From
under the linoleum
Old newspapers show Mussolini's imperialism looked a lot like today's
I sat on the floor and picked through the tragedy of the country we now
call Ethiopia laid out on the yellowing pages. It was eerily reminiscent
of the current Iraq adventure.
A
tale for our times
The December 1934 assassination of Sergei Kirov
Seventy years on, the killing of Sergei Kirov casts an eerie light on
the events of 11 September 2001, the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan,
the “war on Terror” and the state-sponsored hysteria surrounding
the shadowy figures of Osama bin Ladin and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
Ninety-three
years of bombing the Arabs
It was the Italians, hell-bent on acquiring an African empire, who got
the ball rolling. In 1911 the Libyan Arab tribes opposed an Italian invasion.
Their civilians were the first people in the world to be bombed from the
air.
Dispossessed
all over again
After spending nearly two months in the West Bank the pull towards my
village was growing stronger, especially after being detained twice and
threatened with deportation … an Australian Palestinian returns to
her ancestral home.
The
tragic inevitability of a forlorn hope
Australia
slides further into the Iraq quagmire
Cabinet documents recently released under the 50-year rule show that,
in 1954, Liberal (conservative) Prime Minister, Robert Menzies, and key
figures in his Cabinet were extremely gloomy about the prospects for success
in an American war against nationalists in Indochina. But eventually they
went to the Vietnam War anyway.
Bombing
King David
One man’s freedom fighter is another’s terrorist
Some historians date the beginning of modern terrorism from the 1946 bombing
by Zionist terrorists of the British military HQ in Jerusalem.
Don’t
loiter near the exit
Military debacle and economic decline haunt the Bush regime
When I was just a young possum in the school cadet corps there was a hoary
old war story that we all knew. It was almost certainly apocryphal, but
it ruefully expressed a nasty historic truth about the US role in the
demise of the British Empire.
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Brushtail Graphics
Fear in a time of drought
1 December 2002
I had idled my way through a dearth of paying work when suddenly I was rung by the cops. They were seriously overstretched. Would I like some contract surveillance work in the Great Terror Alert? Why not, I thought.
“How did the subjects come to your notice?”, I asked Inspector ‘Shag’ Pile when he called me in for a briefing.
The aircon wasn’t coping and sweat trickled out from under his cheap toupee.
“Alert neighbours. The subjects are Lebanese Muslims. Possibly a family. They live in an old Federation-style cottage and they’ve done it up in the approved Federation style”.
I waited for some evidence, but Pile just cast me a significant look and thrust a picture of a house under my nose. Nice little brick cottage tastefully trimmed in cream, brick red and Brunswick green with a new picket fence and rambling pink roses.
“You mean that’s it? You’re putting them under surveillance because they painted their home in heritage colours?”
“When did you ever see a bunch of Lebs do that?” Pile asked. “They always replace the original windows with aluminium frames and put in an extruded brick fence and a cheap wrought-iron gate. No, these people are trying to blend in, pass unnoticed.”
“To ‘integrate’, in a word?”
“Yep, that’s it. Spies and bombers always try to look like the people they’re moving amongst.”
“Oh come on, I’ll take your money if you want me to, but do you seriously believe these people are a threat?”
“Dunno, dunno, but the government has called on the citizenry to be alert,”
“Yeah, I know, the country needs more lerts. But now Howard’s changed his mind. Reckons we’re probably not a serious target after all. He’s flogged the media for exaggeration.”
“He had to say that. The tourism industry got to him. Anyway, he’ll change his tune soon enough. Now, we just need the surveillance report from you. We’ll do any other investigation.”
And so I found myself holed up in a police surveillance vehicle, a battered L300 van with mirror-finish windows in the back and “Wombat Geotechnical Services” emblazoned on the side. Outside it was a murderous 32 degrees. Inside it was worse. Far worse.
The little Federation cottage was at the junction of two streets, so I’d parked facing it, about 50 metres back, outside a nondescript 1950s bungalow. Everything about it spoke of genteel poverty. Its buffalo grass lawn was nearly dead, brutally trimmed and burned brown by the drought. The only concession to gardening, a badly pruned hydrangea, was on its last legs.
It’d been there a couple of hours when an ancient Anglo lady shuffled down the cracked concrete driveway of the bungalow holding a spray pack of weedkiller. She must have been ninety. She stopped on the pavement and inspected the van malevolently, then she peered down the street towards the Federation cottage. Was she, perhaps, the informant? Bent nearly double, she shuffled a few more steps and stopping where a tiny green shoot thrust its way through a crack in the concrete, she triumphantly sprayed the offending life-form and shuffled back inside.
I looked again at the Federation cottage. I had to admit, this wasn’t the sort of suburb where you saw lots of Muslims and not many Lebanese migrants were au fait with Federation colour schemes. Might there, perhaps, be an innocent explanation? I rang my old mate Graham at the National Trust, who knows everything about Federation houses and asked him about the address.
“Yeah, I know that cottage, That’s the Ayoub place, he’s an architect. Nice bloke. He’s a member of the Trust. Why the interest?”
No drama. I happened to be surveilling a place down the road and I was vaguely interested in investment properties I told him, and hung up.
I said nothing of this to Inspector Pile when I reported back the next day, after all, he’d told me I was just to do surveillance. Stay on the job, he said. I could see I was on a nice little earner which might last right to the next election.
