable as more whites entered the East Maranoa motivated less by fame and discovery then by land acquisition.

MacPherson recorded the first cattle killing at Warroo station near Surat in late 1847. By December 1848 there was all out war between the blacks and the settlers affecting every station the area between the present day towns of Roma and Chinchilla. Station hands working for absentee landholders dispensed rough justice in retaliation for attacks on their livestock while authorities in faraway Sydney and even further London turned a blind eye.

Finally a new force gradually restored “order” by 1851. This was NSW’s northern division of the Native Police, who served the economic ends of the pastoralists. Pastoral superintendent Frederick Walker led a team of 20 Aborigines up from the Macintyre River district dispensing rough justice wherever they went. Walker was renowned for his good relations with Aborigines but he showed no mercy in East Maranoa.

Scanty evidence exists of the genocide that followed. Pastoralist Gideon Lang testified to an 1854 parliamentary select committee on the native police that he wanted them to protect his Darling River runs. But Lang also knew of the “wholesale and indiscriminate killing” and “cold blooded cruelty on the part of the whites quite unparalleled in the history of these colonies”. Walker’s men used “fair means or foul” to bring about a lopsided peace in East Maranoa. There were significant massacres at Yuleba Creek in March 1850 and Yamboucal station near Surat in May 1852.

In retaliation, Collins said Bussamarai united the Bigambul people and two or three other groups with the Mandandanji to drive out the whites. They engaged in battles with the Native Police with inevitable conclusions. On November 1852 a Sergeant Skelton noted a skirmish at Ukabulla between the Aboriginals led by Bussamarai and armed troops in daylight. Two Aboriginals were “shot in the attempt to apprehend them,” Skelton said. “Likewise four more of the Blacks were shot before I could drive them to the station.” The East Maranoa front was “tamed” and the war and the atrocities moved on to other areas of Queensland.

The surviving Mandandanji settled into a life of fringe dwellers in their own territory. Many were forcibly removed to settlements at Taroom and later at Woorabinda and Cherbourg, scattering the memory of their sacred link to the land. The Goodbye to Bussamarai is not only to a warrior but to a way of life that had no chance against European civilisation.

Salman Rushdie: From Bradford’s Fahrenheit 451 to the memoirs of Joseph Anton.

I haven’t yet laid my hands on a copy of Salman Rushdie’s new book, but it is an anticipated pleasure.  “Joseph Anton: A Memoir” tells his own story of being forced underground with armed surveillance after Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against him over The Satanic Verses. Acton was the name Rushdie used while incognito during the time when he was most in danger.  The fatwa remains current, as the only man who can lift it – Khomeini – inconveniently died a few months after the pronouncement. However Rushdie is beginning to rebuild his life in the open 24 years after the publication of that fateful book.

The best explanation for the fatwa and how it directly inspired the likes of London’s 7/7 are to be found in Kenan Malik’s “From Fatwa to Jihad”.  English writer Malik tells how in February 1989 he witnessed a profound event: the first burning of The Satanic Verses in public.  A thousand Muslims gathered in Bradford, Yorkshire with copies of Rushdie’s book and burned it in front of a police station.  It wasn’t quite Kristallnacht but it was calculated to shock and to offend.

Like Rushdie, Malik was born of an Indian Muslim family. He grew up in Britain in an Islamic culture which was deeply embedded but not “all consuming”.   He became a radical leftist in the 1980s, and did not think of himself as Muslim but black.  Malik quotes secular writer Fay Weldon who said the Qu’ran offered no food for thought. “It forbids change, interpretation, self-knowledge, even art for fear of treading on Allah’s creative toes,” Weldon said.

Malik didn’t mind treading on Allah’s toes. He was self-consciously secular and militant. Black for Malik was a political badge which stood for refusing to put up with the discrimination dished out to the previous generation.  The whites called them Asians but they were no more Asian than the Brits were Europeans.  Malik said it was much later they became “Muslims” and that for political reasons.  Rushdie came from a similar background to Malik and his early writings had done more than most to humanise the experience of immigrant Muslims. 

Rushdie was used to having his books banned if not burned. His first novel Midnight’s Children was banned in India and Indira Ghandi successfully sued for libel in a British court.  In the second novel Shame, Rushdie’s description of Benazir Bhutto as the Virgin Ironpants caused outrage in Pakistan and another ban.  Rushdie laughed it off as he won prize after prize for his great writing. The third book took his mockery to the next level. It would be no less than a fable about the origins of Islam. 

Written over 12 years before 9/11, The Satanic Verses opens with an exploding airline.  The magical events that happen to the two survivors of the explosion are used to discuss how God’s revelation to the prophet Mahound brings a new religion called Submission (the English translation of “Islam”) to a city in the sand called Jahilia (“Ignorance” – where Arabs lived prior to Islam).  A second tale in the book is a caricature of Ayatollah Khomeini and the third is based the true story of an Indian pied piper who leads all her Indian village on the Haj and then into the sea to drown.

In one book, Rushdie was attacking Islam’s history, one of its major political leader and one of its five pillars of behaviour. He might have expected some resistance, yet the immediate reaction wasn’t huge. Rushdie’s book was so obtuse and so difficult to follow in its non-narrative form it was almost impossible to understand in a single reading and almost threatened to go under the radar. 

Then Sher Azam stepped in. Azam was the president of Bradford’s Council of Mosques.  Azam wasn’t the first Muslim critic of the book.  That honour belongs to philosopher Shabbir Akhtar who called it an inferior piece of literature. But Azam was one of the earliest to realise how Rushdie could be a rallying cry for Muslim identity.  Azam had not read the book but read reviews of it.  He knew religious scholars had declared it blasphemous and he took on the task of writing to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Azam compared it to the Spycatcher affair and asked for it to be banned. He got no reply.  

Azam told Malik Christians don’t mind about what people say about their God because they no longer believe in “Him”.  But look what it means, he told Malik. “It means a country where the values have gone. People drink, take drugs, have sex like dogs.” Azam said those problems would disappear if people believed in God.  Azam tapped into a new consciousness among young radicals. These people were moving away from the radical secularism preferred by Malik to a radical religiosity that could be firmly rooted across the Muslim world.

The Muslims who burned the book in Bradford felt an immense power in their action. Applauded as it was across the umma, they felt tuned in to a philosophy much bigger than themselves. It gave them a giddy sense of power they had never had before in their lives. A few days later on February 13, Khomeini called on “all zealous Muslims” to execute anyone involved in the publication of the book, and Iran offered $3m for Rushdie’s death ( or a knock-down $1m if the assassin was non-Muslim). 

It didn’t matter that Khomeini issued the fatwa primarily as a marker in his battle with the Saudis for supremacy in the Muslim world. His intervention had made it an event of global consequence. That day Rushdie attended a memorial service for writer Bruce Chatwin who had just died. Paul Theroux came up to him and said “we’ll be back here next week for you.” Rushdie said it wasn’t the funniest joke he’d ever heard.  By the following morning, Scotland Yard had given him grade one protection and spirited him away to a safe house.  Joseph Acton was born.

But so was jihadism in Britain, according to Malik. He argues Britain and many other Governments formed pacts with religious movements because they thought they would be easier to control than the left. This was a miscalculation and it was made worse in the UK by Government policies that outsourced “Muslim issues” to Muslim organisations. In the wake of the London Bombings of 2005, Muslim leaders lashed Prime Minister Tony Blair for ignoring the warning signs that led to 7/7.  Blair hit back criticising moderate Muslims for not doing enough. “Governments cannot go and root out the extremism in these communities,” he said.  That was your job, it implied but no one asked Blair why he felt so helpless rooting them out. 

Under the guise of multiculturalism, Britain divested all its decisions on Muslim issues to the Muslim Council of Mosques. Radicalism fermented in these organisations. Six of the 7/7 plotters were trainee doctors.  The Satanic Verses furore was a catalyst for a more confident Islamic identity which educated young professionals could endorse. But it was not an identity recognised by most Muslims.  Islamism was not an expression of ancient faith but a modernist reaction against the loss of belonging in complex societies comforted by a literal belief in the Qu’ran. Rushdie, one of the most nuanced of Muslim culture writers, had no chance against the power of this certainty.

Murdoch's adventures in China

When Rupert Murdoch took control of The Wall Street Journal in 2008, he collected another less prestigious Dow Jones monthly publication called The Far Eastern Economic Review. It was as the New York Times called it an incidental addition to the vast global stable of Murdoch's News Corp. Murdoch promised editorial independence to all of the Dow Jones stable as part of the price he had to pay for the Journal. But given his reputation, it was no surprise to find there would be a chilling effect whenever a story appeared that affected Murdoch.

The Review’s editor Hugo Restall had hired Australian writer Eric Ellis to write a review of Bruce Dover’s book “Rupert's Adventures in China: How Murdoch Lost a Fortune and Found a Wife." The book is a privileged insider’s account of Murdoch’s attempts to woo the Chinese Government in the 19990s and his relationship with third wife Wendi Deng.  The book got a big reception in Asia in 2007 and Restall hired Ellis to review the book in January 2008. But by February, Restall had got cold feet and told Ellis the book “looks more like the work of a disgruntled ex-employee rather than an analysis of the business."

The book was nothing of the sort, as Ellis realised. In his spiked review, Ellis said for a businessman who has left such a mark on the world’s media, Murdoch himself was under-analysed and his personal life off-limits.  It was this reason why the book is of great service: because Dover (now the chief executive of ABC’s Australia Network charged with beaming content into Asia) was the Sun King’s chief courtier in the Forbidden City in a time when China meant everything to the boss. 

Dover tells the story from the time Murdoch bought STAR TV in 1993 for $1 billion to the time 10 years later when Dover has been sacked and Murdoch realised he could not replicate the success in China he had elsewhere. By 1993, Murdoch had defeated the British print unions in Wapping, was starting to make big money with BSkyB and the Premier League and expanding his footprint in America. The 23-year-old Richard Li’s STAR TV was a satellite operation that beamed programming to an area that stretched from the Philippines to the Middle East with the potential to reach two-thirds of the world’s population. 

But Li could never make money from STAR TV subscriptions as most of its users pirated the unencrypted service. He changed the model to advertising and charged big rates though no one could be exactly sure how much of an audience he was aggregating.  Li’s father Li Ka-shung was Hong Kong’s wealthiest businessman and a friend of Deng Xiaoping and he quietened ruffled feathers in Beijing over the fact the uncensored service was available at all in mainland China.  But Xiaoping told Ka-shung the business had to go and Li reluctantly sold to the highest bidder in 1993. Pearson PLC (owner of the Financial Times and Penguin Books) offered the same money as News Corp but wanted Ka-shung to stay on in some capacity. Murdoch had no such qualms.  

The problem was Li never sought approval from Beijing on the sale. When the Chinese politburo found out who STAR TV’s new owner was, there was deep concern. The Chinese saw only too well how Murdoch intervened in the politics of every other country he had interests in and feared the same would happen to them.  These fears intensified after a major speech Murdoch made in London’s Whitehall Palace. Murdoch was the main speaker in a night celebrating BSkyB’s new multi-channel offering. With the Internet still in its infancy, Murdoch used the speech to laud the new forms of communications which he said were a threat to “totalitarian regimes everywhere”. Orwell had got it wrong, Murdoch said, mass communication technologies did not subordinate individuals but liberate them. Telephony and satellite broadcasting, he enthused, made it possible to by-pass state control of information.

Murdoch would later claim he was talking about the recent collapse Communism in Eastern Europe. But the politicians in Beijing had no doubt he was talking about them. Premier Li Peng was incandescent with rage.  The Butcher of Beijing at Tiananmen was at the height of his powers four years later and he saw Murdoch’s speech as a threat to Chinese sovereignty. Within a month he banned the distribution, installation and use of satellite dishes in China, dashing STAR TV’s expansion plans from the word go.

Murdoch is nothing if not determined and quickly realised the extent of his blunder. He moved to Hong Kong with then wife Anna and started a long and assiduous campaign of wooing the Chinese leadership to see his position. The problem was that all contact with Zhongnanhai was funnelled through the State Council Information Office and Murdoch was allowed to meet no-one above the rank of vice minister.  In 1994 he used the excuse of limited transponder space on the satellite to drop the BBC from STAR TV but he later admitted to biographer William Shawcross it was because the Chinese leaders hated the BBC. Nevertheless it changed nothing and Murdoch remained persona non grata. 

The new play was for Murdoch to befriend family members of Deng Xiaoping.  He got Harper Collins to publish Deng’s daughter Deng Rong’s hagiography of her father.  He also feted his disabled eldest son Deng Pufang in an artists’ tour of Australia. The problem was Deng slipped from power in 1994 and new leader Jiang Zemin was not like the emperors of old. Deng’s children were out of favour and with them any chance of Murdoch patronage. Zemin enforced the crackdown on China’s half a million satellite dishes.

Dover himself was in China by this time trying to negotiate a joint venture with the People’s Daily. This strange alliance with the conservative communist organ was another peace plan and one tacitly approved by the politburo. The paper was under pressure to reduce its reliance on state handouts and proposed a business news magazine with News Corp. However, once again SCIO were not across the deal and did their utmost to ensure the new joint venture would never get off the ground. It was not the thaw in relations Murdoch needed.

Murdoch next’s ploy was to get into bed with businessman Liu Changle. Changle took half share in the Phoenix TV joint venture with STAR TV. Liu had cultivated several key Beijing decision makers and Murdoch was told by senior leaders this was his only way into China. Phoenix proved popular and shook up the tawdry domestic TV market. But Murdoch hated Phoenix because Changle retained day-to-day control.

Murdoch looked to the new information superhighway for a solution. As Beijing wrestled with control of the internet, Murdoch started a new joint venture with People’s Daily called PDN Xinren. The first product ChinaByte was launched to fanfare in January 1997 and soon became the most popular site in China. But after the tech bubble burst Murdoch lost faith in the product and by April 2001 has sold his foothold in the fastest growing internet market in the world.

Dover documents other manoeuvres such as getting rid of anti-Chinese China correspondent Jonathan Mirsky from the Times Hong Kong bureau. Murdoch had promised The Times editorial independence but he invited the Times editor Peter Stothard on a charm offensive of China. Southard would later spike so many stories from Hong Kong and Mirsky resigned citing Murdoch’s heavy hand. Murdoch also spiked the HarperCollins autobiography of former Hong Kong governor Chris Patten on Chinese instructions. Murdoch competed with great rival Time boss Jerry Levin to fawn over Chinese leaders and promise anything for a toehold in the country. Finally Murdoch made a speech which was a mea culpa for Whitehall where he conceded cultural and social values of a country trumped open communications. 

With relations warming slightly, Dover tells the amusing story of when Murdoch met Vice Premier Zhu Rongii in Australia in 1997. Zhu asked Murdoch to tell him the story of his rise to power and the pair had an animated conversation. At one point Zhu put his hands on Murdoch’s wrists, looked him in the eye and spoke in Mandarin.”I see when you needed to expand your business interests in the US you became a US citizen,” he said. “Maybe you should think of applying for Chinese citizenship to further your business interests in China”. Murdoch blinked when he heard the translation and spluttered a reply. Zhu burst into laughter and said he was joking.  

Murdoch did in the end apply for Chinese citizenship – by marrying his young Yale-educated interpreter Wendi Deng. Deng had the language skills but not the contacts in the politburo and the Chinese kept one step ahead of the Murdochs. Just as they successfully cultivated Zemin’s Shanghai clique, the leader was replaced by Hu Jintao. Dover was on the outer too, his boss frustrated by his inability to penetrate the Great Wall.  Hu closed down STAR TV’s intrusion into the Chinese “grey sector” and insisted China retain control of Chinese television, banning cooperation between local stationsand foreign companies. 

 

After 12 years of trying, Murdoch finally admitted he had hit a brick wall in China. In 2006 he sold his remaining interest in Phoenix and reposition STAR TV towards the Indian market. But it was not a total failure. Bruce Dover said Murdoch was a major catalyst of change in China both of its media and its attitude to the Internet (which the party wanted to ban entirely).  Phoenix transformed Chinese television with its brash, downmarket programming but control remained in Chinese hands. Dover said in seeking to woo China’s leaders, Murdoch overstepped the mark. “He became too impetuous, too imprudent,” he concluded.

Slavery is as old a curse as humanity

The issue of slavery doesn’t seem like an important topic to be discussing the 21^st century but it is still a real issue in many parts of the world, including Australia.  Attorney-General Nicola Roxon recognised the fact this week when she announced new laws to criminalise forced marriage, forced labour and organ trafficking.  Roxon said Australia wasn’t immune from slavery and people trafficking. The new bill tackles worker exploitation, ensures those who help to enslave or traffic can be charged as well as those who keep slaves and allows for reparations with up to 12 years in prison for forced labour charges.

The news comes a week after an Irish publication revealed the news slavery exists today in Ireland and is exported to Australia. The Cork Independent quoted from a new book called ‘Open Secrets: An Irish Perspective on Trafficking & Witchcraft' based on data from the Trafficking in Persons Report issued annually by the US Department of State. Book co-author David Lohan said the data was available for several years but the issue was under-reported. 

The report found that Irish and Filipino people on 457 visas were “fraudulently recruited to work temporarily in Australia, but subsequently are subjected to conditions of forced labour, including confiscation of travel documents, confinement and threats of serious harm." It quoted a $174,000 fine issued to a Perth construction company in 2008 for violations of the Workplace Relations Act for “the deliberate exploitation of Filipino and Irish migrant workers.” The workers were not entitled to move between employers and presented with undated work agreements while being denied the required documents outlining their rights.

At the time of the case, Australian Minister for Immigration and Citizenship, Senator Chris Evans welcomed the fine and warned that the exploitation of workers would not be tolerated by his Government. The Cork Independent said slavery exists in Ireland today because of a demand. “Irish people are willing to use, abuse and exploit their fellow human beings for economic benefit or their own gratification,” it said.

But this is not just true of Ireland or Australia. Slavery is as old as organised human society. It was codified in the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi 3800 years ago and accepted in the Old and New Testaments. Exodus 22:2-3 allows for a thief to be sold if they cannot redress their theft.  Ephesians 6:5 cautions servants “who are owned by someone must obey your owners”. The classical Greek definition of democracy glossed over slavery and it was a key component of the Roman Empire economy until it was gradually replaced by serfdom.

Slavery continued in many societies and gained a new lease of life in Western Europe with the opening up of the Americas in the 16^th and 17^th centuries. The Atlantic triangular slave trade brought textiles, rum and manufactured goods from Europe to Africa, slaves from Africa to the Americas and sugar, tobacco and cotton from the Americas to Europe.  Merchants of Liverpool and Bristol combined with the big American cotton producers and the slave-trading kingdoms of western and central Africa to move 12 million Africans across the Atlantic in three hundred years. 

American-based British historian Simon Schama addressed the subject in his blood Rough Crossings:  Britain, Slaves and the American Revolution. The book tells the story of black Americans who sided with the British in the War of Independence because King George III embodied the idea of freedom for them better than George Washington.  The framers of the new American constitution had a bold plan for taxation and representation but behind the rhetoric of freedom, the reality of slavery was their Achilles heels. Tens of thousands of Black Africans looked to Britain to deliver them from the slavery.  When Boston lawyer James Otis called out the contradiction and said slavery diminished the idea of American freedom,  Founding Father John Adams could only “shudder at the consequences of such premises.”

The fact was the trade in humans kept the American cotton industry in profit and this was something the southern colonies were not to give away lightly. Slave rebellions in the sugar islands of the Caribbean created a terror the cotton economy was next and thousands of white Americans signed up for the revolt to protect their livelihood. 

But Britain was a dubious saviour for the blacks. Slavery was still legal in the British Empire and repeated attempts in parliament to ban it were always rejected on the economic grounds it would give bitter enemy France too much of an advantage in the Caribbean sugar trade. The notorious case of the slave ship the Zong where the captain threw 122 sick slaves overboard to get £30 a head compensation for their loss at sea spurred campaigners such as Granville Sharp (a founding father of Sierra Leone) and Thomas Clarkson to lobby for change. But even when revolutionary France rejected slavery (Napoleon re-established it in 1802), a suspicious British parliament would not immediately follow suit.

It wasn’t until 1807 the slave trade was made illegal in Britain and also in the US.  But the economic benefits of the institution of slavery continued in both countries until Britain made it illegal in the Empire in 1834. The internal contradictions of the US system were brilliantly exposed by 28-year-old runaway slave Frederick Douglass who wowed Britain when he toured in 1846. The articulate, witty, handsome and charismatic Douglass gave a dramatic account of cruelty in the plantations and lived constantly under the fear of re-capture. The book on his life was an immediate best seller.

Back home, many called Douglass anti-American but he defended his criticisms. “I have no love for America, What Country have I? The institutions of this country do not know me.” The contradictions tore the US apart leading to a reluctant Lincoln declaring war on the south in 1861.  The war claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and led to Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Declaration. When Lincoln was murdered, Douglass said Lincoln “shared the prejudices of his white fellow-countrymen against the Negro, [but] it is hardly necessary to say that in his heart of hearts he loathed and hated slavery.”

And while the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery after the South was defeated in 1865, the attitudes Douglass saw in Lincoln, lingered on in others. Slavery continued but went under a different name abetted by Jim Crow Laws.  Australia too enslaved its blacks by making them wards of the state.  While most of these schemes were wound back by the 1960s, slavery continues to be a worldwide issue.  In an article about South African slavery during the 2010 World Cup, Time said there were more slaves around today than ever. “Slaves are those forced to perform services for no pay beyond subsistence and for the profit of others who hold them through fraud and violence,” said Time. Slavery is likely to continue as long as humans have economic value.

The Hitching Post: The demons that drove Christopher Hitchens

“Are you a socialist?”asked the African leader.
I said, yes.
“People have been telling me,” he said lightly, “that you are a liberal....”
(Conor Cruise O’Brien, quoted in Christopher Hitchens, “Hitch-22” p.186).

About a month before Christopher Hitchens died in December, I happened to be reading his memoir Hitch-22. It was a book I had in my possession for over 12 months before I read it – It was sent to me by Crikey as part of their bribe to make me renew the subscription. Hitchens was never someone who had impinged strongly on my conscience so I was in no hurry to read him. Hitchens was a prolific essayist but other than his support for the Iraqi war, his strong atheism, and his waterboarding experiment, I’d never really remembered anything he wrote. I also knew he was suffering from cancer, which I knew from the fatalistic tone in Hitch-22 was likely terminal.

Yet when I heard he’d died just before Christmas, I felt an ineluctable sense of sadness on the passing of someone I felt I knew. The memoir was responsible. For months, I had Hitch-22 on my ‘to do’ list but the picture on the cover of a young hipster Hitchens smoking a cigarette never really threatened to excite my imagination. But a time came when I was on holidays on the beaches of NSW in November when there was no other book handy and I picked up Hitch-22. I quickly found it engrossing reading.

It is a rich exploration of a peripatetic journalist's fully-lived life made interesting for me because I had no real understanding of its trajectory before reading it. Hitchens' parents were both British archetypes, his stiff-upper-lipped father the remote “Commander” who gave his life to the Navy rather than family and his attractive Freudian mother who Hitchens preferred to call Yvonne rather than mum. Yvonne hated the life of a Navy wife and eventually left her husband for another man. In November 1973 she committed suicide in a pact with her lover in Athens. Hitchens flew to Greece to identify her body.

Apart from the obvious grief of losing his mother, the place of her death gave additional strains. Greece was then ruled by a right-wing military junta and being there was galling for a young left-wing radical. Hitchens had a typical middle upper-class upbringing, kept away from his parents and learning the value of compulsory games and a flogging at Leys School in Cambridge. He stayed in Cambridge to do his university education at Balliol where he joined the United Nations Association and the school committee, moves he described as shrewd. Hitchens was the classic 1960s hard left revolutionary, addicted to every socialist cause. He described himself as a Trotskyist, which was safe given that Trotsky never led Soviet Russia long enough to have his reputation thrashed.

Hitchens’ ideological purity was tested with a visit to Cuba which co-incided with the 1968 Prague Spring rebellion against the Soviet Union. Hitchens was there while Cubans held their breath wondering which side their leader would come down on. Castro knew which side his bread was buttered and going on radio he supported Brezhnev much to Hitchens’ disgust. Hitchens remained convinced Stalinism could be overturned from the Left and turned his attentions from the “great hopes of 1968” to the edges of Europe. He witnessed the end of Salazar’s fascist regime in Portugal and saw at close hand how Poland managed its communist contradictions in the 1970s.

The communist in Hitchens – something he never admitted to - wanted to iron out those contradictions. America was the place where such a thing was possible and a place where despite its conservatism, Hitchens could be “as free as possible.” The man to whom the book Hitch-22 is dedicated to - his friend the poet, James Fenton - told Slate, Hitchens became American because there was always something holding him back in England.

Hitchens forged a second identity as an American despite his antipathy to Nixon and Reagan. He also hated the Bushes and Bill Clinton, whom Hitchens thought a fraud. Hitchens knew the midtown Manhattan skyscrapers he landed in were an illusion but it was an illusion always accompanied by profound happiness and an exhilerating sense of freedom never experienced in England. When he saw some of those skyscrapers come down in 9/11, it instilled a deep and personal sense of horror against what he called the “cult of death”.

Hitchens supported the Afghan invasion – which was relatively uncontroversial in October 2001. It was the subsequent Iraq war that was to see the greatest cleavage with fellow leftists. Hitchens had been to Iraq in the 1970s and knew it as an artificial creation of British civil servants. His sympathies lay with the nationalists who put Iraq first not the Ba’athists who put the regime first. It was, Hitchens called, a "Republic of Fear". He was there as in the 1991 Gulf War to see Saddam’s Republican Guard get off scot-free while army conscripts were vaporised on the Highway of Death. The outcome left the people of Iraq worse off, but still condemned to suffer Saddam as leader. In a secret visit across the border Hitchens saw Saddam’s eco-catastrophes and Kurdish and Shiite massacres. “I recognised at once it was a state of affairs worth fighting for,” he wrote. “The idea of ‘Reds for Bush’ might seem incongruous but it was a great deal more wholesome than ‘pacifists for Saddam’”.

Hitchens’ anti-Saddam rhetoric was music to the ears of PNAC-influenced Defence deputy Paul Wolfowitz and the pair hit it off when the politician invited Hitchens to meet him. Hitchens became a salesman for the Iraqi war as the debate intensified. His support for the WMD theory was half-hearted. What he really believed was that Saddam was facing a meltdown moment that would lead to Rwanda-like consequences unless the west intervened. What Hitchens could not, or would not believe, was intervention would have similar consequences.

In the final chapter of his book, Hitchens argued it was the responsibility of intellectuals to argue for complexity and insist ideas should not be sloganised. But he also felt things should be simplified where possible. It was this paradox which led him into his highly-evolved yet deeply flawed Iraqi position. “Karl Marx was rightest of all when he recommended continual doubt and self criticism,” he wrote on the final page. Nothing wrong with that, except it looks for Marx for succour when introspection should be without a muse. The only reference to Heller’s masterpiece in the Hitch-22 title comes in the second last sentence of the book. Hitch’s Catch-22 was the impossible balancing act between his Marxian uncertainty and his desire to emulate the assured and dutiful life of his father. This paradox drove his endless creativity.

Too Much Luck: Paul Cleary skewers Australia's mining boom

Eight years into a seemingly never ending resource boom, Australia is now plundering a million tones of minerals every year from the ground. New industries such as LNG have signed contracts to quadruple exports in the next 10 years and will soon rival coal and iron ore in export earnings. It is a vast and vital natural resource that governments appear to be willing to fritter away frivolously at disgracefully low tax rates. That is the central thesis of Paul Cleary’s new book “Too Much Luck: The Mining Boom and Australia's Future”. Cleary was at QUT in Brisbane last Wednesday to speak about the problems his book addresses.

Paul Cleary is a senior writer with The Australian newspaper and a researcher in Indigenous development at the Australian National University. In a career spanning 20 years he has reported on politics and economics in the Canberra press gallery and worked as a correspondent in Southeast Asia and as a political adviser. He was awarded a Chevening fellowship by the UK Foreign Office to study at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies and became an adviser to government of newly-independent East Timor in the early 2000s.

Cleary says Australia could learn from East Timor in how to deal with mining companies who have undue influence on public policy. Australia needs to make changes in savings, taxation and regulation if it is to make the most of the boom. East Timor has an oil resource fund as has Norway with its North Sea Oil Fund and Chile with its Pension Reserve Fund based on copper profits. This fund is critical for infrastructure, schools and health needs when the boom finally ends and Australia will have considerably less by way of natural resources to pay for them.

That will require a change of thinking and a way of “pollie proofing” the profits, as Cleary puts it. In the last 3 years leading up to the GFC, the Howard Government blew $334 billion in additional revenues on needless tax cuts and middle class welfare. The result was a spending binge that forced interest rates up by 3 percent. The new Labor Government was forced to borrow $106b to stave off recession. Similarly the Queensland Government was forced to borrow big to pay for the flood and cyclone recovery this year. By contrast Chile used its foreign currency wealth funds to avoid recession and rebuild after a massive earthquake “without racking up a single peso of debt.”

Australia is heading towards the bottom of the quarry with no plans for what to do when it empties, Cleary said. The high dollar is killing off other export industries and tourism which employs far more people than the mining companies. This eventually leads to Dutch disease and the paradox of the two-speed economy. But those industries don’t have the political power of the resource lobby who work on politicians devoted to the quick fix of mining royalties. The State Governments in particularly are hooked on these royalties which make a mockery of their dual role of industry regulator. Cleary said Australia plans to be world’s second largest exporter of coal seam gas (via LNG) despite only having the world’s 12th largest gas reserves and despite the fact that impacts on salinity and groundwater reserves are not fully known.

Cleary said if the States were less cash strapped, they would not be in such an unseemly rush to approve mining developments. He said reforms were needed to share the profits and remove the disincentive to wait for the production revenues. The “third world” taxation system also needed to be fixed to create a future fund and to ensure that governments only spend the average revenue. As Cleary explained to ABC PM that means, taking the 20 year average of mineral revenue as a spending limit and anything above that gets locked away and gets saved into these funds. As Cleary says, failure to do so is effectively stealing from our grandchildren. “We are enjoying an inflated standard of living based on running down an entirely finite amount of non-renewable resources,” he said.

The Courier-Mail and the 1971 Brisbane Springbok riot

Today’s Courier-Mail has a front page splash that purports to tell the “real story behind a Queensland political myth”. The article is about former premier Peter Beattie’s involvement in the 1971 Springbok tour riot in Brisbane and a vintage picture of the former Premier complete with impressive 70s style moustache adorns the front page. The article is based on a newly released police dossier which the Courier-Mail trumpets as “Forty years on, the facts come out”.

The bland inside headline of “Two sides to every story” hides far more than it reveals. With Beattie among 400 protesters facing off against 500 police there were at least 900 sides to this story, not to mention the important parts played by politicians, the unions and the media, of which the Courier-Mail was the most craven example. Given the subsequent revelations about Queensland’s police corruption and their role in the brutal repression of the Joh Bjelke-Petersen era with the complicity of the media, a 64-page police dossier from the time is hardly to be trusted as an independent verification of what happened. Nor is today’s article the first time “the facts” have come out about the 1971 riot.

The best story of what happened when the white South African rugby team came to Brisbane during the Apartheid era was told in 2004 by Raymond Evans' “Springbok Tour Confrontation”, a chapter in Radical Brisbane: An Unruly History (edited by Evans and Carole Ferrier).

Evans began his account with an ABC audio tape of Sounds of the Seventies. Protesters and foreign journalists (the local ones at the Courier-Mail stayed on the police side of the line) recounted events with fear audible in their voices. “[The police] just chased us with a big grin on their faces,” said one. “When people got to the bottom of the hill, they realised they had been trapped. I think that’s when they started to be brutal,” said another.

The voices were describing the events of the cold winter’s night of Thursday, 22 July 1971. The Springbok tour party was staying at the Tower Mill Motel on Brisbane’s Wickham Terrace. They were separated from the 400 protesters by a line of 500 quasi-military style police officers. The protest turnout was poorer than expected partly because of the police intimidation and partly because Brisbanites bought the official line “sport and politics should not mix”.

That this cliché was an easily exposed fiction did not matter - the media did not expose it. Both federal and state political leaders were quick to use the tour to bolster their faltering credentials. Fast-fading Liberal PM Billy McMahon provided RAAF transport after civilian carriers refused to carry the Springboks. He also opened up Enoggera Barracks to house the additional police Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen called in.

But while the Springboks did not save the PM, it amply served the Premier. Joh was in the job less than 2 years and still untested when he began to try out anti-democratic practices which became familiar in the next 16 years. Eight days before the game, he declared a State of Emergency to secure the Exhibition Grounds, suspending civil liberties for a month in the process. The legislation gave police carte blanche to treat protesters as they liked. The day before the Mill protest, 200 students marched to the city centre. 36 were arrested as police applied excessive force. TV cameramen and press photographers were also hassled by police and had their film confiscated.

Trade unionists kept out of the protests believing the convenient lie about sport and politics. But unions had make life awkward for Joh in the lead-up. The game had to be played at the Exhibition Grounds because BWIU unionists blackbanned essential plumbing works at the Ballymore rugby ground. The BWIU also halted the production of police batons and the AMIEU stopped the transport of police horses to the demonstration. But on the night of the protest, most sports-loving unionists stayed away from Tower Mill. It was students like Beattie who filled the police cells that night. It was easier to demonise the students in the media as hippies and long-haired layabouts. The other major protesters were Aboriginals who paralleled South Africa with Queensland. This was a truth the media could also ignore. After all, weren't Queensland's Aboriginals, as Joh said, "living on clover"?

The numbers of students, aboriginals and academics outside the Mill was swollen by plain clothes police who acted as agent provocateurs. With no warning, the line of uniformed police marched forward and ordered the protesters to clear the footpath. The demonstrators were forced to flee down the steep and pitch-dark hill into Wickham Park. The police attacked with fists, batons and boots as plain-clothes colleagues joined in. Some protesters escaped by jumping an eight metre high embankment into the busy traffic of Albert Street below. Some were simply thrown over.

Others still, including Beattie, sought sanctuary in the nearby Trades Hall building near Jacob's Ladder (now demolished to make way for the IBM building). One unionist saw a girl held and punched by police while a youth (later identified as Beattie) was also jumped on and held to the floor. Two of the three police attacking him were forcibly ejected from the building and the third became frightened when he realised he was alone. The last policeman, Lindsay Daniels left the injured Beattie alone and became quiet. He was wearing two different police numbers at least one of which was wrenched off by students who now greatly outnumbered him.

Outside, 50 police attempted to gain entry to the building. When ambulance officers were allowed admission, police followed them in and were restrained only because they were accompanied by an inspector. Beattie was taken under armed guard to the orthopaedic ward of the Royal Brisbane Hospital for observation of suspected spinal injuries. According to the Courier-Mail report, two doctors told police no excessive force was used in the attack.

According to another report years later quoted by Evans, Beattie said he was charged with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest though he was the one assaulted. “I will never forgive or forget what happened next,” Beattie said. “I was verballed by the police who manufactured the most incredible statements about the whole thing.” Beattie was later released on bail and police never pressed charges.

The day after, angry students at the University of Queensland held a political strike. That night protesters significantly outnumbered police at the Mill and officers refrained from repeating their tactics from the night before. The day after was the Saturday of the game. Just 6,000 attended instead of the anticipated 30,000 full house. With the Oval ringed by barbed wire, protesters demonstrated in nearby Victoria Park instead. 2,000 people turned up faced by 900 police. Led by Labor Senator George Georges, marchers went down Fortitude Valley and into the city conducting the first sit-in at Queen Street. Violence was minimal during the day as Labor MP Bill Hayden urged caution. But the peace did not last.

After some outbreaks of violence in the city, a thousand gathered once more at the Mill that evening. Police Commissioner Ray Whitrod commanded his men to drive the protesters down into the park once more. Whitrod, who was inside the motel, claimed the police charge was in response to a rock thrown into a motel window. The offending missile was never produced and glaziers called to fix the window insisted the fall of the glass suggested it was broken from inside. But with country officers present threatening a no confidence motion in Whitrod’s “soft handling" of demonstrators, he was determined to act tough. He was supported by Joh who wanted to “stop all this business of going soft on all these demonstrations” because he could see it “leading to complete anarchy”.

The only anarchy in town that weekend was caused by rampaging police officers sanctioned by the Government while the Courier-Mail looked the other way. 40 years on, the paper is as cowardly as ever, preferring to concentrate on the irrelevant issue of whether Beattie called the police “pigs” rather than question the nature of the assault. The Springbok riot set the template for one and half decades of police brutality and corruption sanctioned by an undemocratic Premier who could hose down a meek press simply by “feeding the chooks”.

A black history of Queensland

I’ve recently finished reading Raymond Evans' very thorough account of “A History of Queensland”. One thing above all else comes out from the book. It is that Queensland’s white history is one of almost continual dispossession and discrimination against the Indigenous inhabitants. Since the 1820s blacks have been massacred, dispossessed, forcibly removed, interned, had families split and had wages confiscated. In the 19th century they were treated like vermin to be hunted down and in the 20th century they were the victims of hypocritical paternalism, with shades of the earlier attitude still evident. As late as 1970, a North Queensland grazier told ABC television an Aboriginal person was “a sort of link between the upper and lower forms of the animal kingdom” which made them “dangerous to put…into society”.

Whites made every effort to put Aboriginals out of a society they had lived in for 60,000 years. Just prior to occupation in 1820 there were around 262,000 natives in Queensland. By a hundred years later, extermination and disease had reduced that number to just 15,700. In 1884 the “Queenslander” newspaper told its readers that “if a blackfellow is seen, he is brutally shot down the same as a dingo and with about the same feeling of remorse”. Keeping “racial purity” was a higher priority of colonial society than preserving Aboriginal lives. Officials lived in terror of sexual “contamination” that might lead to a “half-caste menace”.

Those that survived those terrible times became government property. A massive system of reserve, mission and police bureaucracy controlled every aspect of Aboriginal lives. The system ran cheaply on the intercepted wages of black workers. The workers themselves were quarantined on semi-penitential reserves with no health facilities. Older Aboriginals still recall with horror sadistic institutions such as Palm Island, Barambah (Cherbourg) and Woorabinda which were no better than concentration camps.

Governments of every stripe blatantly stole from Aboriginals. Evans noted how the 1930s William Forgan Smith Labor Government “perfected the art of robbery with a fountain pen” and stole £72,000 ($3.5m in today’s money) from Aboriginal trust accounts claiming it to be a depression-era emergency measure. Such theft continued through the years and administrations that followed.

The attitude of the Joh Bjelke-Petersen government of 1968-1987 veered between neglect and outright hostility to Aboriginals. Bjelke-Petersen insisted Queensland Aboriginal people lived “on clover”. They were "as wealthy as Arab oil sheiks", he said. But the statistics proved the lie to this absurd claim. In 1980 Indigenous people were 89 times more likely to die of an infectious disease than other Queenslanders. Half of all Aboriginals were unemployed. Half of all Aboriginal homes had no sewers, a quarter had no electricity and a fifth had no water. In 1987, Aboriginal men died on average 27 years younger than other men and for Aboriginal women it was even worse. They died 34 years earlier than other women. Aboriginals were four times more likely to be involved in violence or accidents and seven times more likely to be imprisoned.

By 1974 trachoma of the eye was a disease eradicated across the western world. But it was still rampant in Queensland’s Aboriginal children with 80 percent infection rates. When Fred Hollows and his team attempted to travel around the communities to address the problem, Bjelke-Petersen expelled them on the spurious grounds the team contained two “well-known radicals” who had “contrived an upsurge in voter registrations.”

Around the same time a federal health team described the high rates of childhood malnutrition, gastro-enteritis and threadworm as resembling conditions in Biafra. Queensland Health officials played the report down preferring to lay the blame on parental neglect. Similar criticisms from the World Council of Churches and Amnesty International were dismissed by Bjelke-Petersen as a sinister, subversive “arm of Communist propaganda”.

After the Nationals were finally turfed out in disgrace in 1989, the Labor Goss Government came to power on a wave of new promises. But their Lands Rights Act of 1991 attracted the ire of the Land Councils who said it deprived 95 percent of Queensland blacks from any claims on the land. Black protests on the issue were met with a vigorous police reaction and matters did not improve after talented dancer and activist Daniel Yock died suspiciously in custody in 1993.

Well meaning efforts by the subsequent Beattie-Bligh Governments have done little to arrest the long slide in Aboriginal Health. The adult black death rate remains 10 to 12 times greater than non-Indigenous rates, incarceration rates are 15 times higher and life expectancy is 20 years below the national average. In 2004, the Fred Hollows Foundation compared Queensland Aboriginal health unfavourably with experiences in Sudan, Sierra Leone and Nepal.

Police issues remain a thorn. The Government-sanctioned police response to the 2004 Palm Island riot following the Mulrunji death was particularly brutal. 80 Tactical Response Group commandos conducted dawn raids armed with riot shields, balaclavas, helmets with face masks and automatic weapons. They declared war on local residents while Beattie disgracefully described the entire community of Palm Islanders as “lazy, disruptive and dysfunctional.”

As Evans' book methodically shows, it is Governments from William Bligh's day to Anna Bligh's that are responsible for the real laziness, disruption and dysfunction of Aboriginal lives.

An Awkward Truth: the story of the 1942 Darwin bombing

I finished reading Peter Grose’s engrossing An Awkward Truth a few weeks ago but only now have had the time to review it. Written in 2009, the book is a thorough examination of the catastrophic Japanese bombing of Darwin in February 1942. The book opens up with an anonymous poem of soldiers’ doggerel “Bloody Darwin” that has eerie parallels with John Cooper Clark’s 1980s British urban classic Evidently Chickentown. “This bloody town’s a bloody cuss/No bloody trams, no bloody bus/And no one cares for bloody us/Oh bloody, bloody Darwin.” The poem is apt as the story of Darwin’s first bombing (it would be attacked a further 58 times) is one of official incompetence, wilful neglect, looting, desertion and failure of leadership that cast a dark shadow on Australia’s war record.

Yet while Grose is not afraid to talk of what then Territories minister Paul Hasluck called in 1955 a day “of national shame”, he also uncovers another story of personal heroism and dogged counter-attack he says deserves a place in the record books. The force that attacked Darwin on 19 February 1942 was the same one as that attacked Pearl Harbour two months earlier. Led by renowned “Tora Tora Tora” pilot Mitsuo Fuchida (who lived until 1976), the force learned from their Hawaiian mistakes and caused more damage in Darwin, taking more civilian casualties and sinking more ships. At the time Darwin stood with Coventry as one of the biggest air attacks of the war. Its death toll of around 300 people remains the deadliest single event on Australian soil.

The chief villain of the book is not Fuchida but Charles Aubrey Abbott a former NSW Country Party politician who dabbled with the extreme right. He was appointed NT’s administrator in 1937. When war arrived in 1939, the town of Darwin accepted it apathetically believing it was still half a world away. But by 1941 things had changed as Japan looked like entering on the Axis side. Darwin was suddenly a target. On 7 December Japan launched a double strike hitting out at Pearl Harbour while launching a large ground based invasion of Malaya supported by a bombing campaign from Hong Kong to Singapore. Disaster followed disaster. McArthur’s indecisiveness cost the Philippines, Guam fell as did the citadel of Singapore. Japan could now turn its attentions to its real target: Java’s oilfields.

Across the sea in Darwin, authorities drew up plans for its evacuation. But Abbott sat on the plans and argued a state of emergency would cause unnecessary panic. Most women and children were eventually taken out by boat in a chaotic evacuation. Darwin’s port was transformed into a supply base for the defence of the Dutch East Indies. Ships piled up in the harbour as its inefficient design and strike-prone wharfies made for painfully slow loading and unloading. There were also fighting ships from the Royal Australian and US Navy making a total of 45 ships in the harbour at the time of the bombing.

On 19 February, the Japanese Nagumo Force with its four aircraft carriers rendezvoused in the Timor Sea south of Maluku, 350km north of Darwin. It unleashed 188 aircraft, five more than in the first wave at Pearl and set a course for Darwin. They flew southward in the gap between Bathurst and Melville Island before turning in a loop to approach Darwin from the south-east. This had the double advantage of having the sun behind them and being the least likely direction of attack.

They arrived in Darwin without warning around 10am. They divided into two groups one attacking the port while the other strafed the airfield. The bombers exerted maximum damage on the port locomotives, railway trucks and scattering oil lines which caught fire in the water killing those who had dived in for safety. The town lay just beyond the port and suffered heavy damage. A direct hit took out the post office and communication building killed nine civilians inside.

Anti-aircraft guns did their best to return fire but lack of practice and problems with the shells in the tropical heat meant they were mostly ineffective. Over at the airfield, the second force strafed and bombed knocking out planes and communication equipment. Out on the harbour ships struggled to get away from the carnage. The US ship Peary sank with 91 dead aboard. 15 more died on the William B Preston, also sunk and 12 died on the hospital ship Manundra though it did not sink and continued to accept casualties. By the end of the raid, Darwin was a smoking mess.

After the all clear was sounded, dazed Darwinians emerged to survey the damage. But the Japanese were not finished yet and 54 aircraft arrived for a second attack two hours later. They concentrated on the airfield dropping 13,000kgs of high explosives before flying off at 12.20pm. It was from this point on that local officials displayed their incompetence. Neither Abbott nor the army commander took control of the situation. Abbott directed police away from rescue efforts to pack his valuable glass and china and take it south to safety.

Then there was the “Adelaide River Stakes”, a mass exodus from Darwin as rumours filled the void left by the absence of any official information. A convoy of vehicles set off to Adelaide River about 120kms to the south based on the false rumour civilians had been ordered to leave town. Anything that could move, did and the road jammed as drivers groped their way blindly in the red dust. Meanwhile the Army neglected to start a salvage operation, blowing any chance of giving the surviving aircraft a chance if the Japanese came back. With no orders transmitted, army units dispersed to other parts of the Territory.

Worse was to follow when those left behind decided Darwin was ideal for a spot of looting. Army personnel including military police were involved taking goods away by the truckload. By nightfall matters turned violent within drunken military personnel firing over the heads of crowds as they gathered to leave Darwin. There were no sanitary services and all the wharfies had fled leaving surviving ships with no way of unloading. The military police were out of control but as Grose writes “the Administrator’s port, sherry and other fine wines were in safe hands. Otherwise, Darwin was a mess.”

On the day after, the military finally took control. They took eligible men from Adelaide River and signed them up for the army back in Darwin. Non essential people were evacuated and a week later the whole of the NT was placed under Army control. There just remained the tricky problem of what to tell the world.

Unlike Roosevelt after Pearl, the Curtin administration would not trust Australians with the truth. At the time Curtin was engage in a furious row with Roosevelt and Churchill about withdrawing Aussie troops from the middle east. The three journalists in Darwin had splashed the news of the attacks but the Government was keen to underplay the news. Initially they reported the death tally as 19 with damage as minimal. Abbott also pretended in his communications Darwin was back to normal.

By the end of March the secret Lowe commission to investigate the attack reported back to Curtin that 240 died but censors made sure newspapers did not make much of it. Curtin’s secrecy policy backfired as the Japanese went on to attack Broome, Wyndham and other towns but used the excuse of the “national interest” to avoid any further comment or scrutiny. Darwin disappeared from public gaze. As Grose concluded “The full horror of the attack on Darwin was [the government’s] best chance to jolt Australians out of their apathy. Unwisely it chose not to take it.”

Manning the barricades along Abbott's Battlelines

It is unlikely, as Treasurer Wayne Swan said, Opposition Leader Tony Abbott will be cracking open the champagne on hearing Malcolm Turnbull’s change of mind to stay in federal politics. Yet Turnbull’s decision is not without its gains for Abbott. For starters there is the obvious benefit of shoring up the seat of Wentworth, which was looking difficult to hold without Turnbull’s massive personal vote. Abbott would become a Liberal hero if he pulled off an unlikely victory or even staved off the monumental defeat that looked likely during most of the Brendon Nelson and Turnbull tenures as leader. With the gratitude of the party behind him, Abbott would be secure as leader and the best Turnbull could hope for is the Treasury, a position he would be admirably suited for.

This is a long odds prospect based on current opinion polls but as recent actions by the Government suggest, it is a prospect that worries Kevin Rudd. How else to explain the Government closing off debates and moving closer to Abbott positions on matters such as the ETS, migrant detention and about-turns on kindergarten centres, hospital takeovers and the insulation debacle? As Abbott said in the introductory sentence to his new book, “political parties have to treat defeat as an opportunity as well as a disaster”. As leader in the 2010 election no-one expects him to win, Abbott can afford to treat it as an opportunity to inflict maximum damage. Peter Hartcher observed Abbott’s team is crafted in his own image - populist, angry and spoiling for a fight.

A clue to why Abbott might do this can be found in the title of the book I quoted from. The title “Battlelines” is not accidental. Here is the former pugilist choosing to fight on several fronts. Abbott is a Christian warrior who admits he lacks the humility to be fearful about the size of the task. His Jesuit education makes him want to live life to the full. “For me,” Abbott wrote, “the message was God preferred big-hearted people who might sometimes make mistakes rather than robotic role-worshippers.”

The notion of God remains an important presence in Abbott’s life, as it does the Prime Minister. But whereas Rudd has succeeded in keeping his beliefs at arm’s length from policymaking, Abbott is fundamentally defined by his. Abbott’s approach to ethics is based on Rawl’s Veil of Ignorance. His best answer to most ethical dilemmas is “what if the boot was on the other foot?” which he said was closest to human instinct. This willingness to put himself in other people’s shoes has its limits. The Catholic thinking of B.A. Santamaria may have helped him become a “man for others” but his native conservatism made him feel threatened by some of life’s less conventional mores.

Abbott also admits he was threatened by multiculturalism in the 1980s. It wasn’t that he didn't want an Australia where many languages might be spoken, many religions worshipped, or many cultures practiced. It was because he was “too defensive about Western values that have turned out to have near-universal appeal.” Abbott has a somewhat narrow view of the European Enlightenment. He cherishes British values above all. He loves Britain, the source of the language and the law, as a “fountain of democracy”. He rejects the notion the monarchy is foreign though the “Australian Crown” to him means governor-generals and state governors as much as the Queen and the royal family.

Less intractable are Abbott’s economic opinions. He said he was joking when he said economics was boring and now insists “no serious person can be uninterested in economics.” Yet he has not drawn any economics battlelines and the book does not include economics in the index. His opposition to the GFC stimulus is for opposing sake rather than for a strategic economic masterplan - Abbott is no disciple of Hayek. This may be where Turnbull comes back in. While he has no intention of staying on as Abbott’s offsider, it may yet be his best bet if Abbott gets lucky over the next few months.