Australia – Mind Journeys

Abstract, but luminously beautiful

Noel Jeffs SSF, Walking in Stealth: after Pushkin,
Penrith NSW, Moshpit Publishing 2022

37 pages, paperback

$25 online

Reviewed by Ted Witham tssf

My first pass at reading Brother Noel Jeff’s second book of poetry, Walking in Stealth, left me bewildered. I could see the beautiful edifice of the poems, but I felt I was on the outside walking around looking for a way in. These are complex and mysterious poems. Many are in sonnet-like forms, with rhymes that surprise and an attention to musicality, both in the sounds of words and the overall effect of the poems. They are best appreciated read aloud.

Writing in the New Yorker about the 19^th Century symbolist French poet Stéphane Mallarmé, Alex Ross said, ‘After only a few lines of Mallarmé, you are engulfed in fine mist, and terror sets in.’ I had a similar sense of being put off balance by Noel Jeff’s 18 poems.

These poems ‘were [Noel’s] morning meditations as the sun rose over [his] right shoulder and dawned the day…’ The way into the poems, I am finding, is to stand in imagination next to the poet and look at the dawn with him. The different elements of the morning – the sky, especially, and ‘the grace of birds’, ‘the creating moon’ don’t exactly come into focus, but they float around in the beauty of the words creating an abstract painting.

As these images come into view, the concerns of the poet bubble to the surface of the words: awe before the opening sky, contrasts between the simple beauty of a ‘limpid lake’ and ‘spokes of noise’ (22), the constraints of the human body, the paradox of the beauty and the destructive power of the sun. (31) Physical desire is ‘Crotches burning’ which ‘spin this top in a world’ (30). There are no final answers, just abstract shapes, beautiful Rorschach blots. It’s probably no coincidence that Brother Noel trained as a psychotherapist.

A reader could hunt through these poems simply for arresting images: ‘my own ram’s horn to make a shawm’ (18) takes me straight to Psalms and the Jewish shofar. ‘try perfume lathering’ (13) mixes delight into the two senses of smell and touch.

I found hints of the Franciscan Dun Scotus’s theology of the ‘Word’. Each creature, Scotus taught, is a little ‘Word’ opening itself to the viewer and telling its story of the Creator. Each word in the poems likewise opens into a celebration of the Creator. Noel Jeff’s vocation as an Anglican Franciscan friar is at home in this Creation Theology.

Ultimately, however, Brother Noel’s delight is in words, their beauty and how the meaning of words shape-shifts.

It was said of Mallarmé that the challenge was not to translate his French poetry into English; what was needed was a translation into French! You could say the same for these poems; they would be impossible to translate into English! And yet, they deserve time, opening yourself as readers to the play of meaning, the gambol of musical words, and finding an ineffable effect on you, drawing you back into the words.

I know too little about Pushkin to understand the link with Pushkin, but Noel Jeff’s poems can be enjoyed without knowing the connections. The reader simply needs time to find a way in. They are beautiful on the inside as on the out.

Attractive snapshots of the Christian family: review of Greg Sheridan’s new book, Christians.

…an attractive portrayal of Christianity for those who do not share the faith

Greg Sheridan, Christians: The urgent case for Jesus in our world, Allen & Unwin, 2021.

From $26. Paperback.
Available from St John’s Books, Fremantle

Reviewed by Ted Witham

First published in Anglican Messenger, Perth, October 2021.

Greg Sheridan introduces his new book on the people of Christianity with his cheerful description of our faith:

‘On the inside, Christianity is full of feast days and family, full of fellowship, full of friendship. And everyone is welcome, surely never more so than at Christmas. It’s full of care for the sick and elderly, and for infants. It’s full of sport and play, hard work and rest. It’s full of good music and laughter, happy rituals and lots and lots of food (it’s very big on food). It is the principle of human solidarity. It’s the search for decency. It’s a conversation with each other and with God. As John Denver might have put it, in Christianity you routinely speak to God and rejoice at the casual reply.’ (Page 11)

Christians is Greg Sheridan’s second book in defence of Christianity. Sheridan writes of a large Christianity, catholic in the widest way. One of his principal arguments, first advanced in his 2018 God is Good for You, is that it is more reasonable to believe in God than not. The first book was mainly a rejoinder to the new atheists. In it, he took on writers like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens and showed how much bigger Christianity is than the caricature Dawkins and Hitchens attack.

In this second book, Sheridan tells stories: the stories of Jesus, Mary and the remarkable Paul. Stories of the faith of Scott Morrison, Alpha’s Nicky Gumbel and the Melbourne Anglican founder of Converge, Jenny George. He tells the story of China’s Christians, and the difference they may make to the future of China. In London, he compares the neighbouring churches of Holy Trinity Brompton (HTB) and the Brompton Oratory, where traditional and informal liturgies, high classical church music and Matt Redman’s Gospel songs are all quite different and all nourish believers.

Christians compresses Christianity to its simple heart. For a reader like me, Sheridan sometimes makes Christianity seem too simple. But his purpose is to provide an attractive portrayal of Christianity for those who do not share the faith. In that, Christians reminds me of C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity,and Christians is a more entertaining read than Lewis.

Greg Sheridan’ s writing is compelling and accessible. He works as foreign editor for the Australian newspaper. In Christians, he is open about his political stance (he describes himself as centre-right). In a throwaway line, he suggests that Christians are likely to be centre-right or centre-left in their politics. Extremes are likely to lack love.

Christians is endorsed by well-known journalists and by church leaders as diverse as Russell Evans from Planetshakers International, Peter Comensoli, Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne and Pastor Samuel Rodriguez, President of the US National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference.

It is a book that can be shared both with non-Christians and Christians alike. Those unfamiliar with our faith will find an attractive picture of how Christian faith is lived, and Christians will be encouraged that such a positive book will speak to such a challenging time.

Different ways of seeing

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/P/1925360849.01._SY200_SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

Bruce Pascoe, Young Dark Emu: A truer history, Broome WA: Magabala Books 2019.

Hardcover 80 pages.

$18 online

Reviewed by Ted Witham

As kids, my brother and I used to go through phases of collecting Aboriginal grindstones on our farm. These artefacts were ironstone. They weighed perhaps a kilogram and fitted into the palm of an adult hand. A smooth area had been sculpted out of the top. Our Dad told us to look for the other part of the machine, a smaller smooth stone. It was evident that seeds or berries were placed in the scooped-out area and the second stone used to grind.

There were two inferences we didn’t make as kids. The first was that there is no ironstone near Tambellup. The nearest deposits are in the Mid-West 800 kilometres north. The existence of the grindstones proved there was an active system of trade around the State.

The second inference was that the people who used this device must then have gone on to mix the milled seeds with water and cook them. In Young Dark Emu Bruce Pascoe comments that, if this happened 65,000 years ago, this is the earliest known invention of bread, pre-dating Ancient Egypt by an astonishing 13,000 years. (p. 16)

The basic thesis of Young Dark Emu is twofold: one is that pre-contact Aboriginal culture included sophisticated farming and settled village life, and two that the early ‘explorers’ saw these facts – huge fields under yam cultivation, well-constructed huts that could accommodate 40 people easily – and wrote about them in their journals. By the 1880s the settlers had both deliberately and inadvertently destroyed all this evidence. For example, the hard cloven feet of sheep compacted the soil so that it became too hard to plant yams or seeds.

Once physical evidence had disappeared, Europeans failed to take notice of the eye-witness accounts of ‘explorers’, and soon came to forget the scale of the civilisation they had supplanted.

Young Dark Emu is a version of Bruce Pascoe’s book for older readers, Dark Emu. Young Dark Emu would be suitable for children upwards of 10 years old. Both books are a plea to learn from the land use and fire regimes that Indigenous people developed over 80,000 years (or more) of occupation of this continent. They adapted their crops aquaculture and food storage to the soils and climate of this place.

Text Box: Brewarrina Fish traps - the oldest surviving human construction in the world – Image courtesy ABC — Brewarrina Fish Traps – the oldest surviving human construction in the world

The book takes its name from the Emu constellation. Traditional Aborigines named constellations not for the patterns made by bright stars, as Europeans did, but by the patterns in the dark spaces between them: a unique way of seeing.

Young Dark Emu invites readers to many levels of diverse ways of seeing. All Australians should read it or Dark Emu.

Sci-Fi Twist on Reconciliation

Terra cover Claire G. Coleman, Terra Nullius, Hachette Australia 2017
(304 pages)

$20 paper, $5 e-book

Reviewed by Ted Witham

Set in occupied Australia, Terra Nullius tells three inter-weaved stories: the first is a residential school for Natives run by Settler Nuns headed by a fearsome Mother Superior, Sister Bagra. In this school, Native children have been forcibly taken from their families and are given a basic education so that they will graduate to domestic service in Settler households.

The second story is the escape of Jacky from a similar place. Jacky is determined to find his birth family. He is told that they may be at the former town of Jerramungup, so proudly takes the name ‘Jacky Jerramungup’.

The third group of Natives live fearful lives in a series of squalid camps, always on the run and moving to a new location as the Settlers drive them into the desert. The only advantage of this is that the Settlers cannot live in the desert.

First-time novelist Claire Coleman, a West Australian Noongar, drops little hints that this is not the occupied Australia we know when the British Settlers occupied the land and treated the indigenous people with cruelty. About half-way through the book, she reveals that these Settlers come from a space-faring Empire, and these Natives are black and white survivors of their arrival.

The Settlers are nicknamed Toads by the Natives because they need moisture to survive. Because of the ever-present threat of Settler violence, the name ‘Toads’ is never used in their hearing.

The three main characters, Sister Bagra, Jacky and Esperance, the de facto leader of the ever-moving camp, are vividly drawn, as well as a big cast around them: Sergeant Rohan the indefatigable hunter of runaway Natives; Johnny Starr, the outlaw Settler whose little gang gathers up Jacky Jerramungup on their way to an eventual show-down with Settler power, and Father Grark the reluctant Inspector sent to Sister Bagra’s mission.

I liked Terra Nullius very much. An atmosphere of dread induced both by the Settlers and the difficulty of surviving in the desert pervades the book. The West Australian settings are familiar but changed. The characters are never reduced to caricatures: most Settlers genuinely believe that the Natives were not human; the Native characters are clear individuals.

The pacing is well-handled. Towards the end, I couldn’t put the book down I was so afraid for Jacky and Esperance, and with reason!

It is a didactic novel. I suspect that Australians sceptical of Aboriginal claims will not be convinced by its premise, and may even be annoyed by its ideas. However, it will appeal to people looking for reconciliation and deeper insights into our shared history, settler and native.

Poems A Head

Ivan Head, The Magpie Sermons: Poems 2005-2017, Sydney: St Paul’s College 2017.

Hardcover. Available for $35 from 48header@gmail.com

Reviewed by Ted Witham

This collection of nearly 50 poems is the second for Ivan Head. Dr Head is a West Australian priest, former director of AIT and Canon of St George’s Cathedral, who has spent the last 27 years as Warden first of Christ’s College in Hobart and then of St Paul’s College within the University of Sydney. He and his wife Christine are now moving into retirement in Sydney.

Many of the poems have been published in Quadrant (where Les Murray is the poetry editor), the West Australian and the Sydney Morning Herald. Their presence in those publications suggests their high quality.

Ivan is a poet who celebrates birds and flowers, trips by train and trips to London and the US. In some the words tumble just to celebrate language:

Montezuma met a Puma going to the fair
Said Montezuma to the Puma let me taste your ware.
Said the Puma
to Montezuma
No I prefer my fare rare and so he ate him then and there.

Many of the poems are complex with multiple levels of meanings. I enjoy recognising the double- or triple-meaning, but also knowing there may be more levels that I don’t get. In Swan River, Ivan reflects on boyhood memories of throwing a kylie, or thrusting a home-made gidgie towards a Cobbler. And then:

A boy knows that prawns rest beneath the sand by day.
It is like knowledge of the Pleiades.
Under the Narrows Bridge I stood for hours and left a line out all night just in case
Something big went past.

After the series of Noongar words and the reference to arcane knowing, the pleasure of ‘Something big’ might mean a fish to catch, or, it might mean deep knowledge of culture, Aboriginal and Western. And it might mean something even bigger.

An undercurrent of Christian faith and theology, which on occasion rises to the surface level of the poems, holds them in a strong web of meaning.

Ivan has a strong ear for the music of words, their sound and rhythm. All his poems are free-form and show the influence of modernist and Beat poetry.

I found real pleasure in their Australianness. The poems are about the plants and animals of Cookernup (near Bunbury), Perth and Sydney. They are about our childhoods in the 1950s. Even when the subject is not directly Australian, Ivan’s attitude is. He punctures pomposity. Here he reduces the English Reformation to Henry VIII’s armour.

…. And now he’s gone,
the ghost isn’t in the machine.
Just the carapace remains

And what the commentator
gawks at for the screen
is the gigantic iron cod-piece

With nothing in it.

The Magpie Sermons is printed on quality high-gloss paper and bound simply in a hardcover embossed with gold leaf.

Poetry lovers will enjoy reading, and re-reading, these poems of celebration, irony, contemplation and joy.

Psalm 96 for Australia

⁷Ascribe to the Lord, Australians and West Australians,

ascribe to the Lord glory and strength!

⁸Ascribe to the Lord the glory due his name;

bring an offering, and come into his breathtaking gorges!

⁹Worship the Lord in the splendour of holiness;

tremble before him, all Australia!

¹⁰ Say in W.A., “The Lord reigns!

Yes, the world is established; it shall never be moved;

he will judge the peoples with equity.”

¹¹ Let the Milky Way be glad, and let the South West rejoice;

let the Indian Ocean roar, and all that fills it;

¹² let the golden canola fields exult, and everything in them!

Then shall all the jarrah trees sing for joy

¹³ before the Lord, for he comes,

for he comes to judge our nation.

He will judge us Sandgropers in righteousness,

and all Australians in his faithfulness.

Based on the English Standard Version

http://www.esvbible.org/Psalm+96/

Taxing the church

I grow tired of the Atheist Foundation and others whingeing that the churches don’t pay tax. Their claim is false.For me it’s personal.

I received a salary from the church for 30 years. This salary was the major portion of parishioners’ donations to the church. I was very happy to pay tax out of this salary. At a quick calculation, I contributed between $150,000 and $200,000 to the nation’s tax revenue over those 30 years. The Australian Bureau of Statistics (God bless them) put the number of ministers of religion in Australia in 2001 as just over 12,000. If we count these as 6,000 full-time equivalent employees, then their contribution to Australia’s tax revenue over 30 years is between 9 and 12 billion dollars.

The churches do pay tax.

The Anglican Church, as a responsible employer, put aside part of my salary into superannuation. Our super fund started before the Super Guarantee, and enabled me later in my career to put additional savings into the fund. This means now in retirement I live partly off my super. Without super, I would be receiving a bigger pension. My super fund makes a contribution by saving the expenditure of tax.

The parishes where I worked have parish centres with rooms that community groups use, either for free or at much less than the commercial rate. While it is true that the parishes were partially exempt from rates, they made a contribution to the community through the sharing of their facilities – again saving the expenditure of rates and taxes. Many self-help groups, political clubs and community organisations could not meet if it were not for the churches.

The churches do save tax.

It’s true that the tax situation of the churches is complex; there may be some unfair exemptions for the churches; there are churches that rort the system. If our community were designing this from scratch they would almost certainly do it differently. But we can only live with our history.

From 1788 Australia has had a ‘love-hate’ relationship with religion. Many convicts and early settlers had good reason to dislike the church. On the other hand, most Australians in the 19th and 20th Century considered themselves believers. Australian Governments look to the churches to provide services that the churches can offer more cheaply and hopefully with more compassion than Government bureaucracy.

Section 116 in our Constitution does not declare Australia to be a secular nation. Rather it acknowledges the existence of both church and state and proclaims that they are to be kept distinct, but not necessarily for the church to be kept out of public life. The church’s contribution to our public life is different from the state’s.

And in the meantime, we can get our facts straight. The churches do pay tax, and they do save taxes.

Anzac re-visited

Stephen Daisley, Traitor, Melbourne: Text Publishing 2011, paperback 291 pages

from $AUD16 online

Reviewed by Ted Witham

Traitor is a sensitive exploration of the Anzac myth through the life of David Monroe, hero of Gallipoli and the trenches of France. While wounded, David takes it on himself to guard a young Turkish doctor, Mahmoud, who had been captured when the two of them were trying to save the life of an Australian boy. He forms a deep friendship with Mahmoud, who teaches him about Sufism and the poetry of Rumi. He decides to help Mahmoud escape to his home village, but they are betrayed by their Greek boatman. David is sentenced to death for desertion, but the war ends and he is pardoned.

David then returns to the quiet life of a shepherd in New Zealand, unable to ever make good in a society which never completely forgives him for his ‘treachery’.

Traitor is Daisley’s first novel, and was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Award in 2011. Daisley is a West Australian writer who delves deeply into the Australian psyche. I found myself coming back to the book again and again, unable to put it down. The story begins with David being questioned by intelligence officers, a scene with a Kafkaesque edge, and then unfolds as the past impinges on the present.

I was impressed by the lightness of touch in the story-telling: it is beautifully crafted, and the reader is rarely aware of the mechanics of the story. I felt I was in David’s world, and that the little things in his present really did touch off his memories. I felt I could taste the cold in the New Zealand air and smell the after-birth as he moved about the lambing flats, and I felt nauseated by his descriptions of death in the trenches, and genuinely moved by his love for Mahmoud and the woman he could never marry, Sarah.

I am looking forward to diving into Stephen Daisley’s second novel, Coming Rain.

Moral Leadership?

I am glad the Australian Government has finally agreed to take more refugees. But what a missed opportunity for moral leadership! The politicians were dragged to it by a community shouting our willingness to respond compassionately and sensibly to the crisis in the Middle East and Europe.

Country towns like Katanning and Albany offering to re-settle asylum seekers, and householders with spare bedrooms reaching out to integrate new people into the Australian community have put the Government to shame.

Instead of leading with compassion and with sensible plans for bringing people to this continent, the Government have played politics firstly with numbers – can we stretch to 10,000 or 20,000? – and secondly with cherry-picking those considered in greater need than others.

At this point in the crisis, both limiting numbers and having the luxury to choose between desperate people are irrelevant. Sure, we need to be practical: Australia cannot take 800,000 refugees in a year like Germany, but there is no danger of that happening. Any discrimination in favour of one group, whether it is Christians or Yazidi, will inevitably be perceived as discrimination against other groups. This morning Muslims are complaining, and rightly so, that yet again, our Government is treating Muslims as less than human.

As citizens, we should thank the Government for their willingness to consider increasing our humanitarian intake and encourage the Prime Minister to stretch his imagination to be as generous as possible. (https://www.pm.gov.au/contact-your-pm)

We should also encourage those who express generosity and offer practical help to them if we are able to provide it (Katanning Shire President: alan@katfurn.com ; Albany Mayor http://www.albany.wa.gov.au/?receiver=146&page=feedback ).

We should also look around the facilities that are ours with the same generous imagination. Is there anything we can do as individual families, churches or community groups to welcome refugees, and what action do we need to take to initiate that welcome?

Boat People

This morning I came face to face with an illegal immigrant, and I felt compelled to expostulate:

Rabbit kitten just was sittin
In the grass as I passed:
Ears were flappin, heart was tappin –
this the question that it asked:

‘Immigration made this nation.
Came in boats that scarcely float:
rabbit pest turned out best
at forcing owners to be donors.

‘These the dangers from the strangers
Stealing terra bloodbath terror,
seize the riches, spread diseases;
chalk it up as holy error.

So small rabbit, who inhabit
second-hand wide brown land?
Put the queries, hear the theories.
For shame who shake at all we take?’