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    Quarterly Essay 5 Girt By Sea: Australia, the Refugees and the Politics of Fear
    Quarterly Essay 5 Girt By Sea: Australia, the Refugees and the Politics of Fear
    Quarterly Essay 5 Girt By Sea: Australia, the Refugees and the Politics of Fear
    Ebook159 pages2 hours

    Quarterly Essay 5 Girt By Sea: Australia, the Refugees and the Politics of Fear

    By Mungo MacCallum

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    In Girt By Sea Mungo MacCallum provides a devastating account of the Howard government's treatment of the refugees as well as delineating the factors in Australian history which have worked towards prejudice and those which have worked against it; ranging from Calwell's postwar immigration policy to the recent revelations of beat-ups and distortions in the 2001 election campaign.

    This is a powerful account of how the government played on what was ultimately the race issue. In an essay which is, by terms, witty, dry and bitingly understated, Mungo MacCallum asks what epithets are appropriate for a prime minister who has brought us to this pass. He also raises the question of whether Australia's contemporary treatment of refugees has anything in common with the sane and decent policies that have characterised the better moments in our history.

    ‘… it will take a long time to recover from the campaign of hate and fear which was deemed to be necessary to return the Howard government in the first year of the new millennium.’ —Mungo MacCallum, Girt By Sea

    ‘This most cold-eyed of one time Canberra chroniclers brings to this story all his wit and dryness and power of mind. It's a sad tale ... though it is everywhere enlivened by MacCallum's … tendency to suggest that spades really are bloody shovels at the end of the day.’ —Peter Craven

    ‘A document of immense power … MacCallum's essay will stand as a record of Australia's shame and depravity. It will haunt us. ’ —Julian Burnside, Australian Book Review

    ‘Mungo’s assertion that Howard is a man with no vision, only division, to his name and his recognition that Howard will never have the approval of those elites he so gratuitously desires, is a blistering strike at the Liberal man.’ —Geoff Parkes, Journal of Australian Studies

    Mungo MacCallum has long been one of Australia’s most influential and entertaining political journalists, in a career spanning more than four decades. Mungo has worked with the Australian, the Age, the Financial Review, Sydney Morning Herald and numerous magazines, as well as the ABC, SBS, Channel Nine and Channel Ten. His books include the bestselling Mungo: The Man Who Laughs, The Good, the Bad and the Unlikely: Australia's Prime Ministers and The Whitlam Mob.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBlack Inc. Books
    Release dateMar 1, 2002
    ISBN9781921825040
    Quarterly Essay 5 Girt By Sea: Australia, the Refugees and the Politics of Fear
    Author

    Mungo MacCallum

    Mungo MacCallum is the author of The Good, the Bad and the Unlikely: Australia's Prime Ministers. He has long been one of Australia’s most influential and entertaining political journalists, in a career spanning more than four decades.

    Read more from Mungo Mac Callum

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      Book preview

      Quarterly Essay 5 Girt By Sea - Mungo MacCallum

      Quarterly Essay

      Quarterly Essay is published four times a year by Black Inc., an imprint of Schwartz Publishing Pty Ltd

      Publisher: Morry Schwartz

      ISBN 1 86395 123 7

      Subscriptions (4 issues): $46.95 a year within Australia incl. GST (Institutional subs. $52.95). Outside Australia $74.95. Payment may be made by Mastercard,Visa or Bankcard, or by cheque made out to Schwartz Publishing. Payment includes postage and handling.

      Correspondence and subscriptions should be addressed to the Editor at:

      Black Inc.

      Level 5, 289 Flinders Lane

      Melbourne VIC 3000

      Australia

      Phone: 61 3 9654 2000

      Fax: 61 3 9654 2290

      Email: quarterlyessay@blackincbooks.com

      Editor: Peter Craven

      Management: Silvia Kwon

      Assistant Editor: Chris Feik

      Publishing Assistant: Sophy Williams

      Publicity: Meredith Kelly

      Design: Guy Mirabella

      Printer: Griffin Press

      CONTENTS

      Introduction Peter Craven

      GIRT BY SEA

      Australia, the Refugees and the Politics of Fear

      Mungo MacCallum

      RABBIT SYNDROME Correspondence

      Tony Abbott, Dennis Altman, Don Anderson, Jim Hammerton, Noel Hutchison, Peter Pierce, Don Watson

      Contributors

      Quarterly Essay aims to present significant contributions to political, intellectual and cultural debate. It is a magazine in extended pamphlet form and by publishing in each issue a single writer of at least 20,000 words we hope to mediate between the limitations of the newspaper column, where there is the danger that evidence and argument can be swallowed up by the form, and the kind of full-length study of a subject where the only readership is a necessarily specialised one. Quarterly Essay aims for the attention of the committed general reader. Although it is a periodical which wants subscribers, each number of the journal will be the length of a short book because we want our writers to have the opportunity to speak to the broadest possible audience without condescension or populist shortcuts. Quarterly Essay wants to get away from the tyranny that space limits impose in contemporary journalism and we will be giving our essayists the space to express the evidence for their views and those who disagree with them the chance to reply at whatever length is necessary. Quarterly Essay will not be confined to politics but it will be centrally concerned with it. We are not interested in occupying any particular point on the political map and we hope to bring our readership the widest range of political and cultural opinion which is compatible with truth-telling, style and command of the essay form.

      INTRODUCTION

      The intrinsic interest of Mungo MacCallum’s account of the so-called Refugee Crisis which dominated the last election (and the winding and woeful tale of the history behind it) scarcely needs defending. With the widespread concern about the conditions at the Woomera detention centre and then the revelations about how the children in the water story had been manipulated in the interests of the Coalition during the 2001 election, the question of the Refugees has once more become besetting even for people who supported the government’s stance (a group, alas, which included the Labor Party).

      Mungo MacCallum is hardly typecast as the chronicler of the story of what has gone right and wrong about the business of immigration, regular and irregular, to this country but this most larrikin and cold-eyed of one-time Canberra chroniclers brings to this story all his wit and dryness and power of mind.

      MacCallum was famous in his heyday for the way he could raise the depiction of the follies of Canberra to the level of literature. He could tell his readers that there were moments when Bill Hayden irresistibly brought to mind the fact that he had once been a Queensland cop and he could quote Auden, at the drop of a hat, to illuminate, by contrast, the fatuity of some rambling condemnation of communist tyranny which was not wrong, just very silly. He caught the human face of politics, in the days of Gorton and McMahon and Whitlam and Fraser, and he made it seem, through the medium of his imagination and the sharpness of his eye, like one of the most high and mighty farces on earth. No one who has ever read his account of how the Easter Island Fraser, a man of indomitable personal dignity, was upstaged and made a fool of by a motorbike freak (I think in Tasmania) could doubt the genius of this jester at the court of the kings of Dismissal. He did for Australian politics – from a vantage point that was at once insolent and engaged – what Gore Vidal did for the America of the Kennedys and Christopher Hitchens has done for the Britain of Thatcher and beyond.

      He wore his personal style like a scalpel but he remained terrific fun even as he was rehearsing a satire that gained its force from his sense of appal at the thing which was being mocked and the truth which politics was distorting. And if Mungo was a clown, he was a serious clown with a higher quotient of truth than most of his contemporaries could muster.

      Well, a clown (who is also a truth teller) has many faces, some of them grave indeed. In Girt by Sea he traces the path that led us to the Tampa and Howard’s declaration that only we would decide what feet touched our soil – a statement, as Mungo MacCallum says, echoic of One Nation for all its mock-Churchillian magniloquence.

      It’s a sad tale he tells, with a good deal of gravity and terseness though it is everywhere enlivened by MacCallum’s plain talk and his natural tendency to suggest that spades really are bloody shovels at the end of the day. But it is not, for all its latent vehemence, a pessimistic essay. MacCallum takes the dimmest possible view of what John Howard did when, as he says, he made his play for power against the odds, or rather when the Tampa sailing over the horizon provided him with the kind of opportunity he might have dreamt of. He suggests that the true parallel to John Howard is not Robert Menzies, the patriarch of the Australian Liberal Party, but the Little Digger who set Protestant against Catholic during the First World War and owed fealty to nothing but the prejudices he could bequeath and bestir.

      These are harsh insinuations (though they have their precedent in remarks made by Malcolm Fraser during the election campaign) though Mungo MacCallum also believes that John Howard was displaying the politics of conviction during the 2001 election (a view shared by John Birmingham). No one who reads the section of this Quarterly Essay called What Dare not Speak Its Name, with its invocation of the traditional figure of the quacking duck will be in any doubt about what Mungo MacCallum thinks of the Prime Minister’s stance on those who come from across the seas, but the charge he levels is not really a personal one.

      What he tries to do is place John Howard’s attitude to race (and the harshness of his government’s treatment of the Refugees) in the context of Australian history with its many splendours and miseries. He begins by suggesting that we are all – probably even the Aborigines – boat people and then goes on, with a characteristic sideways motion, to tell the story, humorous and hopeful, of how that old ruffian Sir Henry Parkes reacted to a boat load of French and Italians in the light of his anti-Catholic prejudice.

      It is all a far cry from the story of poor Shayan, the little boy driven out of his wits, the child repeatedly depersonalised by the minister for immigration, Phillip Ruddock, a child whose family’s privacy was abused on all sides.

      And it was not ever thus, even if there were ghastly tendencies. Mungo MacCallum provides his own laconic ode to Reffo Australia, the Australia of the ’40s and ’50s, when Arthur Calwell initiated a policy of allowing non-Anglo immigration into the country in a way that anticipated and made possible what was to come. It’s a genial picture MacCallum paints, though not a sentimental one, and he is also at pains to emphasise the Calwell who was sudden death on any suggestion of Asian immigration: two Wongs don’t make a White, as the famous quip has it. The prejudice extended to the spouses of white Australians, though Mungo MacCallum also emphasises that the Menzies Opposition in 1949 could teach Kim Beazley a trick or two.

      One of the striking things about the historical backdrop that Mungo MacCallum sketches in is that it was Malcolm Fraser’s government that welcomed the Vietnamese refugees. MacCallum sees the crunch as coming under Hawke, partly as an ironic consequence of apparent liberalism. The ferocity of the bureaucratic reaction to this began the long process of delegitimising the refugees and of treating them as de facto criminals. That process was completed under the Howard government when it further toughened up the detention centres in the direction of American-style punitiveness.

      And it has helped enormously in the war against harried strangers that Mr Ruddock has found effectively invalidating terms for them. Mungo MacCallum’s lack of what might be thought of as an automatic tone of moral superiority (of the bleeding heart variety) makes his response to these violations of language all the more impressive.

      And that is the note he strikes throughout his detailed exposition of the Tampa story and its aftermath. This is a remarkable story of innocence exploited and ruthless politics which Mungo MacCallum tells without adornment, with a dry joke here and a feint nudge there. The effect is more devastating than a whole theatre of handwringing because there is no thrill of moral fervour on the narrator’s part. This is Mungo MacCallum, the laconic chronicler of the ’60s and ’70s, discernibly a man from a happier and more civilised moment in our history, who saw much of that time as a delicious cavalcade of folly. But what he sees in the treatment of the refugees is nothing like that, it is flatly awful and his withering summary of it carries conviction.

      And so too with the characteristically terse description of the worst that could be said about the Prime Minister. Mungo MacCallum provides scarcely more in the way of lines of argument than a punter might in a pub but the effect has the devastating economy of a great cartoon that captures a likeness (not fairly but too well) as no photograph could. It is, in its way, a great humorist’s tribute to plain speaking, even as Mungo MacCallum can seem to throw his own charge away with his suggestion that it could be a canard.

      The delineation of Howard, as with the ghostly stick figures of Australian history, Arthur Calwell and Billy Hughes, Menzies and Whitlam, Fraser and Keating, is in no way vengeful. The narration is far too laconic for that, as if analysis could be there as an implication in the recounting, in the narration of what happens: how a man fidgets, what Harradine said. You just get the sense that sometimes history turns human beings into giants and sometimes it turns them into pygmies. You take your pick. Maybe it’s a matter of character or circumstance or inheritance, who knows? In any case it is clear that Mungo MacCallum thinks that we have ceased, in the eyes of those who seek a haven, to have any right to be considered a sophisticated and sane society with a sense of charity and mercy.

      Not that his conclusion is one of despair. Folly happens and it can be rectified. The mood of the people seems to have changed and maybe there’s the light of something saner – more like the tradition we have a right to cherish, the welcoming one – just down the road.

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