Chavez, the new Bolivar

On May 14 this year, Hugo Chavez, the president of Venezuela, addressed an adoring crowd at the Camden Town Hall, London. The Independent newspaper described the event as a “mixture of a Latin American populist rally, an evangelical meeting and a football match.”

London is the latest stop on his European tour which has taken him to the Vatican and Vienna. In his rambling two hour speech without notes at Camden, he quoted Rosa Luxembourg, Pythagoras, Karl Marx and George Bernard Shaw. He attacked US foreign policy on Iran and Iraq. He claims, not without reason, that the US government are plotting to assassinate him. “I know there are plans to kill me, but I really don't care. It will not stop me,” he said to the crowd.

On August 22, 2005, influential right wing demagogue Pat Robertson openly called for his assassination on television. He told the Christian Broadcasting Network’s “The 700 Club” that “I don't know about this doctrine of assassination, but if he thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it. It's a whole lot cheaper than starting a war”. He went on to say “It's a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives do the job and then get it over with.”

And indeed Chavez would not be first Latin American president that the US has forcibly removed from office. The Monroe Doctrine is not idle theory. In December 1823 US president James Monroe issued a statement of intent to European governments of America’s growing power, “the American continents were no longer open to European colonization, and that any effort to extend European political influence into the New World would be considered by the United States as dangerous to our peace and safety." From then on, this cornerstone of American foreign policy meant they would reserve the right to interfere with domestic affairs in Latin American countries whenever it felt their interests were being threatened.

In more recent times, leaders such as Salvador Allende and Manuel Noriega have been ousted from power through overt or covert American involvement. Allende was the first democratically elected Marxist leader in the world when he won the Chilean presidential election in 1970. His regime and life were brought to a spectacular end on September 11, 1973 when General Pinochet led a military coup and bombed the presidential palace with the implicit backing of US State Secretary, Henry Kissinger. Noriega was a CIA operative in the 1970s and de facto military leader of Panama in the 1980s. His relationship with his ex-bosses turned sour in 1989 and the Americans invaded in “Operation Just Cause.” Noriega was arrested and imprisoned in Florida for drug trafficking.

Chavez is a major problem for America because of its large dependence on Venezuelan oil in the middle of a supply crisis. So the US is now trying to turn Chavez into another Noriega. They have accused him of supporting and supplying weapons to the FARC, Colombia's largest revolutionary guerrilla movement. FARC is also accused of drug smuggling and terrorist activities. US newspapers such as the New York Times are fanning the links between Chavez, FARC and drugs in a similar manner to the way Noriega was demonised prior to the 1989 invasion.

Hugo Chavez will be fifty years old on July, 28 this year. He was the second son of schoolteachers in the town of Sabaneta in the Western state of Barinas. His father is now the governor of that state. At 17, Chavez joined the Venezuelan academy of Military Sciences where he achieved Master’s degrees in military science and engineering. Chavez remained in the army and gradually worked his way through the ranks to become lieutenant colonel.

While a student, he developed his key philosophy: Bolivarianism. It is named for the greatest of South America’s generals and fellow Venezuelan Simon Bolivar. Bolivar proclaimed Venezuelan independence from Spain in 1810. He fought running battles with the Spanish over the next 11 years before emerging as president of the original republic of Colombia (now Ecuador, Colombia, Panama, and Venezuela). He also took Peru and upper Peru was renamed Bolivia in his honour. Chavez saw Bolivarianism as promoting the unification of Latin America. As president he changed the constitution and name of the country in 1999 to the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.

Chavez first came to national prominence in 1992. Venezuela was undergoing a crisis under neo-liberal Carlos Andres Perez who was serving his second term as leader. Venezuela’s economic stability was under threat when the Arab countries raised their oil production quotas to aid the collapse of the oil-dependent Soviet Union. Prices plummeted and Venezuela had to introduce austerity measures. Chavez and fellow army officer Francisco Arias Cardenas founded the MBR-200 (Movimiento Bolivariano Revolucionaro 200) and plotted to overthrow the government. The coup of February 4 failed. Chavez only had the loyalty of 10% of the armed forces and failed to take the national TV station. Perez eluded capture and Chavez surrendered. He was sent to prison but many poor Venezuelans saw him as a victim who had stood up against government corruption. Perez was ousted in 1993 and Chavez was pardoned by the new president Rafael Caldera in 1994. In 1998 Chavez campaigned for the presidency and gained significant support from Venezuela’s two largest banks. He won the December election with 56% of the popular vote.

He immediately got to work on his sweeping changes which included road building, housing construction and mass vaccination. He also halted planned privatisations of the national social security system, the aluminium industry and the oil sector. He lobbied OPEC to reduce oil production to increase revenues. He was re-elected with an increased majority in 2000. In 2002 his reform of the state oil company precipitated a military coup.

He was replaced and arrested on April 11, 2002. This event sparked massive pro-Chavez protests and universal condemnation from the rest of South America. Chavez was restored to the leadership in triumph two days later. Only then did the US condemn the coup. The British Sunday broadsheet, The Observer, reported that the coup was linked to three senior US government officials, national security adviser Elliot Abrams, special envoy Otto Reich and intelligence chief John Negroponte.

Internal opposition to Chavez continues to be fierce. In 2004, Sumate (Spanish for “Join in”), a shadowy volunteer civil association funded by the US State Department collected millions of signatures and activated the 1999 Constitution's presidential recall provision. Chavez survived this with a 60% ‘no’ vote against the measure.

Chavez continues to use Venezuela's increasing oil revenues to focus on expanding social programs. Economic activity has also picked up markedly, reaching double-digit growth in 2004. He has forged links with Argentina’s president Kirchner, China’s Jintao, Cuba’s Castro and Iran’s Admadinejad. He ordered US troops and Christian missions out of his country in 2005 and gave away almost seven thousand square kilometres of land to Amazonian tribes. He has denounced US foreign policy but was the first leader to offer assistance to America after Cyclone Katrina. He told AP "We place at the disposition of the people of the United States in the event of shortages we have drinking water, food, we can provide fuel”. His offer was turned down.

Chavez continues to polarise world opinion. It is probably too early to judge his impact on his country. But he remains a refreshing different voice on the world scene. It is no wonder the crowd at Camden Town Hall gave him a superstar reception.

Grant McLennan

Grant McLennan, one of Australia’s finest singer-songwriters, died in his sleep on Saturday, May 6 2006. He was 48 years old. McLennan was born and raised on a cattle station near the town of Rockhampton in Central Queensland. He formed a fruitful and long lasting musical partnership with Robert Forster when they met as students at Brisbane’s University of Queensland in 1977. They shared interests in poetry, movies and the music of Bob Dylan. Other musical influences were 1960s pop, folk-rock, and the bands Television and the Velvet Underground. They formed a band and called it the Go-Betweens.

McLennan had no musical training and Forster encouraged him to learn the bass guitar. They released their first single in 1978, the Forster composed “Lee Remick.” Initially Robert performed most of the songwriting, vocals and guitar work. But McLennan would soon develop his own style so that a pattern emerged where they shared equally in songwriting and vocals. McLennan was often considered to be the more pop-oriented half of the Go-Betweens' songwriting team, but as Pitchfork stated his work was also tinged with sadness and melancholy. McLennan's 1983 song, Cattle and Cane, a nostalgic reverie about his childhood in rural tropical Queensland, was recently voted by the Australasian Performing Rights Association as one of the 10 greatest Australian songs of all time.

The Go-Betweens became hugely influential media darlings. Their albums attracted much critical acclaim which never translated into large sales. Among the bands that claim the Go-Betweens as an influence are U2, REM, Belle and Sebastian, Franz Ferdinand and Coldplay.

The Go-Betweens moved to London in the early 80s where they produced independent hits as the aforementioned "Cattle and Cane" and "Streets of Your Town" (1988). McLennon shared a flat in Fulham with the singer of another Australian band that had also recently moved to London. He was the Birthday Party’s Nick Cave. After recording six acclaimed albums, Forster and McLennan disbanded The Go-Betweens in December 1989.

Grant and Robert then went their own ways to further their solo careers. During the next ten years McLennan recorded four solo albums as well as forming subprojects such as Jack Frost (with The Church’s Steve Kilbey) and The Far Out Corporation (with Powderfinger’s Ian Haug.)

With both McLennon and Forster back living in Brisbane in 2000, the Go-Betweens reunited for the album "The Friends of Rachel Worth," which featured backing from members of Sleater-Kinney. They made two more albums since then, again to much favourable reviews from critics and fans alike.

Saturday, May 6 should have been a very happy date for McLennon. The Go-Betweens last album Oceans Apart (2005) was their biggest selling album ever and won them their first Australian Grammy. He was having a housewarming party that night where he was planning to propose to his girlfriend Emma Pursey. At 4:30pm, he went for a nap. Early arrivers to his party found him dead in his bedroom a few hours later. The autopsy revealed a massive heart attack.

The funeral revealed his artistic legacy with a bevy of Australian musical talent in attendance. Forster paid tribute to his partner, "the last six months was the happiest I had ever known him." He added, "he was very happy in his private life and had just written an amazing bunch of songs. He was especially pleased with how well the last album had done. That had put a real spring in his step."

The Go-Betweens web page stated briefly but eloquently "his singular contribution to music and his commitment to his craft simply cannot be understated. He will be deeply missed by all who knew him."

In the Shadow of the Palms

“In the Shadow of the Palms” is an Australian documentary film made in 2005. It is the only foreign documentary filmed in Iraq prior to, during, and after the 2003 Invasion of Iraq.

The Iraqi war was one of the most media saturated events in history. But it was also strictly controlled by the US military. We had tightly scripted conferences from Washington and the military. We saw the view from Kuwait and Qatar. We heard from journalists holed up in the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad and others ‘embedded’ with the armed forces. What we didn't have was the voices of ordinary Iraqis. The makers of “In the Shadow of the Palms” are one notable independent exception to this rule.

The film is a co-production of Ipso Facto productions and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC.) The filmmaker spent ten weeks in Baghdad making the film and it commences four weeks out from the start of the invasion. The film then takes us through excruciating countdown to zero hour as we go from 4 weeks, to 3, to 2, to 1, to 1 day and then beyond in the daily lives of these people.

Bookended by images taken from a U.S. helicopter gunship as it surgically eliminates a target, the film gives an insight into a cross-section of ordinary Iraqi citizens, a window into their everyday realities before, during and after the war. The film shows first hand the effects of the bombing campaign on the lives of civilians. Many locals are interviewed but the four main characters are a professor of Arabic poetry, a wrestling coach (who represented Iraq in the Olympics in the 1980s) an imam and a cobbler.

Their interviews are interspersed with government propaganda on TV. Saddam is almost a peripheral figure in their lives. People may not like their government but they totally resent the coming invasion and its motivations. Even schoolchildren can see it is all about oil.

The filmmaker is Wayne Coles-Janess, a Melbourne based documentary maker in his late 30s. He mortgaged his Melbourne home to help fund the Iraq film. His 1992 drama, On the Border of Hopetown, was nominated for an AFI award. His documentary Life at the End of the Rainbow has also been shown on ABC.

Coles-Janess had his tricky moments in Iraq and was arrested eleven times in all. "One time I was in the neighbourhood at night before the war and these guys grabbed me and thought that I was a pilot that had been shot down or a spy or whatever," he says. "There was a bit of toing-and-froing but luckily some people that knew me in that area heard all the commotion and rescued me."

Another time, he was bundled into a car and taken to military headquarters. There he underwent an ordeal at the hands of two senior army officers as they discussed his fate.

The film shows first hand the effects of the bombing campaign on the lives of civilians. In one very powerful scene, Coles-Janess brings his camera into a bomb site and watches the frenetic attempts to rescue a family of five from the rubble. Two of the children are killed.

Coles-Janess escapes across the border before the Americans take Baghdad. On return to Australia, his tapes are destroyed by suspicious Customs officers. Luckily for him and his viewers, he has made copies which are safe elsewhere. He returned to Iraq after the Americans had handed over provisional control to the Iraqi interim government.

When he returned to Baghdad, he found caution towards him as a Westerner had intensified and some attitudes had hardened. "I think some characters were happy to see me but they were uncomfortable spending time with me. I was definitely seen as the enemy and therefore people would start asking questions. Is he a contractor? Is he with the CIA? What's that family doing with him?"

He tries to track down the people he spoke to before the war. A Palestinian refugee is now homeless and stateless and living in a refugee camp. US soldiers are suspicious of his filming. The Olympic wrestling coach has disappeared without trace. He was arrested when soldiers suspected his car remote control could be used as a bomb triggering device. Everyone he meets is convinced that matters are worse now than before the war. There is a continual atmosphere of resentment and fear.

The film is not without its faults and is marred by some poor production values. The title cards are frustratingly amateurish and the subtitles rife with spelling mistakes. The misspelling of “sacrifice” to read “scarifice” (several times) is almost frightening apt!

However, the documentary is compelling and builds an articulate picture of the rage and powerlessness of the ordinary people. It demands to be seen by those who buy the official US and Australian government line that the Iraqi invasion was just and necessary.

The dust settles in Beaconsfield

Until Anzac Day 2006, the primary claim to fame of the mining town of Beaconsfield, Tasmania was that it was the first place in Australia to introduce fluoridation in the water. That occurred in 1953. The town had to wait another 50 years before some serious seismic activity made it famous again.

Beaconsfield is on the north coast of Tasmania some 40km north of Launceston on the Tamar coast. Gold was first discovered on the eastern slopes of Cabbage Tree Hill, west of the current township of Beaconsfield, in 1877. An underground mine, known as the Tasmania Gold Mine, operated between 1877 and 1914. Water was the main enemy, the pumps could not keep up with the floods in the mines and this, plus the shortage of labour and materials at the onset of World War I, forced its closure and the flooding of the mine. Drilling in the 1980s discovered a new high grade lode underneath the old mine called the Tasmanian Reef. The mine reopened in 1999 after the flood damage was fixed.

Drilling below the 1000 metre level has shown that the Tasmania Reef is still regarded as the best in Australia and perhaps even the world. The quality of the lode guarantees a future for the mine. The Beaconsfield mine has been high on the crest of the gold boom posting an after-tax profit of $7.5 million last financial year.

Or at least it rode high until hit by two earthquakes. Although the Beaconsfield mine is not in active seismic zone, the April 25 incident was the second earthquake in less than six months. Leading seismologists say it is a well-established scientific fact that sustained mining induces earthquakes. The first quake occurred in October 2005 which caused a rock fall and temporary halting of operations. But there were no casualties. The April quake was roughly the same strength – 2.1 on the Richter scale. But the impact was much greater. On the evening of Anzac Day, 17 miners had been digging for ore in one of the tunnels about 925 metres below when an earthquake shattered rock around them. 14 men made it out safely, but three remained unaccounted for among the underground debris.

On the following day mine manager Matthew Gill held out hope that the trapped trio might still be alive saying “there's every reason to believe that in the general area, ventilation is reasonable”. His optimism seemed unfounded when one day later, rescuers found the body of Larry Knight, one of three men unaccounted for. Here the story looked like it was petering out. It was surely only a matter of time when the other two bodies would be recovered. Then on Sunday the 30th, the extraordinary but sketchy news that "some form of radio monitoring and communication" had shown the two miners Todd Russell and Brant Webb were still alive. They had survived by drinking drips of rancid and mineralised water that run through the mine. On the Monday morning, the town erupted. Kaye Russell, Todd’s wife, enthused “They're alive, they're talking to us, they're in contact, and they're gonna get 'em out.” They had survived the rockfall thanks to the protection of a small cherry picker cage. The miners were in good spirits but they used “quite a few swear words - get us out of here, you know, it's fucking cold and cramped in here, I want to get out.”

But that wasn’t going to be easy. Rescuers were less than 12 metres from them, but had to abandon the blasting technique they had been using because of safety concerns.

Enter a new player Australian Workers' Union (AWU) national secretary and soon-to-be federal ALP MP Bill Shorten. Shorten is being groomed by Labor as the Bob Hawke of the noughties and he was onsite to co-ordinate the union response to the disaster. And because of his media skills he shared the limelight with the mine manager Gill. Shorten announced on May 1 the drilling was going slowly but surely, and could take up to another 48 hours.

“Another 48 hours” was to become the mantra of the mission. And this was to become a major mission. The announcement that the miners were alive meant that an armada of Australia’s big media guns descended on Beaconsfield.

They were there so that they could celebrate the rescue in “another 48 hours” with their audiences. And so on Wednesday May 3 they could now begin the risky process of creating a tunnel through the final 12 metres or so of solid rock standing between the men and freedom. That would take another 48 hours.

The men were provided with protein drinks, vitamin capsules, biscuits, glow-sticks, space blankets, cameras, magazines and ipods via a nine-centimetre pipe.

On Friday May 5 it was announced that a rock barrier had slowed progress and the rescue would stretch into the weekend.

The media contingent was becoming restless and decided to eat its own. The Sydney Daily Telegraph reported a story about the Channel 7 “Today Tonight” host Naomi Robson saying she was “doing nothing but hair and make-up" since arriving at the site on Monday night. Ms Robson denied the allegation in her high rating program citing jealousy from the other media.

On Sunday May 7 as the mine manager Matthew Gill gloomily announced another delay, he was asked a question on mine safety by veteran Channel 9 reporter Richard Carleton. His question was: "On the 26th of October last year, not 10 metres from where these men are now entombed, you had a 400-tonne rock fall. Why is it -- is it the strength of the seam, or the wealth of the seam -- that you continue to send men in to work in such a dangerous environment?"
Gill refused to answer citing the recovery effort instead. Carleton left the conference and collapsed and died of a heart attack some twenty metres away.

After yet another 48 hours, Russell and Webb were finally freed in the early hours of Tuesday May 9. This was the same day of Larry Knight’s funeral. Graham Mulligan, spokesman for a Christian motorcycle club which escorted Larry Knight’s coffin from the church to a nearby cemetery said “This whole ordeal has taken us from horror to shock, grief, sadness, joy and happiness and then back to sadness again.”

Now the media scrum gathers around the survivors in order to buy their stories. Millions of dollars will change hands. Bill Shorten wants an independent inquiry into the disaster. The mine has deferred the interim 2006 dividend until further notice. No one knows whether the mine will re-open though there is much goodwill to make it happen. Beaconsfield Benefit Concerts and Footy Shows from the town have been arranged.

Everyone feels good about themselves in this sensational story. However at the other end of Australia, a similar story occurred with precious little media attention. Three Torres Strait islanders lost at sea for 22 days switched their mobile phones off to conserve the batteries before finally getting enough of a signal to text message for help. They were found on the same day as the miners.

The Islanders were black and didn’t attract the same attention as two white men in Tasmania. This story also shows the media's obsession with crisis, drama and emotion-packed stories like Beaconsfield. The story had blanket coverage (and therefore other events did not get a look in.) All the media were involved and jostled with each other for exclusive angles. The media sent its biggest players to cover it. And this caused the sideshow mentioned earlier.

The Torres rescue did not have the same drama. A helicopter fished them out of the water with no network cameras in tow. It did not have sustained media drama.

The islanders survived the same length of time without the little luxuries that the miners had. They had no contact with the outside world, no dry clothes, no water, no magazines and no ipods. But the sad truth is their story will never have the value to mainstream advertisers that the Tasmanian story will offer.

Unfree Papua

On Tuesday May 9, the Australian Federal Government revealed three men from Indonesia's Papua province were found in the Torres Strait on Saturday by Immigration officials. The Australian minister for Immigration Senator Vanstone said “because they arrived on an excised island, they will not be processed in Australia if they seek asylum, and are not entitled to apply for refugee status under Australia's Migration Act.”

The Australian government does not want to assist Papuan refugees because of the problems it creates with its relationship with Indonesia. The arrival of 43 asylum seekers in Cape York in January created a major diplomatic incident between the countries.

Papua is an Indonesian province on the western half of the island of New Guinea, the second largest island in the world after Greenland. Prior to 1969, Papua was the Dutch territory of Netherlands New Guinea. It has also been known as Western New Guinea, West Irian and Irian Jaya in the last forty years. It shares the island with its Eastern neighbour, Papua New Guinea. New Guinea is a tropical island inhabited by Melanesian people, with almost 250 different tribes, each with its own language and culture and is the second most biologically diverse habitat in the world after Amazonia.

New Guinea has been inhabited for 40,000 years. The earliest inhabitants were probably migrants from the Indonesian archipelago arriving in several waves. Due to the island’s rugged terrain and high mountains, different population groups developed in virtual isolation. The first European contact was in the early 16th century , when the Portuguese explorer Jorge de Meneses visited the country he named Ilhas dos Papuas (Land of the Fuzzy-Haired People). The Spanish explorer de Retez saw similarities with his country's African colony of Guinea and called the island “Neuva Guinea”.

The Dutch arrived in 1828. They had been near neighbours for a long time before that date. The Dutch East Indies Company had gradually ousted the Portuguese from Java and the Spice Islands but considered New Guinea to be lacking in wealth. In 1824 they signed the Treaty of London to divvy up the Indies. The Dutch claimed Sumatra, Java, the Moluccas and Irian Jaya and the British took Malaya, Singapore and North Borneo. This treaty roughly defines the borders of modern Malaysia and Indonesia. The Dutch moved into New Guinea as later did the Germans and the British. They carved up the island between them. The German province called Kaiser-Wilhelmsland (the north eastern half of what is now PNG) was annexed to Australia as part of the Versailles settlement at the end of World War I. The island was a major battlefield in World War II and the Japanese were turned back on the Kokoda Track in the Owen Stanley ranges.

After the war, neighbouring Indonesia declared independence from the Netherlands claiming West Papua as part of its territory. They gained full independence in 1949 without Papua. The Dutch retained its colonial presence in West Papua and prepared to bring about its independence. Through the 1950s Indonesia persistently maintained their claim to Papua and when invited to present their claim to an International Court of Law declined, given the fact that they had no legal claim on any part of Greater New Guinea.

In 1962, the Americans brokered the New York Agreement between the Netherlands and Indonesia. This secret document was made without the consent of the peoples of Western New Guinea after the Indonesian invasion in 1961. At the insistence of the Dutch government, the document also included a guarantee that the Papuan people would be allowed an “Act of Free Choice”.

The effect of the agreement was to transfer authority for the territory from the Dutch to Indonesia. In 1962 President Kennedy wrote a secret letter to the Dutch prime minister De Quay exhorting them to reach an agreement with Indonesia and not to stick to their guns to allow the Papuans “the right to determine their future political status”. On October 1962, the Dutch handed over West Papua to a United Nations Temporary Executive Authority (UNTEA). In May 1963, Indonesia took control of the territory with the tacit support of the US.

Papua was formally annexed by Indonesia under the so-called Act of Free Choice in 1969. The Act of Free Choice was a controversial referendum to decide whether Papua would become a province of Indonesia or an independent nation. The Indonesian authorities arranged and conducted the referendum and they declared that the result was a unanimous vote against independence. A United Nations observer confirmed the result. It was a sham. While many prominent Papuan leaders were in prison, the Indonesian military hand-picked just over a thousand tribal leaders. These they indoctrinated under threats and military intimidation. The result was a 100% vote in favour of Indonesian rule. The Americans were happy with the result. Although they saw the flaws in the Act and understood Indonesia's intentions, U.S. officials were not interested in creating any problems for a Suharto regime they saw as non-aligned but pro-Washington.

Today, Indonesia shows no sign of loosening its grip on power. Unlike the ex-Portuguese colony of Timor Leste, West Papua’s problem is that it is rich in oil and mineral resources. The multinationals currently active there include Amoco, Phillips, Freeport, Esso, Texaco, Mobil, Shell, BHP and CRA (Australia). The extracted billions of dollars in gold, oil and other minerals all leave the country in the grasping maws of the corporations, the Indonesian military and the Javan elites. West Papuans are left with nothing except poverty in despoiled and polluted environments.

Areas within mining concessions have been dubiously designated as "earthquake zones", requiring the mass resettlement of Central Highlands tribes from their traditional homelands. As well as the land grab, Indonesia’s human rights record in Papua leaves a trail of acts of genocide. Violent military action and extrajudicial killings have claimed thousands of lives. There have been numerous massacres documented from the 1970s that include aerial bombardment, the use of napalm and chemical weapons. The most recent documented mass murder occurred in 2000 when 32 Papuans were killed in Wamena. The government has denied genocidal intent saying their actions are intended to repress separatist activity.

West Papuans are second class citizens in their own country, deprived of their rights and culture and excluded from the upper levels of government, business and education.

In 2000, then Indonesia president Abdurrahman Wahid agreed that the easternmost province would revert to its former name of West Papua but added an ominous rider "As for an independent Papua state ... I will not tolerate efforts to build a country within a country."

The Free West Papua movement have a plaintive and poignant message “"We have struggled for more than 40 years, and the world has ignored our cause."

Brisbane society turns 125

The Brisbane lodge of the Theosophical Society is 125 years old in 2006.

The Theosophical Society is a little-known worldwide religious body without a dogma.

The Brisbane lodge was founded in 1881 although the current Charter dates from 1895.

In 1875, the Russian mystic Helena Blavatsky founded the society in New York and eventually moved to India where she set up the world headquarters in Adyar, near Madras (now known as Chennai.)

Local Society member, Ron Sprott, said Brisbane was one of the oldest centres of theosophy in the world.

“Theosophy is a set of ideas which holds that every religion is a human attempt to understand the meaning of God and that means each religion has a portion of the truth,” Mr Sprott said.

According to the Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance (OCRT), theosophy is a religion containing elements of Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, the Egyptian Hermetic traditions, Neoplatonism, Kabbalism (Jewish mysticism), Rosicrucianism, Freemasonry and spiritualism.

Mr Sprott said there are over 700 active members in the Brisbane area but the society had no specific plans to celebrate the anniversary.

“We tend to celebrate the anniversary of the Charter not the lodge but our aim is to conduct meetings and special activities at least once every week,” he said.

The society and its library are based at Besant House, a historic building on Wickham Terrace which has an even longer history than the society.

Mr Sprott said it was built in 1864 and is the oldest surviving example of a Brisbane workers cottage.

“The theosophy society bought the building in 1926 and re-named it for Annie Besant,” he said.

Besant was an English women’s rights activist who took over the presidency of the society in the 1890s after the death of Blavatsky.

The Society library is open to the public six days a week.

The Rabbi Warren?

Yesterday, the Israeli shekel hit an 11-month high against the US dollar after Warren Buffett said he was buying a controlling stake in Israel’s Iscar Metalworking Companies for about $4bn.

Ehud Olmert, Israeli prime minister said of Buffett, “He is not Jewish, nor is he a Zionist. The Israeli economy is such that he believes in it and supports it.” Israel’s economy is on the rebound from the dotcom crash and the impact of the intifada and is expected to record gross domestic product growth of about 5 per cent this year.

Warren Buffett deserves to be better known than he is. Buffett is the second wealthiest man in the world with a fortune that Forbes magazine estimated at $44 billion in 2005. Only his friend Bill Gates has more money and he also has an infinitely higher profile. So who is Buffett and how come he so successfully avoids media glare?

Warren Edward Buffett is a 76 year old American businessman, investor and industrialist. He is an extraordinarily successful player of the world’s stock markets and has earned the nickname the Oracle of Omaha for his ability to unerringly spot trends ahead of the pack. His runs his business from Berkshire Hathaway a holding company that owns subsidiaries engaged in diverse activities, mainly in property, insurance and manufacturing. Buffett has a 40% stake in the company.

His father Howard was a stockbroker who later became a Republican congressman for Nebraska. Warren was a middle child, the only boy of three siblings. He showed an astonishing aptitude for money and business from an early age. He had a freakish ability to calculate columns of numbers unaided - a feat he still impresses business colleagues with today. At age 11, he bought his first shares. He made money on them but learnt the lesson in patience that he would have made vastly more money had he held on to them for longer. He attended business school where he complained he knew more than his teachers. His lifechanging experience came at Columbia University where he was taught by Ben Graham who is now acknowledged to be the “father of modern security analysis” (It never ceases to amaze Woolly Days how many things have fathers these days.) Graham’s 1934 book “Security Analysis” is considered the classic text on the stock market.

After graduating from Columbia, Warren and his family partners created Buffett Associates, Ltd. In 1956, he was managing around $300,000 in capital. In the next five years his partnerships made a 250% profit while the Dow Jones was up only 75% in the same period. By 1962 he was a millionaire with 90 limited partnerships across America. In 1969 he liquidated all his partnerships but kept Berkshire Holdings, a declining textile company, of which he made himself the chairman. Buffett diversified the company purchasing cheap insurance companies using them to buy equities. He chose managers to run the company that had excellent underwriting and cost cutting skills. Throughout the seventies and eighties his empire continued to grow. He lost one quarter of his paper value in the 1987 stock market crash. In 1988 he started investing in Coca-Cola. Within a few months, Berkshire owned 7% of the company, a billion dollars worth of stock. Within three years, Buffett's Coca-Cola stock would be worth more than the entire value of Berkshire when he made the investment. During the remainder of the 1990s, the stock catapulted as high as $80,000 per share. Buffett ignored the dotcom boom causing many to predict the demise of the Oracle. He was proved right when the technology bubble burst in 2000. Berkshire's stock recovered to its previous levels after falling to around $45,000 per share, and the man from Omaha was once again seen as an investment icon. A billion dollar profit on silver bought in 1997 didn’t hurt either.

Politically, Buffett is a liberal. He was involved in abortion rights issues in the sixties and worked to integrate Omaha's segregated country clubs. But he is no philanthropist, the Buffett Foundation dishes out a paltry $12 million a year, mostly to family-planning clinics. It has also helped to finance trials of the abortion pill RU-486. Buffett has said that 99% of his money will eventually go to his foundation. The vast bulk of this wealth is his personal holding in Berkshire Hathaway. Because this business consists of stock insurance companies, many state insurance regulators may have serious qualms about allowing for-profit insurance companies to be controlled by non-profit entities.

Buffett is still hard at work as his Israeli deal shows. But whether this deal fits into his usual risk averse scenarios is very difficult to see from here.

Iran joins the nuclear club

At the beginning of March 2006, Iran announced that it intends to activate a uranium conversion facility near Isfahan (under IAEA safeguards), a step that produces the uranium hexafluoride gas used in the enrichment process. The IAEA concluded that Iran introduced this gas into some centrifuges (used to enrich uranium) at a secret location to test the process. This is a violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, to which Iran is a signatory.

Iran first attempted to develop nuclear technology under the Shah in the 1950s as part of the “Atoms for peace” program. Eisenhower was the force behind this program which got its name from a 1953 speech he made to the UN. Under this program, large quantities of fissionable material was shifted from military to civilian stockpiles in the form of a ‘nuclear bank’.

The Americans supplied the Shah with a reactor fuelled with enriched uranium at the Gulf port of Bushehr. US support continued right up to the 1979 revolution. Afterwards Iran under the mullahs tried to go it alone but the program lapsed without US and European support. It stalled completely after reactors were damaged by Iraqi air attacks during the Iran-Iraq war. In 1995 Iran signed a contract with Russia to rebuild the Bushehr complex. A year later, the Chinese sold Iran a conversion plant and gas to enrich uranium despite US disapproval. When the ex-mayor of Tehran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was elected president, the program took on a new zeal and he resumed conversion of uranium which had been halted while the EU were investigating.

The stand-off tension increased in February this year when the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported Iran to the UN security council. In April, Ahmadinejad announced that Iran joined the group of those countries which have nuclear technology.

The U.S., U.K. and France proposed a resolution in the United Nations Security Council on May 3 demanding Iran cease uranium enrichment, and said they would seek sanctions should the government in Tehran fail to comply. The U.S. claims Iran plans to build a nuclear bomb, while Iran says its program is for generating electricity. Russia and China are currently opposed to the resolution.

Mohamed El-Baradei is Director General of the IAEA. The IAEA is a non-subsidiary body of the UN whose mandate is to “promote safe, secure and peaceful nuclear technologies.” The US government has accused El-Baradei of having a lenient approach in dealing with the Iranian nuclear program. He argues that his stance is more likely to keep Iran under the umbrella of the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty.

The Egyptian El-Baradei is serving his third term as director-general and won the Nobel peace prize with the IAEA in 2005. As well as his softly-softly approach on Iran, he incurred American wrath when he questioned US intelligence on Iraq prior to the invasion. The US opposed his third term and tapped the telephones in 2004 at his Vienna headquarters in search of ammunition to oust him. However he is well respected by the IAEA board and faces no likely challengers. The US failed in a bid to get the Australian foreign minister Alexander Downer to take the role in 2004!

So the question, if as is likely China and Russia veto a security resolution to impose sanctions on Iran, will the US or Israel mount a pre-emptive strike?

There are three facilities; Bushehr, Natanz and Arak, which are hundreds of kilometres away from each other. Israel destroyed an Iraqi nuclear facility in 1981 but this would represent a much bigger challenge at greater distance. And because so much of the program is home-grown, the industry could survive an attack on all three facilities. The Russians would also become involved as they have many people working on the Bushehr facility. Iran would also seek revenge for such an attack. They have missiles which could reach Israel or any of the many American targets now in the region. Iran would also be likely to work to destabilise Iraq further. The impact on oil prices is impossible to calculate but is hardly likely to be pretty.

It is difficult to see how an attack on the facilities would have anything other than devastating consequences for the region and the world. And yet given 25 years of animosity between US and Iran with both Bush and Ahmadinejad issuing fighting words, this situation is only likely to deteriorate further.

The White Australia Policy

The White Australia Policy was an Australia commonwealth law between 1901 and 1973. Though it has been off the books now for over thirty years it still has the ability to generate controversy. Keith Windschuttle, the leading player on the right in the Australian history wars debate, wrote what was a brilliant history called “The White Australia Policy” in 2004.

The problem is that this subject is so politicised, it is sometimes very difficult to see the history "would" from the history "truth". Windschuttle impressively presents his information with an avalanche of footnotes and a forest of references in a document that is never less than excellent scholarship.

But the Age critic Marilyn Lake gives the book an awful caning in her review. She says the book is a deeply political work, "combative in tone, often contemptuous of other people's work, passionate and polemical in argument”.

And she should know, being one of the victims of Windschuttle’s contempt in the book. Marilyn Lake is a historiographer at Melbourne’s La Trobe University and is the biographer of civil rights activist Faith Bandler. Bandler wrote a book called Wacvie in 1977 purporting to be the story of her father Wacvie Mussingkon, a Kanaka who was kidnapped into working on a Queensland sugar plantation. Bandler’s tale is about a form of slavery that existed in Australia in the late 19th century. The process was called by a poetic name ‘blackbirding’. In 1883 Wacvie was taken from his home of Ambrym, a volcanic island off the coast of what was then known as the New Hebrides and is now called Vanuatu. Enter into the story another historian Peter Corris. He complicates matters by describing Bandler’s story of her father’s kidnap as a fabrication. Wacvie may be about her father, but Bandler’s work was fiction. By 1880, the Ambrym trade with Queensland was legal and the islanders were making a lot of money from indentured labour. Corris’s exposure hurt Bandler. Bandler complained to Lake that she thought she was being patronised. Lake justifies Wacvie as a work of history because ‘stories about the past do not all speak the same language or follow the same rules’. But Keith Windschuttle’s sees it as ‘inventing facts to mislead her readers’.

As well as dispelling myths about blackbirders, Windschuttle is also applying a very different attribution to the White Australia Policy itself. The six Australian colonies that came together in 1901 are traditionally have said to have instigated the policy out of fear of invasion and the concern for the purity of the white race. The White Australia Policy of that year was the federal government’s first substantial legislation. Richard White described how 19th century Australians saw themselves as similar to the South African ‘uitlanders’, the white English who tried to bring order to the decaying Boer regime. They were the King’s men alright but brought a new zealous outback version of imperialism. Great Britain itself could not condone this action, they had a multi-racial empire to maintain. But the country they created as a dump for prisoners was now trying its damnest to be British in a part of the world where they were in a severe minority. Where Windschuttle disagrees with accepted wisdom on the policy is in understanding its cultural causes.

Charles Pearson’s "National Life and Character" was a hugely influential book in 1893. His book was a forecast to a time when the whites would be overrun by other races. It gave rise to the fear of the Yellow Peril. It gave Theodore Roosevelt the excuse to go on his wars of American expansion. Pearson was British but emigrated to Australia in 1871. He was a close friend and major influence on Alfred Deakin, Australia’s second prime minister and most influential post-commonwealth politician. Darwin’s name was dragged into the argument as a spurious re-reading of his theories led to Social Darwinism. Darwin’s scientific views were twisted into a social context by the Prussian academic Heinrich Von Treitschke. Though Von Treitschke was fervently anti-British some of his ideas on race translated well across the North Sea and thence to its white colonies.

Windschuttle rejects the notion that Social Darwinism, so admired by Hitler, was the cause of the Policy. Instead, he ascribes the major influence to the Scottish Enlightenment. Scotland was governed from Westminster since the Act of Union of 1707 and the Scots spent much of the 18th century wondering whether the country would “become prosperous like England, or would it descend into dependent pauperism like Ireland?” The enlightenment lasted roughly 50 years from about 1740. Scotland produced a stellar list of intellectuals in this era. It was led by David Hume, Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson. The Scottish view was based on observation of their own highlanders and it proposed that human society had developed in four stages: hunting, pastoral, agricultural and commercial. Each society was somewhere along this scale. The Scottish highlanders were believed not to have progressed beyond the pastoral stage.

Windschuttle argues persuasively that enlightenment views on civil society were what dominated Australian political thinking at the start of the 20th century. The reason it was accepted was that it was a racial theory that found acceptance with the established churches. Unlike Darwinism or its twisted sister Social Darwinism, it posed no conflicts to Christianity and aroused no opposition from the clergy.

All three Australian parties accepted the Policy although many individual politicians spoke against it. The labour groups were most in favour as it ensured that trade unions would not be undercut by imported scab workers. There was also a strong and genuine racist element who supported it. Edmund Barton, the first Australian Prime Minister made a speech during the Policy debate which oozed white supremacy.

But on the whole, Windschuttle is probably correct. The policy was more about realpolitik and cultural views not racist ones. That meant that when the time came to remove it, it was done gradually but without violent opposition at each step. The kind of violence that would undoubtably have occurred if it were racially motivated. All that remains now is a political consensus about the past.

Woollygathering on a Bribie beach

The newspaper flutters in the sandy breeze. Headlines of American threats. Who is next in line for a dose of the coalition of the wilting? Who wants a hearty dose of shock and awe? Muzzle the mullahs or gamble on Gaddafy? Whither Syria…who is to be thrown out with the Baath water?

It all seems like an alien nightmare on the clean warm beaches of Bribie. The girls muck around in the shadow of Moreton Island and the withered flesh of middle-aged women walking their manicured dogs. Cargo ship speed on in their passage to the Port of Brisbane while the towers of the fugitive coast beck in another direction.

“Keep off the dunes" is the ignored sign, boys and toys glide down the side, and hide and seek and trod on spiky grasses. Next to me is an empty can of Dulux trade semi Gloss enamel. It’s the “professionals Choice” and it is detritus of Sinead’s profiteering. White sandy paint drips from the sides like fossilised stalagmites. Inside are a cigarette butt and two unknown bush seeds.

The speedboat trundles around the buoy and the man with the boy takes off his white t-shirt and contemplates a dip in the water. The girls remind me of their presence, squealing and shouting further down the beach, their path from me stretched by the effect of the prevailing current.

A long and pretty girl breaks the spell of the sutured flesh and leaves the beach for the benefit of fogies. The surf rescue boat does a slow yellow and orange patrol along the shoreline. My girls stop their play to check out the craft and its orange tonsured occupants.

A nearby beach tent is turned into a noisy Persian bazaar complete with howling hounds, whinging tots and colourful holiday towels flapping in the breeze. I’d haggle with the occupants if I had any dinar. Eventually their dogs cease their yapping, worn out by the sun and the lack of attention.

I check the girls hidden by a dip in the sand but they are sitting pretty at the water’s edge. Girls and boys pass by, cosseted by their parents. A backpacking man walks past with his sandals under his arms. A couple with dog pass in the other direction. The two tented dogs look up briefly in mutual canine interest but they are all barked out. Only then do I see the “no dogs” sign at the entrance to the beach. It clearly doesn’t matter what officialdom thinks out here.

The fluttering paper reminds me of its presence. A random page opens up on the poultry and birds for sale section.

Here I have bargains for you. Day Old Meat, Chicken India Rednecks, proven breeder. Green cheek conure five months old and very friendly. 1 Female Indian Runner duck, Harlequin cross NOT FOR EATING. Major Mitchell mature male, four hand-raised cockatiels, budgie babies, red rump hens, fisher Latino blues, surgically sexed pair of blue quakers, white-faced cinnamon, eclectus parrot, tumbler pigeons, sussex roosters, Ancona, Belgian, Silky Whyndotte, Plymouth Rock and Wheaton bantams. Guaranteed pilkington stock, charolais calf one hundred and eighty dollars, long billed corella (white and pink). Quiet bird in a cage. Super tame rainbow lorikeet. Great companion. Cannot be held responsible for errors or subsequent effects.

No more time for ducks and drakes, I'm getting sunburned.

Shannon-Weaver model of communication

Claude Shannon (1916-2001) is considered one of the founding fathers of the communications age.

Shannon's 1937 master’s thesis on enabling electrical switches to do logic was the foundation of digital circuit design. He became a mathematical engineer and research scientist at the Bell Telephone Company. During the war he worked on fire-control systems and cryptography. In 1948 he worked on the problem of achieving maximum telephone line capacity with minimum distortion. As a result, he developed a mathematical theory of signal transmission which he published in the article "A Mathematical Theory of Communication".

The theory was intended purely for telephones. But when fellow American scientist Warren Weaver (1894-1978) applied Shannon's concept of information loss to interpersonal communication, an ingenuously effective model of communication was created.











The model expands on Harold Laswell’s theory of communication which states:
"Who (says) What (to) Whom (in) What Channel (with) What Effect"

The Shannon-Weaver model deconstructs communication into the following six elements:
1. a source
2. an encoder
3. a message
4. a channel
5. a decoder
6. a receiver
There are also three other factors: physical noise, semantic noise and feedback.

The source is the sender of the message; someone with a purpose of communication. The communicator wants to achieve some end: to show friendship, give information, ask for something, convince or simply share something. The communicator’s message is the code and the encoder turns a purpose into a something that can be delivered as a message. Human encoders include the human larynx, facial muscles, arm movements. Examples of non-human encoders are telephones, alphabets and modems.

The message is the centrepiece of communication. A simple definition of communication is “to consider it as the sending from one person to another of meaningful messages”. In a sense, the message is not an element but merely the combination of all the other elements. The key question is: is the message received the same as the message sent?

Shannon was unfussed about message meaning because it was irrelevant to his engineering problem. As a result the model does not deal effectively with issues such as assumptions, social context, or the impact of knowledge and memory. See the Berlo SMCR model for a more detailed look at these complexities.

The Channel is a path; it is the medium on which the message travels. Marshall McLuhan observed the path is all with his dictum "the medium is the message". In the model, this can be read as the journey being more important than the destination. This is borne out in the real world where communication companies such as News Corp, AOL Time Warner and Disney are among the world’s most powerful organisations.

The existence of physical noise is the problem that Shannon was trying to solve in the first place. But noise is not just an audible sensation. The roar of passing traffic, interference on a radio broadcast, poor TV reception and fog on glasses are all examples of physical noise. As is channel overload due to lack of bandwidth.

If Shannon’s engineering problem was physical noise, the biggest problem of human communication is the existence of semantic noise. Semantic noise occurs when there is a mismatch between the encoder and the decoder. Examples include distraction, inability to translate the message, incorrect emphasis, attitude to the sender and attitude to the message.

It is easy to see how being distracted is an impediment to communication. There may not be any physical noise, but for some reason the receiver is not paying attention. “You weren’t listening!” is a common complaint of message senders. The receiver was present but was distracted by something else.

If the message is not delivered in the lingua franca, then the receiver is not going to understand, regardless of distractions. And even if they are speaking the same language, the message may be missed if the wrong part of it is emphasised. People may remember a wonderfully inventive ad but not the product it was spruiking. A biased attitude to either the sender or the message is also likely to produce semantic noise. Consider the responses: "What would he know?" or "I don’t believe in that mumbo-jumbo!"

Assuming the message gets past all these noises, a decoder is needed to retranslate at the other end. It could be an answering machine, a TV screen, ears or a mobile phone. But it is more than equipment. There are endless cultural factors that also influence how the message is translated. Here is where assumptions made by the sender are tested.

The destination is the receiver. Without a receiver, there is no-one to communicate with.

But the destination is not the final step. The final step goes back to the start. The receiver provides feedback. This is the heartbeat of communication. Without it, communication is a very dull affair. Lack of feedback explains why most people are awkward talking to answering machines. Mathematician Norbert Wiener (who coined the word ‘cybernetics’) defined the feedback principle to mean “behaviour is tested with reference to its result and success or failure of this result influences the future behaviour”.

End of message. Any comments?

Galloway exposes the Fake Sheik!

The "Fake Sheik" is the nom de guerre of English undercover reporter Mazher Mahmood. Mahmood uses his swarthy Arabic appearance to effect his modus operandi: making fools of the rich and famous. Among his victims are Sven-Goren Eriksson, Princess Michael of Kent, and George Galloway. However, the latter would appear to have turned the scales on Mahmood.

His alter ego, the Fake Sheik, gains the trust of his victims by portraying himself as an oilrich Arab before getting them to commit indiscretions that are splashed as "scoops" on the front pages of the Rupert Murdoch-owned British Sunday tabloid, the News of the World.

In April 2006, Galloway said he had decided to expose Mahmood after the journalist tried to trick him into discreditable conduct. According to Galloway, "Mahmood sought to implicate me in what would be illegal political funding and sought my agreement to anti-Semitic views, including Holocaust denial."

Galloway responded by publishing pictures of Mahmood on his Respect Party website despite an unsuccessful an attempt by News International to prevent it.

Mahmood’s picture is also on the Wikipedia page named for him. The normally open source Wikipedia page on Mahmood is currently locked from updates due to a dispute among Wikipedians as to the veracity of the data about him on the site. One user complained about the photo of Mahmood on the talk page of the Mahmood entry claiming that “by publishing the photo, you are helping paedophiles and other nasty villains from being exposed by Mahmood.”

Controversy has always followed Mahmood. In November 2002 the News of the World printed a page one Mahmood story “Posh kidnap - we stop £5m ransom gang". It discussed an alleged plot to kidnap Victoria Beckham. The News of the World was on hand to photograph the arrest of the five suspects. However the court case against the suspects collapsed when the chief prosecution witness was revealed as an unreliable convicted criminal who was paid £10,000 for his story by the News of the World.

In 2005 Princess Michael of Kent revealed family secrets and used her royal connections to try to sell a property when Mahmood rolled up posing as a prospective Arab buyer. She also offered to do a lecture tour in Dubai on his behalf telling him: "It's a one-hour, one woman show, but I'm very good as you can imagine. I can write anything. I don't usually discuss fees. But it's £25,000 to speak. Is that not enough? Shall I do more? And expenses?"

She should have known better. She was not the first member of the Windsor clan to fall for a Mahmood “sting”. Princess Sophie, the Countess of Wessex, was another minor royal who fell victim to Mahmood’s fake sheikery. In 2001, the so-called "Sophie Tapes" had her making critical remarks about the government and using her royal status as a business tool to gain clients.

But probably the single most famous “sting” involved Sven-Goren Eriksson and cost him his £4 million pound a year job as England’s football manager. In January 2006 he was invited to Dubai to discuss a supposed football academy. There he was feted by Mahmood in full sheik regalia. Mahmood proposed a plan to him that his consortium were planning to take over Aston Villa football club and suggested Eriksson should become manager. Eriksson agreed saying he would be available after the World Cup (he is now!) to take on the job and intimated that England captain David Beckham might be persuaded to join him. He also made disparaging remarks about some of his other players, describing Rio Ferdinand as lazy, Michael Owen as only being with Newcastle for the money and blamed Wayne Rooney’s temper on his poor upbringing. The game was up for Sven after the News of the World revealed the hoax.

Very little is known about Mahmood himself. He was born in Birmingham to Pakistani parents. He was reputedly dismissed from the Sunday Times as a cub reporter 17 years ago for attempting to cover up a mistake in one of his reports. Despite this he was hired by the News of the World after a short stint in TV producton. The paper which has a circulation of four millions copies each week, boasts that Mahmood's investigations have led to over 120 criminal convictions.

About his disguise he said “The only reason I'm alive is because I'm Asian, because I can be a Pakistani market trader, a minicab driver - because of my colour. If I don't speak English properly, nobody would ever think that I'm a reporter."

If Arabs in the US are unfairly targeted as potential terrorist suspects, ones in England are more likely to be suspected of being journalists. Although the publication of his photo offers some respite to the wealthy, the famous, the royals and the child molesters.

New Home for Brisbane Inukshuk

A Canadian replica directional marker was recently dedicated in its new home in Victoria Park, in the suburb of Herston.

It is the third home in 18 years for the Brisbane monument which is known by its Inuit name of “inukshuk”.

The Canadian High Commissioner, Mr Michael Leir attended the re-dedication ceremony on Thursday, April 6, this year.

The monument weighs 19 tonnes and was created for the Canadian stand at Brisbane’s Expo 88 by indigenous artists of Nunavut, a territory in Arctic Canada.

In his re-dedication speech, Mr Leir said the inukshuk is easily one of Canada’s most recognizable symbols.

It is a traditional stone sculpture of the Inuit people of north-west Canada and inukshuk translates roughly into English as "likeness of person."

The Inuit used inukshuks to show directions to travellers, to warn of impending danger, to mark a place of respect, or to act as helpers in the hunting of caribou.

The sculpture was presented as a gift to Brisbane when Expo 88 concluded and it sat outside the entrance to the Queensland State Library for the next 15 years.

In 2004, extensions to the new State Library meant it needed to be moved again.

The new site is the pedestrian bridge on the Great Northern Greenway at Victoria Park, Herston.

Queensland Arts Minister Rod Welford said he was delighted a new home had been found for the important sculpture, which will now be enjoyed by more than 800 cyclists and pedestrians who pass the site each weekday.

According to a Canadian embassy media release, the High Commissioner Mr Leir said the inukshuk would become an important stop on the tourist trail for the 175,000 Canadians who travel to Australia each year.

The inukshuk appears on the flag of Nunavut and has also been chosen as the official symbol for the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics.

Oil for fools

The Australian academic Paul Chadwick wrote a book in 1988 called "FOI – How to use the Freedom of Information Laws". It's a handbook for journalists and interested citizens on how to get information out of heeldragging, suspicious bureaucrats and politicians. The law was drafted in the early 1980s by the Fraser Liberal government and passed by the Labor Hawke Government elected in 1983. There are several groups that don't have to comply with FOI, they include the usual suspects like the security organisations ASIO and ASIS. But there is also a less obvious group immune from prying eyes. This group is the "single desk" export bodies such as the Egg Board, the Dairy Corp, the Meat and Livestock Board and the Australian Wheat Board, now known more simply as the AWB.

The principle of “single desk” was, and still is, to prevent Australian primary producers from being played off against each other by large corporate customers. In AWB’s case those competitors were the US conglomerates Conagra and Cargill.

It was rather prescient that the Australian Wheat Board (AWB) be included on this list because they are now the subject of what is commonly called the Cole Inquiry (named for Terence Cole QC, an ex-appeal judge in the NSW Supreme Court). This inquiry is more properly known as the Inquiry into certain Australian companies in relation to the UN Iraqi Oil-For-Food Programme.

Previously a low profile organisation, the AWB made headlines in late 2005 when it was alleged that it had knowingly paid kickbacks to the Iraq Government, defrauding the UN and violating sanctions. The allegations were made by the Voelker report commissioned by the UN. Kofi Annan, the UN secretary-general asked Australia to investigate the allegations in a statement issued in October 2005.

The Australian government limited the terms of reference of the Cole inquiry to investigating the role of three Australian companies (AWB was the main player but there were supporting roles for the little known companies Alkaloids of Australia plc and Rhine Ruhr plc) in paying kickbacks to Saddam Hussein.

Saddam’s regime had been the subject of UN sanctions since the time of the 1991 Gulf War. The sanctions did not particularly hurt the government but they caused a humanitarian crisis. Clinton’s response was Oil for Food.

And so in December 1996 the UN allowed Iraq to begin selling limited amounts of oil for food and medicine. The program was escrow (a legal arrangement where an asset is delivered to a third party to be held in trust pending fulfilment of a contract.) The people that bought Iraqi oil put it in a BNP Paribas account. BNP is trusted by both sides because the major shareholder is Anglo-Iraqi business man Nadhmi Auchi. He didn’t do too badly either. The bank received more than $700 million in fees under the program. Auchi is listed as Britian’s 7th wealthiest man according to the Guardian and 10th richest according to Forbes. In 2003 he was jailed for two years for paying out bribes to expand his empire.

The oil for food program was ended shortly before the 2003 invasion of Iraq. However, it is alleged that, due to corruption on both sides, very little food and medicine was actually delivered to the Iraqi people. In the 2004 a US Subcommittee on investigations claimed that the Iraqi government paid $600,000 of kickbacks from the oil fund. They accused British maverick politician George Galloway as one of the recipients.

AWB became the single biggest seller of wheat to Iraq in the last years of Saddam's regime. Under UN Security Council Resolution 661, Australia was responsible for seeing that no cargo left its shores in breach of sanctions.

The Cole Inquiry held closed hearings in December 2005 and January 2006. Public hearings started in January. As each of the leading AWB executives were interviewed, they all produced a litany of excuses such as memory loss, inability to locate diaries and notes and loss of hearing (the latter being gun-toting ex-chairman Trevor Flugge’s problem.)

In February this year Cole added the activities of BHP Billiton into the terms of reference of the inquiry. The bribes were side payments made from falsely inflated contracts. The money was all coming out of the escrow account. The only problem was how to get the cash into Iraq undetected. The solution was a Jordanian company “Alia for Transportation and General Trade.” Alia was well connected in Iraqi political circles and had proved to be very well informed about key issues inside Baghdad during the last few years of the Saddam regime.

Under the oil-for-food program, no wheat could leave without a tick from the Department of Foreign Affairs, headed by minister Alexander Downer. Downer was called in to give evidence as to what he knew about the scandal.

Here are the unexpurgated statements he made to the Cole enquiry in precisely the order he made them:

"It could have been It may have been I don't specifically recall I can't precisely remember I don't recall I don't recall I couldn't rule out It is possible I don't know I'm not sure I have only a very distant recollection I don't recall I don't think I did I'm pretty sure I didn't make a note I don't recall I could have done I don't recall it….” and on and on it went for 80 different statements of forgetfulness. In fact his testimony has been set to music.

Downer doesn’t have too much to worry about. His boss John Howard, who was also interviewed by Cole (and also didn’t see any evidence of wrongdoing) made sure he set the terms of the inquiry so that AWB will take the rap not their political masters.

Which will probably happen when Cole hands down his findings in June. Australia’s wheat farmers will also suffer. They will see their Iraqi market share heading off into the eager hands of Conagra and Cargill.

Menzies and Horne

Robert Menzies wrote the Forgotten People in 1942. Donald Horne wrote the Lucky Country in 1964. In the intervening twenty years or so, much of the moral certainties that sustained the country in the early part of the century were blown away by a devastating world war. It was a war that lapped Australia’s shores and confirmed the United States as the dominant western power. The decades that followed saw the emergence of new Australian values. It became a stable, secular and wealthy society driven by conservative mores. The aim of this essay is to examine the factors that contributed to the versions of national identity on view in the Menzies and Horne documents. This essay will examine the similarities and differences in the documents and will show how Australian values changed in the decades between the writing of the documents.

The Second World War changed the world’s political landscape and Australia was not immune from the upheaval. The British Empire was permanently crippled. Curtin’s 1941 SOS call to America was answered at a great price. In the post war era “economic, cultural and military dependence on Britain was replaced by a similar dependence on America” (White 1981, p162.) Though Menzies remained a staunch supporter of empire, Horne wrote that Britain’s collapse had perplexed many Australians for whom it was “easier to feel self-important as an imperialist than as a nationalist." Horne was making the point that Australia should now look both harder at itself as well as its local neighbours to better understand the new geopolitical realities around it.

Menzies wrote his Forgotten People radio broadcast during the darkest hours of that war but his subject matter was about the post-war direction of Australian values. The values Menzies favoured were “self-help, independence, freedom, ‘lifters’ rather than ‘leaners’” (Murphy 2000, p137.) These values would be underpinned by Menzies’ motto which was “to strive, to seek, to find and not to yield.” Menzies was describing a spirit of independence, the prototype of what was to be become idealised in the post-war vision of the “Australian way of life.”

The centrepiece of this way of life would be the Australian home. Menzies imagined three types: “homes material, homes human, homes spiritual." The stone walls of the houses were of no use to Menzies unless populated by warm and loving families who combine “dependence upon God with independence of man.” Horne too saw the importance of home in creating a self-satisfied, stable society. But rather than as a result of spirituality, he put it down to the “strong materialistic streak in Australians.” Home ownership was “both a bulwark against communism and the site for happy domesticity” (Murphy 2000, p137.) Both Menzies and Horne construct an Australian identity that the idea of home was the central force in the creation of a stable and conservative nation. Australia embraced this by handing twenty-three years of power to Menzies’s Liberals.

The cultural homogeneity embodied in the idea of universal home ownership led to the embracing of the slogan “the Australian way of life”. Rather than something tangible, it was “a nationalist narrative that served to articulate the various aspirations, values and anxieties” (Tavan 1997, p82) in Australia. Horne recognised the materialistic aspect of these aspirations. Australia was “one of the first nations to find part of the meaning of life in the purchase of consumer goods.” It was an imitation of America which had the way of life which was the “most glamorous, the best publicised” (White 1981, p162.) Horne, who was an admirer of American values, saw this as a positive step. He constructs an image of the growing confidence and sophistication of Australia in the post-imperial world.

Outside this materialism lay a thin veneer of spirituality. Even in Menzies’s “home spiritual”, God had to share half of this domain with man’s independence. Menzies was sensibly Presbyterian enough not to foist his brand of religion on the people. And even though Anzac Day had its religious aspect, the new religion that most Australians shared was worship of the motor car. The Holden was the first locally built car. Essington Lewis, the wartime minister for munitions and visionary head of BHP, was given the honour of buying the first Holden (White 1981, p164). Homes were an anchor, but it was the growing road network and the cars it supported that gave Australians access to their own country. Motels, imitating the style of their American cousins, started to dot the landscape. Despite the lofty spirituality inherent in Menzies’ speech, it was Horne who best articulated what the Australians were most passionate about: a “pantheist love of outdoor activity.”

Menzies created the Liberal Party in 1944 from the ashes of the United Australia Party (Clark 1969, p255). With the rise of the Cold War, it found its ideological feet with a strenuous opposition to the "officialdom of organised masses." Communists controlled much of the union structure, the state Labor councils and the ACTU (Horne 1965, p.167.) Menzies tried twice to ban the Communist Party but failed both times in referendums. Despite this, the ALP was unable to seize the initiative. It was riven by internal struggles. Bob Santamaria and the Catholic wing broke away to form the anti-communist DLP. The ogre of communism cemented the left in opposition for a generation. Both Menzies and Horne espouse Western values and construct images of Australia which used the mythical way of life to support the conservative status quo.

Since the time of Federation, one of the pillars of that status quo was the White Australia Policy. Keith Windschuttle may well be correct in his assertion that the policy was influenced more by the cultural theories of the Scottish Enlightenment than the racist ones of Social Darwinism (Windschuttle 2004, pp 66-67.) However it was the discrediting of racist ideas after the war that led the policy to fall into disrepair. Immigrants fleeing from the “overt racism” (Murphy 2000, p155) of Nazism could warn Australians of the folly of a race based ethos. The definition of suitable Australians was broadened to include southern, eastern and central Europeans. Further dismantling occurred with the removal of the odious dictation test in 1958. Horne constructs a new idea of Australia, a “suburban nation” where the lifestyle is important, not the racial mix.

In summary, Menzies’s vision for Australia was only partially realised. He brilliantly articulates the community values of a self-help attitude underpinned by the power of the homestead. Alongside a strident anti-communism, it was to be the blueprint for Liberal Party success throughout the fifties and sixties. However, Horne could see other factors changing Australian identity: the decline of empire, the rise of American values, Australia’s growing materialism, the importance of the car and the impact of immigrants. Through the looking glass of these factors it is possible to see a modern Australia slowly emerging.

References
Clark, Manning 1969, A short history of Australia, Mentor, New York
Horne, Donald 1965, The lucky country, Penguin, Ringwood, Victoria
Murphy, John 2000, Imagining the Fifties: Private Sentiments and Political Culture in Australia, University of NSW Press, Sydney
Tavan, Gwenda 1997, "Good Neighbours" in The Forgotten Fifties: Aspects of Australian Society and Culture in the 1950s, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne
White, Richard 1981, Inventing Australia: Images and Identity 1688-1980, Unwin & Allen, Sydney
Windschuttle, Keith 2004, The white Australia policy, Macleay Press, Sydney

a history of Wicca

Wicca is both an ancient feminine earthly religion and also a newly-minted 20th century faith. Wicca is a neo-pagan religion which was reconstructed from beliefs, deities, symbols, practices and other elements of an ancient religion. Unlike Christianity it is not based on the value of the human word, but on the impact of the elements.

This is demonstrated by the words of a native American Indian Wiccan: "If you take the Christian Bible and put it out in the wind and the rain, soon the paper on which the words are printed will disintegrate and the words will be gone. Our bible IS the wind and the rain."

Wiccans believe in a dual deity structure: a Goddess and a God. Furthermore, the Goddess has three aspects of different ages: the Maiden for sexuality, the Mother for fertility and the Crone for wisdom. The Wiccan golden rule is the Rede, which states “Harm None, do what thou wilt”.

There are many who dispute this type of worship is a religion. Many people are frightened by the idea of Wicca and its more pejorative incarnation “witchcraft.” They judge it on moral grounds as an evil force. Why would a religion that on face value that is so respectful of the world be the object of great fear and dislike? The answer goes back many centuries.

Britain had anti-witchcraft acts on its books dating back to 1401. The Church was suspicious of supernatural and magical events that it did not control. Henry VIII, as part of his appropriation of the powers of the English Catholic Church, instituted the death penalty for witchcraft. Elizabeth I took matters further making it an offence against common law not ecclesiastical law. This gave officials a financial incentive to prosecute them. Witches would forfeit their lands to the Crown if they were convicted. The end result was an open season for witchhunts. The pursuit of witchcraft was exported to America with the Mayfair. The Pilgrim Fathers were also keen to keep their communities free from those found guilty of “invoking or conjuring an evil spirit."

Back in England witchhunting became associated with the Puritans and they were out of favour after the restoration of the throne under Charles II in 1660. The Puritans were out of power, but their laws remained quietly on the books. Witchcraft was still an offence at the end of World War Two. In 1941, Scottish psychic Helen Duncan was arrested after she passed on classified defence knowledge in a séance. Duncan told her audience that the British ship HMS Barham had been sunk by the Germans. That was true but the British had concealed this fact at the time to hoodwink the Germans. The Germans eventually found out and the British announced the loss in 1942. Two years later, the paranoid planners of D-Day used the Witchcraft Act to arrest Duncan out of fear she might reveal the landing plans. She was found guilty and imprisoned for nine months. She was the last person to be tried and convicted under the law. The act was repealed in 1951.

An eccentric British civil servant named Gerald Gardner was the first person to take advantage of the relaxed law. Gardner was also an amateur anthropologist, author and a student of the occult. In 1954 he published a tract called ‘Witchcraft Today’ where he produced the definitive texts for those who practiced ‘Wica’ or ‘the Craft'. Gardner documented the religious aspects of what was to become known as Wicca.

This book was based on the writings of Aleister Crowley, Doreen Valiente and others. Crowley was infamous in his own lifetime despite a stellar Renaissance Man career. He was a author, occultist, mountaineer, chess master, painter and critic. Crowley fused his studies of mysticism and Eastern religion into a system he called "Thelema". Doreen Valiente was a self-proclaimed witch who provided the feminist influence on Gardner’s philosophy. These two influenced the Wiccan Rede in Gardner’s book which said “do no harm to others and do what thou wilt”. The Rede is now the prayer that sums up Wiccan ethics.

Gardner had two other key influences from history. The first was the American folklorist Charles Leland. Leland travelled vastly in Europe and made a detailed study on gypsy lifestyle. He wrote a book in 1899 called “Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches”. Its first five chapters were about a mythical document called the Vangelo (which may or may not been a figment of Leland’s fiction.) The Vangelo, the origins of which Leland never revealed, outlined the practices of witchcraft.

The second influence was the British anthropologist and Egyptologist Margaret Murray. She was a fervent women’s rights campaigner and a veteran of many archaeological expeditions to Egypt. She took a break from this work to write “Witch cult in Western Europe” in 1921. In this she exaggerated the scale of the underground pagan resistance to Christianity that existed across the centuries. But she did alert the world to its existence.

Gardner’s tract is credited with the re-introduction of the word Wicca into English. The word itself is a multi-purpose Old English word which could mean wizard, soothsayer, sorcerer or magician. This old meaning of the word has affected public acceptance and the word Wicca retains a strong pejorative meaning. The pentacle is still not recognised by the US Department of Veterans Affairs as a religious symbol in military cemeteries. However Wiccans won a major victory in Virginia in 1985 with the ruling that it is a legal recognised religion and therefore afforded all the benefits accorded to religion by law.

Conservative Christian groups in the US, led by politicians such as Jesse Helms and Bob Barr are fighting to overrule this decision and see Wicca as analogous to Satanism. Wiccans reject this comparison as they also reject allegations of black magic. To them, Wicca is the opposite of everything its opponents fear. They say that Wicca is a very peaceful, harmonious and balanced way of thinking and life which promotes oneness with the divine and all which exists.

It has interesting parallels and overlaps with the Green movement. “As ye harm none, do what you wilt” could be a credo of either movement. As could the Gaia hypothesis. But it is not all sweetness and light in the garden of Wicca. There are arguments as to whether ‘hereditary witches’ are better than ‘book witches’. The question is how will the political glare and the environmental overlaps mutate the public face of Wicca in the coming years?