Life can be a storm, boy
11th September, 2006
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So much death so close to home: The ABC-TV news the other night was a traffic jam of death notices. Steve Irwin. Colin Thiele. Peter Brock. Gone. On the heels of true Australian warrior Don Chipp. Oh, for the days of boring news reports of just politics, interest rates and bad weather.
Death seems to just sweep into town one day. And it stays a while. Not just of public figures. Even closer to home. Two women you know die, both of breast cancer. The lovely woman behind the counter at the fish shop, who could always tell you the fish to buy, firm and white, for fish pie, is gone - a heart attack at the clothesline in the backyard. A young man who swam in your lane at swim squad, dead in his 20s. You reel a little. Lick your dry lips. Say: "Well, I'll be blowed. That's enough now." Some of us shrug and become fatalistic: We're not here for a long time, we're here for a good time. For others, these deaths prompt a re-examining of something in our own lives. We vow to stop wasting our lives, to do something worthwhile or big with our lives. But John Lennon told us long ago: "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans." The deaths of these passionate public figures have been sad. The aftermath of these deaths has been interesting to observe. There is something parts of the media does, which I don't enjoy. We make saints of people after they die. They can be black or white but not grey, not flawed. Most people have good and bad and ugly. They did it to former Australian cricketer David Hookes, who died after a pub brawl in 2004. They hailed him a saint, when anyone who knew Hookes knew he was many things - a larrikin, talented batsman - but not a saint. The media does no one any favours in this pursuit. Sometimes in our rush to canonise someone, we prompt a backlash. This time Germaine Greer stepped up to the plate to offer an alternative view about crocodile hunter Irwin. She took some valid points and baited the hook with a rotting old carcass of hurtful abuse. Australia's commentators took it hook, line and sinker. They fluffed themselves up and called her a harpy and spiteful bag. Good grief, name-calling. Are we back in the school yard again? It was like some dreadful pantomime, with hissing and booing when Greer, the ever-predictable villain, appeared. Yet, I suspect, Irwin himself would not have given a rolling rat's arse what some radical feminist living in the mother country had to say about him. Let's all grow up. Last time I checked, we were still living in a democracy. In the great avalanche of newsprint and television specials about Irwin's death (tell me, please, that Naomi Robson didn't really dress up in a khaki get-up with a live lizard on her shoulder to host Today Tonight outside Australia Zoo? And they wonder why we mourn the departure of Jana from TV-land), there were several paragraphs in the negative. It's called freedom of speech. Greer, a radical thinker in her time and now a professional stirrer, whether you hate her or love her, has always had balls. She simply has no respect for anything she's supposed to. Yet she's entitled to her opinion. Just as the nutters on the Internet are entitled to posting Steve Irwin jokes about stingrays and crockpots. (Yes, already. Apparently it took just hours before the first appeared.) We may think they are puerile and sick and hurtful. We may most strongly disagree. But we cannot abandon the higher notion, based on the beliefs of French philosopher Voltaire: "I disapprove of what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it." The let's-kick-the-crap-out-of-Greer mentality worries me. Not for her. She's big enough and ugly enough (that's an Australian saying, not a personal attack) to look after herself. But Australia seems in danger of losing the absolutely vital ability to tolerate the "differing opinion". Differing opinions are good for us. They are oxygen for ideas. When we allow no differing opinions, when we cannot tolerate hearing anything but a certain line, it is like a mob of cattle moving through cattle yards down ever-decreasing chutes. The narrowing field of vision ultimately leads to all being loaded in a truck for the one-way trip to the abattoir. There are signs of this intolerance of differing opinions creeping in. When someone disagrees or criticises the popular line these days, they are howled down and deemed "unAustralian". Bloody hell, and there was me thinking that NOT being allowed to have a go at a sacred cow was unAustralian. Differing opinions were Don Chipp's bread and butter. The Australian Democrats founder, who died recently at 80, was a true political warrior who showed you can fight with dignity in a world of politics often lacking that particular trait. The last many of us saw of Chipp, or Brock and Irwin for that matter, was on Andrew Denton's ABC talk show Enough Rope. A journalist I know has dubbed Denton TV's grim reaper, citing other departed guests such as Renee Rivkin. But I think that's probably just her journalistic macabre sense of humour. Also buried recently was Colin Thiele. The author of 80 books including the much-loved Storm Boy, the story of a boy and a pelican called Mr Percival, changed several generations' thinking about the environment in a time in Australia when "greenie" really was a dirty word. This softly spoken, gentle former high school teacher actually radicalised people. He was before his time. The television news has ended and the current affairs have started on the September 11 terrorist attack anniversary. More death. I step out onto the balcony. The moon is white and covered in scars. Maybe we're all a little covered in scar tissue from a month like this. Death swoops down and grabs one of our own and doesn't even have the decency to leave us an instruction manual on how to cope. We can make no real sense of it - highly educated adults no more have answers than the smallest child. I go inside, pick up an old copy of Storm Boy. There, at the end, is Thiele's own take on death, after the beloved pelican dies. "And everything lives on in their hearts - the wind-talk and wave-talk, and the scribblings on the sand; the Coorong, the salt smell of the beach, the humpy and the long days of their happiness together. And always, above them, in their mind's eye, they can see the shape of two big wings in the storm clouds and the flying scud - the wings of white with trailing black edges - spread across the sky. For birds like Mr Percival do not really die." |
