Airmail, page 10
My parents started to get calls in the middle of the night from someone complaining that our kangaroo was in their chook yard scaring the laying hens. My father would get out of bed in the cold and drive further and further distances to get you. Your reputation had spread far and wide.
On the way home, from the back seat of the car you would lean your head over my father’s shoulder, full of remorse. He stroked your head gently telling you it was okay, but he knew the day was coming when a decision had to be made. You had been desexed so you would never be accepted by the mob, and for any shooter you would be easy sport.
So my father built a large enclosure beside the garage and locked you in at sunset. You were bewildered when he did this, but my father was even more gutted when he saw the track you had worn around the fence line during the night.
The next time we returned from boarding school a day had already been set. In morbid silence we all packed into the station wagon, with you in the back. When we reached the mountains we had a picnic in a spot we loved and had so often done with you before. We tried to chat as usual. You had no idea what was in store for you.
We tried to coax you into the bush so you could feel your way around. But you stayed close as if you wanted to enjoy us all being home from school. Or maybe you had forgotten your desperate attempts to reach the land of your birth.
Eventually the light began to fade and we packed up. We took our turns to say goodbye and you started to lick your arms, like you always did when you were nervous or afraid. You had no mother. She had been road kill. You had been pulled alive from her pouch by my uncle who was a doctor on his way home one night.
As we drove away, I stared back into the growing dark of the forest with you all alone in it, frightened and confused, licking your arms furiously. I thought my heart would break.
Please can you forgive me, Willy? You were the best brother anyone could have had.
With love,
Robin
A sorry and thank you letter
Dear Nathaniel,
I am glad I ran into you today. Meeting your little daughter was a ‘blessing in the sky’.
It has been several years since we last saw each other, and as time went by I found myself thinking of you more often. Reminiscing about our times together was a bittersweet experience; our fun moments made me smile, and the fact that we were no longer together saddened me.
Happy and beautiful memories between us are abundant.
I will never forget the time we took your little nephew to the mountain to do some ‘target shooting’. I shot at a bottle, which hit a rock, then a small piece of the rock bounced in our direction and hit his ankle. When we took him home, he told his mom about the incident. I couldn’t forget the look on her face when she turned to me, the look of shock, worry and disapproval – all hidden behind a polite half-smile. But it wasn’t bad after all, because the following weekend he was out with us again . . .
I went to Vietnam to visit my family for two weeks, and when I came back, you gave me a notebook containing letters that you wrote to me every night before you went to bed. It was the sweetest gift I ever received. Every now and then I pull the notebook out, sometimes to read the letters, sometimes to just look at your sloppy handwriting.
I also miss your family. They were very loving and caring. I was so touched when your mom cooked chicken rice soup for me because I was sick and waited for you to come home from work so you could help her bring it to me. The image of her little figure arriving on your jeep made me feel so loved and welcomed. Your dad loved me just the same. The day I came to say goodbye, he said, ‘If you are not happy at the new place, call me and I will come to help you move back.’ I did not know what to say. I felt sad and guilty because I thought I was betraying the love that you and your family had given me.
After a few more exes, I became a little wiser and began to appreciate you even more; you had let me be me. Every time we went out to dinner, you knew that I don’t eat a lot but could never decide which dish I liked the most. You always let me order several dishes and instead of ordering your own meal you just happily helped me finish the food I had ordered.
We hardly ever disagreed, but when we did, you didn’t fight for the last word. You waited until we were calm, then pointed things out to me. Very often you were right; I was simply stubborn . . .
I agonised over these beautiful memories because I broke up with you and stopped us from having more wonderful moments together. I wrestled with myself for hurting you, hurting us. Missing you beat me up inside.
My last memory of you was one that I tried not to revisit but failed – the time when you asked me to move back and you proposed we marry. It was one of my hardest moments. I didn’t want to hurt you by saying ‘no’, but I couldn’t say ‘yes’, because I felt I was not ready for marriage. The following day, I couldn’t stop crying. Thinking of you driving 500 miles across the desert, all alone, full of anger and sadness, made me want to call and say, ‘Yes, I want to marry you.’
Even months after we broke up, whenever I saw our friends, especially my girlfriends, I always received the questions: ‘What happened?’ ‘Why did you break up with Nath?’ No one saw it coming because we looked like a perfect couple; we were always happy and almost always together, and my friends used to envy me. Those were difficult questions to answer. I did a lot of explaining, but none of it sounded right. The truth was that I didn’t even have the right answers for myself.
I spent many sleepless nights, tossing and turning with the ‘what ifs’ running through my mind. I also punished myself with the ‘I shouldn’t have’ self-lecture. To top it all, my parents often said, with a hint of disappointment, ‘Nath was such a nice man . . .’ They were right but not quite: you were not just a nice man; you were also funny, gentle, giving, adventurous, patient, and you loved me.
So, why it didn’t work out between us? I used to hate this why question until I came up with an answer that was such a cliché but worked perfectly for me. I still hate it, but it sounded all right: ‘He was the right person, but it was the wrong time.’ Brilliant! I had finally figured it out; we were right for each other, and if only you had come into my life at a different time, we would have been married and building a family together.
I no longer find it difficult to answer that question. Over time, I became quite comfortable with my explanations: I wasn’t ready to get married; I still had responsibilities for my family – they need me; I had just got out of college and I needed to get some work experience first, etc., etc.
Then I spent a long time analysing my answers and began to question myself: did I really know when I would be ready to get married? Who said I must be single to take on the responsibilities of my family? Who said I couldn’t still get work experience if we were married? Did I have to take the job and move 500 miles away from you?
I wonder how many people believed and accepted my explanations. Or did everyone see right through me and know that I was just pretending, to comfort myself? The sad truth was, it was too late when I realised that I had taken you and your love for granted.
Today, when I ran into you, I was happy, excited and nervous. It’s been so long . . .
You took me over to your car and introduced your little girl. She looks just like you. She took my breath away, especially when she smiled her whole-face smile. You have the same smile, which I adored. I used to tease you, saying that when you smile, your eyes close, and if you stopped smiling to open them, I might have disappeared . . .
I was happy for you. I tried so hard to hold back my tears, even though they were happy tears.
Somehow, meeting your daughter helped to put me out of my misery. I saw how happy you were, the way you took care of your baby and how proud you were as a father. I knew that it wasn’t meant for us to be together forever.
Nath,
I am sorry it did not work out for us.
I am sorry I hurt you.
Thank you for loving me the way you did.
Love,
Carina Hoang
Twenty years from now, a recent history of our country will be written. I will not write it, but I wish I could.
What it will say is uncertain. But there are some facts it should not overlook.
If I were to write it, I would remember that, once, I was proud of my country.
In 1948, Australia played a leading role in creating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We had a history of being a proud, decent, largely egalitarian country.
In 1998, something important and fundamental started to change.
Patrick was one of the two big stevedoring operations in Australia. They were caught out training an alternative, non-union workforce in Dubai and never offered a convincing explanation. Peter Reith tried to help them, but with friends like that . . .
Then in April, on the Tuesday before Good Friday, a bunch of goons stormed the docks and kicked out all the workers who were members of the union. They had attack dogs to give them an advantage, and large gents with balaclavas and no necks who put up chain-mesh fences to keep the unionists out.
At the same time as the docks were being stormed, Patrick took steps to sack the entire unionised workforce and put the company into administration.
It turned out that the company had moved all its assets sideways into a new company without telling anyone, and the government had secretly helped it implement the plan.
It was a shock to learn that a Coalition government would conspire to break its own laws in an attempt to break the union movement: it’s not how patrician blue-bloods are meant to behave. But the Coalition argued all the way to the High Court that it was okay. They lost.
Then things got worse.
Since the Russians had left Afghanistan, the Taliban had escalated their attacks on the Hazara minority. Millions of Hazara fled Afghanistan. A few thousand reached Australia.
In August 2001, the Palapa was carrying 438 Hazaras towards Australia.
It began to sink. Australia asked the Norwegian cargo ship the Tampa to rescue them. But when it tried to put them ashore at Christmas Island, Australia sent the SAS to take command of the Tampa at gunpoint.
John Howard said the people rescued by the Tampa would never set foot in Australia. He said any asylum seeker trying to get protection in Australia would be sent to Nauru: a tiny Pacific republic with a population of 10 000 people and an area of just 21 square kilometres.
A week later, September 11 happened. And the Coalition government headed into the 2001 election on the indecent idea that ‘we will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come.’ Coalition propaganda called asylum seekers ‘illegals’ and ‘queue-jumpers’ and said that asylum seekers had thrown their children into the sea.
The Labor party said nothing to contradict the lies. The Coalition, it seemed, had turned into a party which was prepared to lie to the electorate and gain popularity by mistreating the most helpless people in the world.
For the next few years the cruelty and dishonesty continued. Asylum seekers, innocent of any offence, were held in detention for years until they collapsed into hopelessness and despair.
A little girl, ten years old, held in detention in Melbourne, hung herself.
A little boy, eight years old, held in detention in South Australia, slashed his arms with razor wire.
A man who had been in detention for five years cut himself so often he had 10 metres of scarring on his body, but the Immigration Department insisted that the only treatment he needed was Panadol.
The Coalition government argued all the way to the High Court that a man who had not committed any offence and was not seen as a risk to anyone, who had been refused a visa but could not be removed from Australia because he was stateless, that this man could remain in detention for the rest of his life.
What was shocking was not only that the government won, but that a Coalition government was prepared to make the argument in the first place.
The Immigration Department held Cornelia Rau in detention for ten months, in wretched, degrading conditions. She was filmed being dragged naked and protesting from her cell in Baxter detention centre, being manhandled by a group of guards. Eventually, the department discovered that she had a visa and was entitled, all along, to be in Australia. It paid her a huge sum in compensation for the brutality and humiliation she had suffered.
We deported Vivian Alvarez Solon from Australia and dumped her in the Philippines. The department then realised that she was legally entitled to be in Australia, but it ignored that fact and did nothing to correct its mistake for the next two years.
We ignored the fact that David Hicks was being held and tortured in Guantanamo Bay by our allies the USA. The Americans told him that even if he was charged and found not guilty he would not be released from Guantanamo. We knew this. He was held without charge for five years and the Australian government did nothing to help him. The Howard government eventually interceded on his behalf when public opinion swung in his favour and Howard saw that there was an advantage to be had from helping him.
Then Kevin Rudd became leader of the Labor party and won government in late 2007. He promised a better, more humane policy concerning refugees. And he delivered it.
But then Tony Abbott became leader of the party which still called itself Coalition.
He restarted the anti-refugee rhetoric. Rudd responded by attacking people smugglers. He seemed to have forgotten that his moral hero, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, was a people smuggler.
For a couple more elections and a couple more fractured administrations, things kept sliding to the right.
The Pacific Solution, begun by Howard’s Coalition government, abolished by Rudd’s Labor government, was restarted by Julia Gillard’s Labor government.
Then in 2013 we had an awful election campaign in which Rudd and Abbott courted political support by promising cruelty to asylum seekers. If they had promised cruelty to animals, it would not have worked. It’s tempting to think that if Pauline Hanson had been asked to help Rudd, she might have been concerned that he was too far to the right for her taste.
The Coalition won the election. Australia lost.
The Labor party lost a lot of talent when half its front bench followed Gillard out the door.
The Coalition quickly showed their true colours when we learnt that senior members of the new government had been rorting their parliamentary expenses. That was no surprise; but it was interesting to see that the new attorney-general was involved. Haughty, supercilious, self-righteous George Brandis was at the trough with the best of them.
After all, wasn’t Brandis the one who had ferociously attacked Peter Slipper for visiting a winery and charging the taxi ride to the Commonwealth? Brandis went to a friend’s wedding and billed the Commonwealth. When he was found out, two years later, Brandis repaid the $1600 and said he had done nothing wrong.
Peter Slipper faced criminal charges for much less.
And Tony Abbott has billed the Commonwealth for every fun run and lycra-clad cycle-fest, not to mention his Tamworth photo opportunity, which apparently cost us about ten grand. Over the last couple of years he has had his hands in our pockets for about $3 million.
So here’s the problem.
We have a corrupt, hard-right-wing Coalition government led by self-seeking hypocrites.
We have a weakened, right-wing Labor opposition led by . . . well, we don’t know yet.
And we have a country, once great, now seen as selfish, greedy and cruel, and we have no genuine political leadership at all.
We are well into the process of redefining our country. Most of us have not noticed, because for most of us life is good.
The sight of the major parties competing to promise greater cruelty to boat people is new in Australian politics. We have never been perfect, but this is something without precedent.
It is painful to recognise that we are now a country which would brutalise one group with the intention that other people in distress will choose not to ask us for help.
But some of us remember how things once were; some of us see how things could be.
We will grieve until we find our way.
In twenty years, we may be embarrassed by these things, or we may have changed so much that no one cares any more.
Please, Recent History of Australia, when you are being written, remember these things. Please remember how it was.
Dear Pumice,
If it had been me, the first one to write you, to capture your sound, I would have written ‘poomice’. Because that is the sound you make inside my head. It is the sound of my father, because while all around us people were saying pumice, with a u, we said poomice, with two o’s.
You are not alone in this, poomice; there are other word sounds I wish I had written: fukary, om shanti santi om, apple, biduke, Lakshmi, Petrushka, habitacione, boodje, Argentina, sob bekheyr.
What is it with these sounds, poomice, and what is it in me that I now wish I had written them, and you?
When I was a boy in boarding school, poomice, you stayed at home. You were the family poomice. We used you to rub and scour the dry and cracked bits of our beings, mainly extremities – hands, feet, sometimes elbows.
When I set out for my first big sorry trip, to Papua and New Guinea in 1968, you were presented to me by Mother. You were the family poomice, the only poomice, yet she took you down from the shower cradle and handed you to me as though you were something special. I almost laughed: Mum, it’s only a lump of poomice.
When I came home I did not hand you back. I kept you. You stayed with me during my exciting retail adventure, the four long years running a supermarket in Manjimup, and working the family apple orchards in Bridgetown – small towns, home to the Bibbulmun people, side by side, in the vast smallness of south-west Australia. By now I had long realised your practical benefits, as you had helped me keep my heels well soft. A damn good rub in the shower, both foot and hand, was by now a necessity, due to my fondness for nude appendages and their propensity to dry and crack.
