Radio Australia Today Editorial
Archive for January, 2010
J.D. Salinger. The death of a genius
29 January 2010
Jerome David Salinger, author of Catcher in the Rye, passed on yesterday at the age of 91.
Catcher in the Rye is an extraordinary book, one of the few where an adult author has successfully written from the perspective of a child. In fact I can think of only two other writers who have done so (David Ireland in Bloodfather and Sonya Hartnett in Of a Boy ).
Catcher in the Rye is a sometimes painful story of a young man walking the streets of New York sometime after the second world war. He is feeling disenfranchised, at a loose end, but also inquisitive. It is a masterstroke of Salinger that he doesn’t tell you the whole story. We know that the boy is supposed to be in school, but we don’t learn much about why he’s walking the streets. Instead we are on the streets with him, in a kind of sidewalk stream-of consciousness.
Some authors only write one great work in their life (such as Harper Lee and her To Kill a Mockingbird) and others will produce ridiculous amounts of masterworks (Charles Dickens, William Shakespeare). Salinger wrote Franny and Zooey which also was successful, but it was for Catcher in the Rye that he will be forever remembered, a book that took us all on a remarkable journey where the mind was more important than the geography.
A loss indeed.
- Phil Kafcaloudes
A boot on the head. A maritime PR disaster.
28 January 2010
I blogged earlier this week about the enquiry into the explosion on-board a boat carrying Afghan asylum seekers in Australian waters. The incident, if you remember, happened on the SIEV 36 which was being towed by an Australian naval vessel near Ashmore Reef in April.
The inquest was told that after the explosion sent dozens of asylum seekers and some Australian naval personnel into the ocean, and the navy was trying to rescue them, a member of the Australian Defence Force raised his foot and connected with the heads of two overboard asylum seekers to block them from getting onto a rescue boat.
The evidence was given by Corporal Sharon Jager, who was one of the naval personnel blown into the water. She told of struggling to get onto the rescue boat with Afghans also trying to scramble onto the boat. I’ll quote here: “[Able Seaman Adrian Medbury] has moved along and he has physically removed the two asylum seekers, saying ‘Get the f— off her, get the f— of her’ as he dragged me into the boat. I saw him raise one of his feet, connect with the asylum seekers, from what I saw it was the head.”
Sharon Jager suffers from that moment, having symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Even at the time of being rescued, she understood the inequality of having your life saved at the expense of others around her.
The inquest was told that the navy’s policy was to save naval staff first before rescuing others.
Kicking in the head probably doesn’t come into official regulations.
Mind you, we must remember that this all happened in a flash. The officer on the rescue boat may well have been thinking that Sharon Jager’s life was in peril, as it was. The evidence did seem to suggest that there was a lot of scrambling, and that the desperate asylum seekers, fearing for their lives, were grabbing onto anything they could. It is a reasonable assumption that poorer people from land-locked Afghanistan may not be able to swim in ocean waters. You can understand their panic they might have felt at that moment, and perhaps you can also understand the momentary reaction of a soldier seeing a comrade at risk of being drowned by those around her.
It’s still a terrible look for Australia, and I’m sure all the people involved wish it had never happened.
We must always remember though that in Australia we have a justice system which allows this kind of evidence to come out, even if it does tarnish our image overseas.
- Phil Kafcaloudes
SAAB saved, but what does it mean?
27 January 2010
A lot, at least to the people who work for SAAB, but for the motoring public this might be a ho hum.
The Swedish car maker has been dying a long slow death, especially after it was taken over by General Motors a few decades ago, which integrated the former prestige marque into its production line, meaning that we started seeing the hitherto distinctive cars being fitted with generic GM parts.
The public wasn’t buying it, and they didn’t buy the car. SAAB became unprofitable at some stage in the process, and GM’s hopes of having a broad portfolio of vehicles came crashing down along with its finances last year.
After months of negotiations, GM looks like it has offloaded SAAB. Just as well for the workers at SAAB, because the alternative to a sale was precisely nothing. SAAB would have been dead, a real shame for a company that pioneered the modern soft top and the widespread use of the turbo. The saviour here is Spyker, a small Dutch sportscar maker that agreed to buy SAAB from GM, in a deal that looked dead only a week ago. Obviously GM went back to Spyker with an improved offer that is believed to include some cash and a lot of deferred shares.
As one writer for wrire service Reuters put it today, it is a David and Goliath fit. Saab is a big interest with around 3,400 employees. Spyker only has 100.
It is an audacious move that will have Swedes all over the world cheering. But the question is, will people buy SAABs? If they don’t then no measure of deterred share transaction is going save this Humpty from falling off the wall.
- Phil Kafcaloudes
Australia Day and asylum seekers
26 January 2010
The first thing most us woke up to on this Australia Day was the news that the newly crowned Australian of the Year, Professor Patrick McGorry, has taken it up to the Australian prime minister about asylum seeker detention centres, calling them factories for mental illness.
His argument is that they house people who are, by and large, people who are fleeing persecution. Many fear (at best) reprisals, and at worst, death if returned to their homeland.
Professor McGorry says the absolutely wrong way to treat such people is to put them behind razor wire on isolated islands while their future is being decided by people they don’t know. Professor McGorry says Australia should put asylum seekers into the community as residents while their refugee claims are assessed. This is something not likely to happen in the current political climate, but it is a humane suggestion.
The humanity of our refugee policy certainly is in the Australian media this morning with the reports of the inquest into the explosion of an boat carrying 47 Afghan asylum seekers last April. Five asylum seekers died in the explosion, and many others were seriously burned.
The boat was being towed by a naval vessel to Christmas Island, when someone on-board lit a container of fuel, which exploded. The video shown to the inquest as graophic and quite disturning, showing the moment when the explosion happened.
Here is a Defence Force photo of the aftermath:
The inquest was told, by the Counsel Assisting the Inquest, that the navy made a few errors. It allowed the asylum seekers to keep their cigarette lighters and matches; it did not know that there was spare flammable liquid on-board the boat; and provocatively, had issued the asylum seekers with letters that insisted that they go back to Indonesia. According to the Counsel, it was that clause in this letter that stirred the emotions, and it was a clause that should never have been inserted, since the asylum seekers were in Australian waters anyway.
Whoever lit the fuel may still face charges, if they are discovered, but the final point of this story is that all the asylum seekers that survived the explosion were found to be genuine refugees. They were not ‘queue-jumpers’; they were not ‘economic refugees’. They were fleeing persecution.
This does bring home Professor McGorry’s claims about the mental stress that asylum seekers are under, and makes us question just how carefully such people should be treated. Respect is a good place to start.
- Phil Kafcaloudes
A new Australian flag?
25 January 2010
This one seems to come up with the regularity of an early morning magpie call.
If you’ve seen the Australian flag, you would understand why. It is a flag that devotes a corner and its background colour to its British origins.
Have a look:
Yes, without the stars, it would be the British Blue Ensign, a permanent reminder of the fact that this country was colonised by the British back in 1788.
This emblem has been a running sore for some Aborigines, who say that the current design makes no reference at all to the country’s traditional owners, people who lived on this land for up to 70,000 years before Captain Cook took on water at Botany Bay.
Over the last thirty years a new kind of nationalism has formed, a nationalism that has suggested that we are no longer British, but something of our own. In keeping with this, various competitions have been held by private groups to come up with a new flag.
There have been hundreds of alternatives offered over the years, many of them featuring boomerangs or leaping kangaroos. Few have been willing to completely bust tradition, so most ideas have included the five stars that are on the existing flag.
Fred Rieben’s design from 2004 has been one of the most popular recent alternatives:
Some have incorporated the more bolshie elements, like the Eureka flag (which originated after the Eureka Stockade of 1854, when gold prspectors rebelled against what they saw as an unjust government. They didn’t win the physical fight, but did win the battle, with the government changing its attitude and rules towards the miners).
A poll revealed on the weekend suggests that Australians are fairly happy to leave things as they are. So what do you think?
Do you want roos and rangs, our own version of the Candian Maple leaf?
Or is a country far more than an emblem, and as such, should Australia cut the last visual tie with Britain?
- Phil Kafcaloudes
