AUSTRALIAN IDENTITY, MULTICULTURALISM AND THE REPUBLIC

My speech at the Groundswell Multicultural Arts Forum, the Carriageworks, Sydney, 14 April 2012 -  thanks to Cathy Vogan for filming it.

http://vimeo.com/40494558

THE ENDURING MYSTERY OF BOGLE AND CHANDLER

        

               

Doctor Gilbert Bogle and Mrs Margaret Chandler died in circumstances which have remained the topic of speculation and public fascination in Australia for more than four decades. The pair died in an apparent lovers’ tryst on a river bank in Sydney early on New Year’s Day 1963. 

The New Zealand-born Bogle was a scientist of international repute, a physicist working on lasers for the government research body, the CSIRO. He was a popular figure in scientific and intellectual circles in Sydney at the time. Not only was he highly successful in his work - he was about to take his wife and family to the United States, where he would be working at the prestigious Bell Telephone Laboratories - he exuded charisma, played the jazz clarinet, and had a reputation as a ladies man.

Margaret Chandler was the young wife of a CSIRO technician, Geoffrey Chandler. She met Bogle at a Christmas party in late December, and he ensured she and her husband were invited to a friends’ home for New Year’s Eve. Bogle offered Mrs Chandler a lift home, and they left the party together as dawn approached. They stopped off at a lovers haunt a few kilometres away, on the bank of the Lane Cove River, but little is known about what happened next. 

Their bodies were discovered a few hours later by two boys looking for lost golf balls from the adjoining course, and police rushed to the scene. Almost immediately the police and press realised they were dealing with something major, and very out of the ordinary. Not only was Bogle a well known figure in the more rarified echelons of Sydney society, but he had been found with a married woman, both of them in a state of partial undress suggesting sexual activity. Moreover, no obvious cause of the deaths could be found. They was no sign of any gunshot or stabbing: the bodies were virtually unmarked. Sydney and the entire nation were scandalised by the revelations. The inquest created enormous attention (and newspaper sales), yet at its conclusion the coroner was forced to bring in an open finding. A cast-iron alibi for Mrs Chandler’s husband - the prime suspect - removed him from  suspicion, and exhaustive testing failed to detect any toxic substances in either body. There the case rested, over time attaining the status of a mystery. 

What did come out during the decades after was that Bogle was doing work which might well have brought him to the attention of various spying agencies such as the CIA or the KGB. The laser he was working on developmentally in 1962 was in use in smart bombs in Vietnam by the end of the decade. There is also the possibility that Bogle was conducting his own inquiries into the death of his friend Cliff Dalton, head of the Australian Atomic Energy Commission, whose wife Catherine maintained he had been killed “without hardware”. 

There were suggestions too that Bogle might have been involved in the development of laser anti-satellite weaponry, although a veteran reporter, perhaps tellingly for the yellow press of the era, recently claimed that was concocted by newshounds keen to keep the story going. Whatever the case, there remains the suspicion in many quarters that there is more to the story than Sixties free love gone wrong, and that Doctor Bogle and Mrs Chandler may have been victims of Cold War intrigue. There is also an explanation, aired in a 2006 TV documentary, that the pair died from noxious hydrogen sulphide gas exuded by the river, but for some this raised as many questions as it answered. After all, if such lethal gas leaks were occurring from the river bed, why were Bogle and Chandler the only two ever known to be affected, in an area known as a lovers' lane? The case would seem yet to be closed.

From my book Dead Famous: Deaths of the Famous and Famous Deaths.

http://www.amazon.com/Dead-Famous-Deaths-Famus/dp/1741105641/ref=sr_1_15?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1277516386&sr=8-15

NUCLEAR UNDER TONES?

The day he defeated Malcolm Turnbull for the Federal Liberal leadership at the end of last year, Tony Abbott came out strongly for a debate on nuclear power for Australia.

In the following days he backslid, admitting it would be a long way off - and too far in the future to be part of any immediate response to human-caused global warming (not that he believes in it anyway). Besides the time lag to get nuclear power stations into service - usually estimated at around two decades - the other difficulty for the Nuclear Liberals is that Australians don’t want them, and certainly nowhere near where they live. 

Recently there have been numerous articles in the press putting the nuclear case, as part of an obvious attempt to get the nuclear push going again, as it was in the dying days of the Howard government.

Notable among these was a piece late last year (The Australian, 18 December 2009) by Ziggy Switkowski, the former Telstra boss who chaired the Howard Government’s review of uranium mining, processing and nuclear power in 2006.

Titled “A clean and green way to fuel the nation”, Dr Switkowski’s piece addresses a range of concerns of Australians about nuclear power.

In it he first addresses toxic waste, stating “A reactor providing electricity for one million people produces a volume of radioactive waste roughly the size of a family car a year. This is judged to be a small amount.” 

He does not tell us how toxic that family car of waste is, and what risks it would pose to people if they ever came into contact with it. Nor does he mention that radioactive materials in this waste take an extremely long time to break down, and would remain very toxic for literally thousands of years.

Dr Switkowski continues: “Eventually spent fuel is transported to a national repository, a well-engineered deep hole in the ground, probably in central Australia.” 

Here we have the price for nuclear power - turning an area of central Australia into a “deep hole in the ground” for highly toxic waste. 

Northern Territory lands are already under threat from Rudd Government plans to bury tonnes of radioactive waste accumulated over decades - but that would be nothing compared to the waste that would accrue from a commercial nuclear power programme.

One can only wonder how most people in indigenous communities would feel about yet another dose of radioactivity, another Maralinga on their tribal lands, courtesy white Australia. 

And what would Dr Switkowski have to say if and when toxic waste escapes and poisons the land and mutates generations of Aboriginal children? That’s right: Sorry.

Central Australia is not a blank, there for the grabbing and polluting. It is a part of our continent, precious to us all, but especially so to the peoples who have lived there for tens of thousands of years. If there is nothing whatever to fear from nuclear waste, perhaps Dr Switkowski should drill his big hole where the nuclear shareholders will be, in Paddington, or Toorak. Those living there need have nothing to fear, as the hole will be very well engineered, to world’s best practice.

A major omission in Dr Switkowski’s comments concerns what effects over thousands of years that leaking and leeching radioactive waste might have upon Australia’s precious subterranean aquifers. For a nation as reliant as we are on underground water, that represents a massive gamble to say the very least.

He next addresses the probable location of any nuclear power plants for Australia, noting “use of sea water [for cooling] is a practical option so reactors are frequently sited along a coast.”

Where would they be then, on our beautiful coast? Manly? Byron Bay? Portsea? No, they would go where industry has already left its mark - Port Kembla and Geelong, for instance. One can only imagine how the communities of Wollongong and Geelong would greet the nuclear spruikers coming to town with their Homer Simpson job offers: “Get a life - and a half-life too!”.

But Dr Switkowski is determined to meet community concerns about reactor placement head-on. 

“’Reactors in your back yard’ is an easy scare campaign but it's silly and insults the community's intelligence,” he said.

It’s also easy to dismiss legitimate concerns of communities with high-handed, patronising comments. As a wealthy former CEO, he is unlikely ever to have to have to expose himself and loved ones to the risk of living near a nuclear power plant. 

Communities have every right to weigh the costs and benefits, and potential risks to their families, of any planned development in their area, be it residential or industrial, a prison, a nuclear dump, or a nuclear power plant.

If Dr Switkowski has clear ideas of where such plants would go, as he seems to, let him publish them now. After all, if he thinks “scare campaigns” are merely silly, then he should be confident his profound common sense will prevail.

Dr Switkowski also considers the risks to any potential plant from terrorism, stating: “Nearly half of the capital cost of a reactor is spent on safety and security systems that are expected never to be stressed. A dirty bomb has yet to be activated. Terrorism is a serious issue but civilian nuclear establishments are very difficult targets with no known penetration.”

His difficulty here is that a single “penetration” would be enough to cause truly catastrophic consequences. Nuclear power stations would be prime terrorist targets, and with Australia having been a frontline participant in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, as recent terror cases have shown there are zealot nuts aplenty who wouldn’t blink about killing us in their pursuit of their own lofty goals or lack thereof. 

It’s one thing to shoot people or blow up a bridge, but another entirely to fly a light plane packed with explosives just a little way off course, and into a nuclear reactor. Does he propose to equip nuclear plants with anti-aircraft batteries, or to have the RAAF patrolling all of them 24 hours a day? We must remember too that the even the US Air Force failed to scramble fighters quickly enough against the September 11 hijackers to intercept them. So much for the security systems he expects “never to be stressed”.

Dr Switkowski also considers the cost of nuclear power, admitting: “Nuclear energy has the highest capital cost, up to $4 billion to 6bn for our first 1000MWe reactor”, but assures us that after that there would be “low running costs largely independent of the cost of uranium itself”. He does not say what the second, third, fourth and so on reactors would cost, but admits: “We must have bipartisan support for nuclear energy and a robust world-class regulatory system. No commercial enterprise will accept the financial risk otherwise.”

For “support”, read “subsidy”. In other words, the taxpayer will have to foot at least part of the bill for this enormously expensive scheme which would place nuclear reactors up and down our coastline, sites which would become prime and very dangerous terrorist targets, and which would generate waste which would remain highly toxic for thousands of years, and which we would dump in a big hole in the ground on or near tribal Aboriginal lands, and pollute the last water we could rely upon in the droughts to come. And that is not to mention the danger of increased nuclear proliferation.

So all in all, it’s obviously a very attractive idea, this “clean and green” nuclear energy.

- Larry Buttrose

Part Two of this article will be posted next week, examining the solar alternative to nuclear.

BIG BROTHER KEV AND HIS BIG FAT CYBER WHITE ELEPHANT

by Larry Buttrose

     

Some months ago I saw a rack of Penguin classics in my local post office, and noticed Lady Chatterly’s Lover among the titles. I couldn’t help but smile at remembering the controversy it aroused and the censorship it suffered in decades long past. Now here it was, on sale in the post office, a sure sign of human progress and maturity.

Just a few days after that I read that the book was being withdrawn from post offices. It seems that even in the new millennium, Lady Chatterly was adjudged too risqué for people licking their stamps. 

It made me wonder whether other books might not disappear from post office shelves, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four for instance. After all, despite it being a mordant denunciation of totalitarianism, it does have a sex scene or two. Would that be considered too much for the stamp-lickers, and disappear just as it would have in Orwell’s dystopia?

All of the old battles of censorship are now being revisited through the Rudd Government’s ill-conceived, bizarre and bloody-minded determination to go ahead with its internet “filter”. “Filter” is Newspeak for censorship. What Kevin Rudd and Stephen Conroy intend to do is censor the content of the world wide web, the greatest tool for disseminating knowledge and free expression the world has ever seen. Why they would indulge in such a monstrous folly, and who they intend to impress by their cyber vandalism, remains debatable.

The arguments advanced are truly pathetic. Firstly, we are told that the targets are child pornography and home bomb making instructions for potential terrorists. But if by any chance such sites were effectively blocked, those wanting to access such information and images could readily do so by sharing files with similarly twisted minds. After all, both paedophiles and terrorists are definitive networkers. So to stop them sharing information, the government would have to view and censor all email too. No doubt Stephen Conroy has already thought of this.

Then there is the question of who would be the gatekeepers of information, and decide which sites we could or could not see. Cardinal Pell might be invited to sit on the committee. The Roman Catholic Church does after all have a long history of involvement with sexual crimes against children. The Anglicans have similar form too, and could dispatch their own eminence grise. 

A posse of academics would inevitably be involved. They could frame their reasons for banning this or that site in suitably incomprehensible postmodernist jargon, adding that ideal extra layer of opacity to the process. Upstanding churchgoers from the business community could be invited - oil or coal company executives perhaps, or someone from the board of James Hardie - or politicians themselves, definitive paragons of virtue, being honourable members. 

The image of such an august gathering of high and holy minds viewing endless hours of pornographic images and videos to determine which crosses whatever line may be drawn, is a delicate one indeed. Why not just get Steve Fielding and Hillsong Church to tell us what we may see online? That, effectively, is that Kevin Rudd is doing. 

The question remains too about whether any such “filter” could be effective in a world where hackers can get into the Pentagon and destructive viruses are created daily by teenagers bored with Grand Theft Auto. It would become an online security nightmare, a never-ending battle with phantom legions seeking to disable and destroy it. It would present hackers with a digital just war, a fight for free speech, a fat white elephant forever dangling in their laser sights in cyberspace.

All this begs the question of what the Rudd Government is doing throwing in its lot with the Fieldings and Niles, and turning its back on key constituencies of its win in 2007 - the young, and the educated. These are two sections of the community that are heavily reliant on a fast, open internet. How will they feel about Rudd slowing access and tying their web in knots while he appeals to pre-digital grannies for having made life harder for those terrorists who don’t even know how to make bombs.

The greatest threat is what might happen in the future. Once set up, and in the hands of an even more conservative government - say, for argument’s sake, Tony Abbott’s - what other sites might come onto the radar for censorship? How about those advising women on abortion or contraception, or the terminally sick on euthanasia? How about global warming, or stem cell research? Perhaps some future government might see fit to block those sites disseminating the dangerous fable of evolution, or that the earth is really round.

Perhaps too they would stop us reading Lady Chatterly’s Lover, by blocking sites like the Gutenberg Project which post the whole text (http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100181.txt) or the politically inflammatory and sexually titillating Nineteen Eighty-Four. Who after all needs to read George Orwell in the perfect Big Brother world of Rudd and Conroy?

The government’s proposed web censorship will appeal only to the god-bothering, the paranoid and the technophobic. Is this the constituency Kevin Rudd really wishes to swap, for the young and the educated? Censorship is and never will be a cure for perceived failings and dangers in others, but instead is an affliction of the mind suffered by the pompous and the self-righteous, and bloody-minded fools. 

NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTION - GET RID OF OUR STATES!!

My New Year’s resolution is to get rid of the states. Not only are their governments all but useless, but they have such pathetic names too. Western Australia and South Australia are little more than mud-map directions to get there. Queensland and Victoria - in effect the same name for two of our most populous states. What, couldn’t we think of another one?

As for New South Wales, it’s confusing. Did Cook mean “New southern Wales” or the “New Wales in the South”? Who cares anyway - either way it smacks of Postman Pat and Cardiff on a rainy day. The only decent state name we have is Tasmania because at least it has a little mania, and that nice zesty Taz straight off the tongue.

The real question we should ask ourselves as we enter the brave new year of 10 is what are we doing without a single national education system and a single national health system when we are a single nation and not the jigsaw of states our colonial forebears stencilled upon this continent. 

The states give us “states rights” too, the scurrilous catcall of lamebrain senators who sit in that benighted place, the bush lawyers, eccentrics and spoilers who somehow know more about climate change than all the world’s scientific experts put together. 

Paul Keating rightly labelled the senate “unrepresentative swill”, because Tasmania elects as many members as New South Wales or Victoria. But we are not Tasmanians or Victorians, nor Welshmen new, old nor southern, for heaven’s sake - we are Australians, and both our national houses of parliament should recognise this simple fact by properly proportional representation. 

The current situation is a ludicrous colonial hangover, matched only by the fact that the entity we call the Australian Commonwealth, the one that comprises the jigsaw of states, has a head of state in a slate grey snowed-in capital on the far side of the world and whose main interests are horseflesh and small dogs.

The only reason we still have a foreign head of state is that we are too lazy and apathetic to replace her with someone who was actually born here, just as we are too lazy and apathetic to revisit the arrangements made more than a century ago, to go about reforming the senate and abolishing the states. For those who remain to be convinced of the need for senate reform, three names: Albert Field, Brian Harradine, Steve Fielding. 

Once abolished, many of the roles of state governments could be replaced by an enlarged local government sector, and for all those who immediately cry out “Shonky Wollongong Council!”, I reply “I’ll see your shonky council, and raise you one utterly and terminally useless New South Wales Government!”

The other state governments might possibly be a tad more acceptable, but we don’t need them. We have three tiers of government for a nation of just 21 million people. State governments are superfluous and by and large useless for anything more than sod-breaking photo-ops. 

I urge all readers to make getting rid of them their New Year’s resolution too. Think of it: we have nothing to lose but one entire unimaginative, wasteful, and expensive tier of government. 

While we’re at it, our city names could do with a revisit too, Sydney and Melbourne in particular, named after our English lords and masters of the time of colonisation. Are we to be burdened evermore with the legacy?

Bennelong would seem a fine name for Sydney, and as for Melbourne, a friend suggested Batmania, which may at least give it more popular appeal than that big ball of wool. For Brisbane, Bogan has been suggested, fusing with its satellite Logan to become the tropical metropolis of Boganville. Perth I move to retain as my emigrant family came from Perthshire, and Adelaide I should like to retain too as with enormous foresight it was named after my daughter.

Darwin is our best-named city, a permanent annoyance to Creationists and flat-earthers. In honour of the great man one might suggest that the imaginatively named “Northern Territory” become Galapaga. Or if not that, how about Gondwana?

Alice Springs must be retained too, in honour of Neville Shute, Helen Morse and the telegraph, and for the famed on-air blunder of the ABC radio newsreader who opened a bulletin with “Here is the news from South Australia, read by Alice Springs”.

Alice springs eternal. But as for the states, abolish them; the senate, reform it; and as for the republic, may we at last be grown up enough to bring it on.