So I was riding my bike home from town the other day, along a quiet country backroad lined with huge karri trees, and I started to daydream, as I often do. Well, to be honest, not so much daydream, but fall into the type of imaginings I had as a child, when I used to love playing various daring roles with my sisters.
I was lucky enough to be raised in a very large family of (mostly) girls, with one long-suffering brother, and the best thing about this was that you never had to scratch around for someone to play with, or for something to do. We were all very avid readers as well, and having had both parents in the armed forces in WWII, quite a few of our games involved complicated escaping-the-Nazis-French-Resistance storylines, with ourselves cast in heroic roles-always the good guys. These adventures were always spiced up whenever we could convince our brother (generally as the bad guy) to join us, because he had awesome “cap guns”, you know, the ones that made a sharp cracking sound and puffed out a little bit of smoke when you pulled the trigger. You can probably still get them in Bali I imagine…
One of my favourite books that I read and re-read (even as an adult) was a Dutch novel called “The Winged Watchman” by Hilda Van Stockum. The story is told through the eyes of Joris Verhagen, a 10 year old boy who lives in a windmill with his parents, older brother Dirk Jan and baby sister Trixie, and it deals with their lives under Nazi occupation. In one scene, a young girl, Reina, who is working for the Dutch resistance, is cycling along with a satchel full of forbidden newspapers, when she is accosted by a Nazi collaborator, who demands that she get off her bike, then throws her onto the side of the road. Bicycles, at that time, were no longer available to ordinary people, and the thug is outraged when he sees Reina coolly ignoring the interdiction and deals with her accordingly. Although Reina lives to tell the tale, the frightening incident sets a super-suspenseful mood for the novel.
So, occasionally, when I am riding along freely, breathing sweet country air, listening to the sound of the birds and occasionally waving to an acquaintance, I get a scary thought about what it would be like to be in a situation like Reina. To be listening out for the sound of drones, or gunfire, or to be looking over my shoulder, and I feel, for the millionth time, how incredibly lucky I am to live in such a peaceful and safe place, and feel so sad for those many millions of faceless and nameless people who don’t.
They’re not all faceless though. I am in touch with a young Rohingya chap on Manus Island, who’s been there in a mouldy tent for nearly three years. For those of you who don’t know, the Rohingya are possibly the most persecuted group in the world. An ethnic minority in Burma for generations, the Rohingya are unable to be citizens of Burma. Ever. Even the peace-loving Buddhist monks there won’t have a bar of them, and the much celebrated freedom fighter Aung San Suu Kyi has turned her back on them, needing the support of the military establishment there to shore up her fragile fledgling democracy. And I guess I kind of get that, I mean, maybe the end does justify the means and God knows I have never had to be in the position to make huge decisions like that, and maybe it’s easy to criticise when I will never have those responsibilities. But I don’t know.
I do know that it makes me sad to reflect that it’s a lot harder these days, for me to think of Australia, this land that I love so much, as one of the good guys.
A poem I often think of when I am corresponding with a few of the young fellas on Manus and Nauru is John Donne’s No Man is an Island, but I think this short passage from the Winged Watchman sums it up pretty well. After liberation, Joris’ mother is speaking to a Jewish woman who was the sole surviving member of her family and says to her: “how you must hate the Germans!”
But Mrs Groen shook her head. “Oh no” she said. “I’m sorry for them. To suffer yourself, that is nothing. God will wipe all tears from our eyes. But to hear God ask: ‘Where is your brother?’-that must be dreadful. The hardest to bear are the wrongs we do others.”
Wishing all of our politicians the strength and courage to remember for whom the bell tolls. .
Gay Taylor 