Another Polish Tragedy

Reports of the crash of a Polish government aircraft and the loss of so many eminent Polish citizens have brought back memories of my youthful connection with this much abused nation.

For about five years in my early teens, my family lived next door to a Polish couple. They were refugees from internment, and Steve wore a tattooed "P" on his forearm. He never spoke of his wartime experiences, and whilst a tolerant and forgiving man, he had no time for anything German or Russian. I discovered this when I showed him my first car bought at age 18 when I was at Teachers' College. It was a 1956 Volkswagen Beetle. He took one look at it, spat in its general direction, and refused to have anything more to do with it.

They were devout Catholics, and we got to know them well through our local church. When my mother went back to full-time teaching, Mrs K (as we knew her) was employed to mind my youngest brother during school hours. They also had a pretty daughter about my age, but we never did get together. It was difficult for us to get any unchaperoned time, as Steve kept a very close eye on proceedings. I went off to study in Brisbane. She got a job locally, and finished up marrying an Anglican clergyman, which must have caused family ructions.

I had a mate at college who was going out with a nurse, and just before I embarked, he set me up on a blind date with his girlfriend's best pal who turned out also to be Polish. We hit it off, and when I arrived in Vietnam, I started writing to her. After three letters with no response, I gave up.

Years later, when we were both school principals in Toowoomba, he told me that her dad intercepted and burnt my letters, as he wanted her to marry someone of Polish heritage. She did, but it didn't last, and divorce followed, although apparently arranged marriages are generally more enduring statistically than the conventional kind.

There was a Polish bloke in my section in Vietnam. I got to know him fairly well, but we lost contact on RTA. In 1991, I was shocked to hear that he had been shot and killed by a Police Special Operations Group in a seige of his farmhouse in isolated rural Tasmania.
 
This incident was the subject of two formal inquiries that eventually found police justified in the way the seige ended, despite the less than ethical behaviour of some involved. The whole episode was tragic and avoidable.   

All of these memories flooded back when I read of this crash. There is a deep irony in the fact that the VIPs involved were on their way to a commemoration of the Katyn massacre in 1940 in which the Russians executed  over 20000 of Poland's best and brightest.

According to Wikipaedia, those who were killed in cold blood at Katyn included an admiral, two generals, 24 colonels, 79 lieutenant colonels, 258 majors, 654 captains, 17 naval captains, 3,420 NCOs, seven chaplains, three landowners, a prince, 43 officials, 85 privates, and 131 refugees. Also among the dead were 20 university professors, 300 physicians; several hundred lawyers, engineers, and teachers; and more than 100 writers and journalists as well as about 200 pilots.

Those aboard the doomed aircraft were on their way to a ceremony close to where the original atrocity occurred, and many military, political and institutional leaders (again the best and brightest) were lost.

History has come back to haunt Poland, a nation which has seen more than its fair share of tragedy in the last two centuries.

Australia - Asylum for Political Lunatics

This is the first time I've linked to a Catholic Newspaper, but The Catholic Leader today features the best article on refugee policy I've seen in a long time.

I don't know about anyone else, but I've had a gutful of shock jocks, drop-kick bloggers and tabloid newspapers stirring up fear and resentment of vulnerable and desperate people who have been dispossessed of every skerrick of security and live in fear of their lives. I'm also heartily sick of politicians, both Labor and Coalition, attempting to score brownie points for toughness by beating their chests about "border protection".

I saw enough of the disruption caused by war in Vietnam in 1970 to understand something of what these families are going through. Many years ago I looked into the eyes of some women and children who were in a restricted area near Binh Ba and saw the fear created by being confronted by men with weapons. I can only imagine how it would feel if my family were in a similar situation, and the lengths I would go to in an effort to keep them safe.

As a nation, we've grown so smug and complacent that many of us are more concerned about insignificant issues in the quality of our own lifestyles than about matters of life of death for others. Australian values are rapidly becoming as inward-looking as those of some of our more vapid friends across the Pacific.

The Leader article very clearly exposes the media and political race to the bottom that has characterised the issue in this country since John Howard's cynical exploitation of those on board the MV Tampa in 2001, by making the following points -

Only a quarter of unauthorised arrivals come by boat. The largest majority come by plane, and the majority of these are from mainland China.

There has actually been a reduction (12%) during 2008 - 2009 in the number of people held in detention centres.

Refugee centres for Hazaras, the largest Afghani group seeking asylum in Australia, are no longer available in Afghanistan. Those seeking safety in Quetta in Pakistan, long the traditional destination of Hazaras escaping the Taliban, are being snatched off the street by Iranian agents.

Australia is a signatory to international conventions recognising the right of people fleeing persecution and violence to seek refuge.

To quote the Leader article -

Brisbane archdiocese's Catholic Justice and Peace Commission made the call following a recent front-page story in The Sunday Mail that the commission's executive officer Peter Arndt said had the effect of "de-humanising asylum seekers and robbing them of their God-given dignity".

Mr Arndt appealed to Catholics to defend the right of people to seek asylum in Australia and to be treated as human beings - "not as demons to be feared or as objects to be used for political or commercial benefit".

"Both major (political) parties are trying to show that they are tough with boat arrivals and they are causing a lot of suffering and unfairness for people seeking asylum," he said.

And -

"There is a potent mix of sensationalised media reporting, political point scoring, xenophobia and resentment", Mr Ferguson wrote.

"The consequence is that the circumstances and need of people who are in desperate situations is forgotten.
"At worst, they are being demonised and portrayed as a threat to our way of life."
Mr Ferguson urged a different response than that taken by politicians.
"Imagine a nation encouraged to be proud that we are one of only a few in the region to have signed the UN Convention on the Status of Refugees," he said.

Mr Arndt called on Catholics to reject "the attempts by fear mongers in politics and the media to foster resentment towards our fellow human beings".

"As Christians, we see asylum seekers as our sisters and brothers," he said.

"It is our responsibility to defend their human dignity and to encourage our politicians and the community to treat them with compassion and fairness."

How right he is.

"sensationalised media reporting, political point scoring, xenophobia and resentment"

Yes - it's all there.

The lunatics are taking over the asylum

Macho Politics

So now amongst much chest-beating and agro posturing, the Rudd government has suspended processing of boat arrivals from Afghanistan and Sri Lanka.
 
The reason given is that these countries are now "safe".
 
This has to be the most blatant example of political opportunism witnessed in this country since the Tampa saga, and follows the grubby precedent set by the Howard government of employing the dog-whistle apparently hanging around the neck of Australian political leaders.


Any new Australian dictionary will need to have an alternative meaning for asylum seeker. Look under "political football" for clarification.
  
I have never doubted for a minute this national neurosis that lies just below the surface in this country. It runs in a rich vein through our history, from the anti-Chinese riots in the 1850s through the years of the White Australia Policy and most recently, the Cronulla riots. I had naively believed that this phenomenon had moved offshore with the unlamented Pauline Hanson.
No doubt it's good politics, although atrocious policy. The ethics of this behaviour obviously don't compute. It must be difficult for those caught on Christmas Island or in transit to understand how they're different from those already processed, especially those who arrived here during Howard's time.
 
What is even more cynical is the coalition describing it as the application of a wet lettuce. I guess they've run out of Macho metaphors.

Chapter Seven - Jellybeans in the Jungle

Next Episode - Jellybeans in the Jungle

Dust and Mud

Last week I worked the westernmost loop of my area.

This takes me from Roma west to Quilpie, across to Thargomindah and back to base via Cunnamulla and St George. It's about a 1500km round trip, and in good conditions, a bit boring but straightforward.

This time it was neither straightforward nor boring.

The South-West has just been through a once in twenty year weather event that to me felt like a monsoon. Now I know it sounds bizarre to call weather in this part of the world monsoonal, but it reminded me of the wet season in Vietnam, characterised by daily rain lasting from the afternoon into the early hours of the morning.

Once the big flood rains stopped in the south west, this is what was happening, so any water lying about was being topped up daily.

Our team was using two light duty 4WDs (a Mitsubishi Outlander and a Nissan X-Trail) and for the first time in a long time the 4wd was necessary.

I assiduously checked the road advice from the various Shire councils and from the police daily, but unfortunately it was often contradictory. The on-line stuff isn't worth a cracker, always at least 24 hours out-of-date. We were told the Quilpie-Thargo road was open, so after a pretty strenuous day's work at Quilpie we set out late in the afternoon to travel the 195km across. The first 130km is good (if narrow) bitumen, the rest is a mixture of graded gravel and poor gravel with bulldust and corrugations. We had negotiated almost all of this, and were about 30km short of Thargo (with a plume of dust following) when we came across water across the road for about 100 metres.

Now I was brought up in the bush, and understand what can happen if you plunge into muddy water without knowing both depth and firmness of the road surface, so I removed the RMs and waded across. This may have revealed the nature of the track, but it did little for my soft feet.

There were a few soft patches, so I marked them with branches I broke of and planted upright in the mud. Then I explained to the driver of the Nissan (an enthusiastic newly graduated Occupational Therapist who grew up in the city) to make sure she dodged them to avoid getting bogged. I drove the Mitsubishi through in 4wd with the diff lock engaged with no dramas. The OT, on the other hand, went off the track a bit and got into the boggy stuff, and for a second or two it looked like she was stuck. She didn't lose her nerve, and managed to make the other side with me frantically gesturing to straighten the wheels as she was losing momentum through the amount of lock she was applying to the fronts to steer away from the edges.

We continued, but about a kilometer up the road there was another submerged stretch about the same depth, but a bit longer than the first one. The OT asked if I could drive her car through this time as she was still a bit shaken after the first one, so I ended up taking both vehicles across. Thiis necessitated wading the second hole twice. I haven't yet worked out how to drive two vehicles at once.

Comparisons were inevitable, and I discovered that the Nissan is also a very capable machine in 4WD so long as you keep your foot down and take advantage of the diesel torque.

We arrived in Thargo late, muddied and forlorn. The cars looked like they had been on a Paris-Dakar run, covered in both dust and mud. When we got home on Friday night it took an hour and much loose change in the DIY carwash to get the Outlander back to a state which wouldn't arouse the ire of the fleet manager.

The OT has had an excellent bush adventure and learned a bit about bush driving. She did well.

And I've got bloody sore feet.

Resilience

This time last week my youngest daughter was the victim of a sexual assault. It was a Tuesday night at about 10pm.

It's taken me a week to get myself into a frame of mind that makes blogging about it possible. To make it worse, I was working 900kms west when it happened. She spent last weekend home and seems OK. I thought I knew her well, but she's surprised me by her toughness and pragmatism.

In one sense, she was lucky (and smart) to escape with little more than a manhandling, but she was briefly in fear of her life.

The offender chose an isolated corner of the railway station, and for a few long minutes and try as she might she couldn't get away from him. She is petite and this guy was big. Fortunately, the training she had at school kicked in, and when her train arrived she broke away, and went straight for people and light. He followed her into the train, and then she was petrified that he'd follow her off the train at its destination. She told one of the other passengers, a guy she didn't know, but who daily caught the same train, and he was generous enough to stay with her until she got from the station to her unit. The offender disappeared.

She then called the police and they came around pretty quickly.

They have a description, and he would have been seen on video surveillance, but as I write this, the police haven't found him. So he's still out there. It looks as if he was stalking her for a while, as he waited until she was away from other people to make his move. She works shifts in a coffee shop and always catches the same train to get home.

So now she is reviewing her security, and organising for friends to accompany her whenever possible at night. I'm looking for some kind of duress alarm.

What makes me angry beyond measure is that her confidence and self-assurance has been put in jeopardy by this creep. One good sign is that she seems angry and indignant rather than frightened. I share that anger, and so do her two big brothers.

It's to be hoped for his sake that we don't encounter him somewhere. Brisbane is a small town.

Update 09.04.10 -

Police phoned my daughter yesterday and told her they will be charging a bloke today. Let's hope he can't raise bail - he needs to be off the street.