For The Byron Echo, August, 2005

Bob Carr called me from London two weeks ago to praise to the skies the Henry IV Parts 1 and 2 starring Michael Gambon as Falstaff that he said I 'must see' and the Hedda Gabler which he called 'a revelation'. I therefore suspect that his was an RSC-led resignation born of his yearning, always thwarted, to spend his days in Sydney and his nights in London, brain-deep in 'the best theatre there is'.

Any thought that he is 'angling' for an ambassadorship or a Frank Lowy consultancy or a tardy tilt at the Lodge is addled and foolish. He is fifty-eight, with a bad back (from a fall while rock-climbing) and a need to get on with the list of Great Novels Gore Vidal gave him eight years ago, and his own voracious reading in US, Chinese and Russian history. His political professionalism in the face of these mountainous, quiet passions speaks for itself. He is already two years older than Lincoln ever got to be and, in Falstaff's words, 'we have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow' and old time is still a-flying.

History would have been different had I got him, as I long tried, to my chiropractor. He tiptoed, like John F. Kennedy, around ferocious crippling pain he wonderfully concealed for perhaps twenty years.

What Are We Afraid Of?

So now we shoot suspects six times in the head in freedom's name. How quickly it all goes. The right to remain silent. The right to a phonecall, a lawyer, a day in court. What, precisely, are we afraid of? Terrorism in Britain these last thirty years has killed fewer people than Dr Harold Shipton, and we are still not shooting tall, bearded doctors on sight. How can we be so careless of our safety? With roving gangs of soft-spoken euthanasists massing in every Outpatients, waving their hypodermics and planning our extermination, we must shoot first, pre-emptively, and not stand on the niceties. Vigilance is required, and six bullets in the head of an innocent backpacker now and then, to show these monsters we mean business.

The new tough laws will punish, we hear, anyone who praises the mad bombers or otherwise 'encourages the terrorists' or acts of terror. The authors of Shock and Awe, Donald Rumsfeld and Tommy Franks, must be trembling in their boots. This famed tumultuous midnight attack on sleeping defenceless civilians, killing perhaps five thousand children, was by its very name an act of terror -- spell it out, SHOCK AND AWE -- and George Bush, who threatened it and praised it and proved in due course to have no just cause for ordering it, must surely under these new provisions go to gaol if he visits Australia. Or am I missing something here? An invisible clause in the legislation, perhaps, that says 'excepting rich white politicians' or 'excepting attacks on civilians from helicopter gunships and B-52s'.

How much longer can this Bronze Age babble, this Chicken Little blithering, pass as policy? Jehovah's Witnesses who promise firestorms from heaven are encouraging, surely, the terrorist faction among the angel hosts. Southern Baptists who promise hellfire for sodomites are likewise promoting fear and awe and terror in the hearts of their enemies with talk of wholesale fiery slaughter. We still keep Mein Kamf on the shelves of suburban and country town libraries, but won't let a Muslim cleric say what he's supposed to say, that the values of the West are sinful, abominable, atrocious and stink in the nostrils of Allah, and will in due course be punished by the Almighty. Fred Nile says much the same thing, threatening the same fiery doom, and yet has been at large these forty years, bellowing ungagged, unshackled, his promise of terror and torment.

Please let begin to join the dots. 'Freedom of speech' means freedom of inconvenient, annoying, upsetting speech. It is why the civilised West -- or should I say the Former Civilised West? -- is better than other, more language-manacled societies. We are free to write in praise, unpunished, of Steve Vizard. Take that away, and we are barbarians too. Oops, it's gone already. Pity about that.