The Digger No.43 April 1975

Inside Phnom Penh: A Digger in Cambodia

ISSUE NO. 43.

APRIL 10 - MAY 5 ,1 9 7 5

40 CENTS

The judgment o f A ustralian women’s poetry Two books of poetry by Australian women reviewed, with selected poems. Centre pages.

''VDHHfiQuùyìl . i ¿H. ÎViK v A V tja B »! Ï jK* X

See Malcolm Caldwell, page 4.

BLANK PAGE FOR ISSUU VERSION ONLY

■-nrjliWiilMWìtfnrèf

i

“If US aid was cut back to the last dollar, 50 cents of it would still find its way into the generals’ pockets”

C A M B O D IA M arch 1 8 w as th e f if t h an n iv ersa ry o f t h e c o u p th a t m a d e G e n e­ ral L on N o l p rem ier o f C a m b od ia. B a ck ed b y th e C IA an d th e A m erica n g o v e r n m e n t L on N o l d ecla red w ar o n th e K h m er R o u g e , a w ar th a t h as b een fo u g h t b y con scrip t^ w ith A m erica n w ea p o n s an d ev er-d im in ish in g f o o d a n d arm s.

O n M arch 1 5 , a D igger c o r r e s p o n d e n t f le w in to P h n o m P en h fo r several d a y s an d re tu r n e d th e fo llo w in g im p ressio n s. “ There will be no time to spare at the airport so could you hand your passports to the hostess and pick them up at the city terminal.” The loud speaker crackles above our heads as fighter planes join us in the air to guide us to a fast landing. Our plane taxies very quickly to the terminal building, now only a shell, surroun­ ded by sandbags as feeble protection against the daily rocket attacks. Soldiers run wildly in all directions around the building, and fear being contagious, we follow a frightened bourgeois Cambodian couple around the terminal. Here they escape in a Peugeot and we retreat to the ter­ minal. We find ourselves in a room Where, covered by the panic and chaos ensuirij^from an attack five

their hands, swat flies from their faces and wipe their arses”.

In the south, Kompong Som (Sihanoukville) remains the country’s only deep-sea port, but it is useless to Lon Nol’s Phnom Penh base be­ cause the Khmer Rouge control the highway except for Kampot On the highway to the north, FANK’s only town is Siem Reap, ten miles from the ancient temple city of Angkor Wat which Sihanouk popular rised as the seat o f Cambodian cul­ ture. The Royal Cambodian Gov­ ernment of National Union (GRUNK) held its first conference recently, at Angkor.

In some o f these isolated areas local truces exist, and demarcation lines have been agreed on. b About ; 70km down tv ' Mekong River from Phnom... -ftettlF is Neak till, kicu ^ H o o c S H P ^ d d le m ine Luong where, during our time in terminal, waiting to get out o f the Cambodia, the heaviest fighting was country but scared to move onto the tarmac. Squeezed between sandbags taking place. It is where Highway 1 no-one is making a quick exit, either to Saigon crosses the Mekong and to the city or the plane. Eventually FANK troops hold four square miles we board a bus which, driven with a‘ around the village. FANK officials mixture o f fear and machismo, rushes say there are 5,000 troops there us to the city market where a ten-day totally encircled and subject to con­ visa is stamped on our passports. stant shelling.

Lon Nol forces hold only eleven A BBC crew spent 24 hours there centres outside o f Phnom Penh, and on March 16 and reported hundreds they’re all encircled. of civilian and military casualties in In the provinces an American one morning.

Helicopters which adviser told us the Khmer National brought in supplies, until the grass Armed Forces’ generals have “full strip airport was taken the next day, colonels to order their food, wash were supposed to fly out the woun­

Charley Pride, Asleep at the Wheel, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson — country’s where it is!!

Much Peace.

music Hell, here I just released the pause button on my cassette to re­ cord “ Lay Lady Lay” from our local 4LM and turned the page in ihy latest Digger and glory there’s Merle Haggard!

Lord I’ve been into Digger and country music for more years than I care to think back over and you know I really thought there just wasn’t anyone else dug both. Mer­ le’s about the ultimate in country music. Buy “The Very Best o f” get into him, then start with “ Hag” and work back through all 28 albums of him.

Six pages in Time mag. last year, try to get a copy — but Okie, hell that was only a million dollar joke! The single from “ If We Make It Through December” o f the same title has sold more than “ Okie” , try your local juke box for a listen and find it’s the complete opposite — it’s left-wing working man US the Ford Motor Company. “ The Mag”, as we call him, is incredible and the Strangers are the tightest m ost consistent country band ever.

While you ’re down the record shop try Gram Parsons’ “Grievous Angel” — try the tragedy o f the lyrics — try his own OD’d, body stolen and burnt in the deserts o f Nevada, most all possessions stolen by ‘friends’.

Try John Prine (country Dylan) Kristofferson, Flying Burrito Broth­ ers. Hell if you ’re still with me, Lorretta Lyn, Conway Twitty,

ded. Instead, for $200 businessmen escaped their inevitable spell of thought reform. Neak Luong by now has been taken by GRUNK. John Dean, the US ambassador,, believes it “strategically vital” that Neak Luong remain open. When the wet season comes (starting midApril) “it will wash the Khmer Rouge from the banks and all their mines down the fiver and the Me­ kong from Phnom Penh to South Vietnam will be re-opened” . Not only will the fall o f Neak Luong end the last ,hope of re-opening the Mekong, it will also be a psychological and material blow to the Phnom Penh government. The remains of the divi­ sion at Neak Luong will presumably, as in the past, join Khmer Rouge forces adding troops to their Phnom Penh front and adding to the insur­ gents’ arsenal of military equipment.

Forty percent of GRUNK equipment is captured US supply.

Phnom Penh is a special military region, supposedly defended by 200,000 troops, more numerous than the GRUNK forces who are moving closer daily. On March 16 we took a pedicycle to the front at Prek Penhou, a village 10 km north of the capital. Some o f th e soldiers retur­ ning from the front while we were there at the main garrison HQ were no more than 14, struggling to carry even a light weapon such as the M l 6 . In the south, we were told This would give them reason which they could “justify” to their own people and the world, to re­ enter the Vietnamese war!

I mean, we can’t let the dirty commies take over Vietnam like they» did Cambodia can we-.

So Amerika’s econom ic interests would Still flourish and be protected.

Warren Carey Sydney, NSW. ■

Kev in M. Cro we, Mt. Isa, QLD.,

Don’t trust ’em I know the Vietnam war is now old news and boring to everybody but could i point out something that came to rriind.

First i’d like to rehash a bit of re­ cent Indo-Chinese history (please correct me if i’m wrong).

Amerika’s primary concern has always been Vietnam. 1« was this country that has received all the benefits that Amerikan “ free” enter­ prise such as Coca-Cola, IBM, Lock­ heed, can give. Until a few years ago Cambodia was a neutral until Nixon and his cronies decided to bomb what Vietcong sought refuge there.

Their reason was supposed to be to stop the Vietcong storing supplies in Cambodia and walking across to Vietnam to make hits. Afterwards with a newly installed puppet in power Cambodia was in the war too.

Yet Amerikan troops did not enter the country nor did our beloved “free” enterprise companies grant her their benefits, these all stayed in Vietnam.

Now let me get to my point. I think that it is very possible that the little men in the Pentagon have even planned for the defeat o f Cambodia by the Vietcong.

“Buck-shee” Digger Your paper is nowhere in sight down here. I was told by the cir­ culation department of The Exam­ iner (our local straight paper — it’s the straightest), that they would not handle Roiling Stone or Digger for fear o f prosecution for ‘peddlin’ feelthy mind destroyin’ papers.I got a couple of copies from them “ buckshee” — was told the rest had been burnt — copies given to me were marked with red pen. ‘Offensive’ sections had been underlined — to each their own — well it seems you people are just not destined to poison the minds o f us Tasmaniacs — what a shame.

Stay cool,

Bill, Launceston, Tasmania.

Biological implosion Come off the grass Paul Watson and/or Georgia Straight. Notwith­ standing everything you wrote, which is doubtless true, this creaky old planet is over-crowded with humansand rapidly becoming more so. Al­ though all countries, races etc. must

later by a Cambodian doctor, generals have orphan, armies of 11 and 12 year olds as their personal soldiers.

Daily, rockets shell the city. It is a terrifying sound. One’s ears rapidly^ tune in for the whistle o f passing rockets followed by a felt thud and a loud explosion. If they hit you, we were told, you do not hear them.

They spread shrapnel* the cause o f .most injuries, for two hundred yards.

A piece the size of a fingernail can kill.

One fact o f the shellings not repor­ ted in the west is that GRUNK sappers have leafleted twice, at the Pochentong market near the airport and in the vicinity of Lon Nol’s palace, before attacking these areas v ith missiles.

The leaflets urge people to come over to GRUNK and move out o f areas “into which we shall fire hundreds more rounds” .

The fact that sappers can do this in a city supposed to be defended by 200,000 tells of the support they really have. Three years ago sappers destroyed 80 per cent o f Lon Nol’s airforce on the ground at the airport.

What FANK soldiers there are left are convinced it is not merely Khmer Rouge they are fighting but North Vietnamese. Three times this scenario was outlined by soldiers to me: “The first line is Khmer Rouge, the second North Vietnamese who have their guns trained not only; on us but also on the Rouges, to make sure they don’t retreat.”

In fact the Khmer Rouge have had little material support from other nationalities compared with Lon Nol’s troops. For five years they have fought with few weapons, their best captured from Lon Nol’s forces. A single SAM missile would be enough to knock out one o f the American airlift DC 8s that keep Phnom Penh in ammo and food at present, and that would probably stop the airlift and convince the wavering US Con­ gress to stop further propping up of the Lon Nol, organisation. But they have no SAMs. In 1970 the US gave Cambodia — then still ruled by Sihanouk — US$8.3 million for military aid.

Since then the US has given US$1,165 million. Figures for Chi­ nese or USSR aid to Khmer Rouge are uncertain but it has been a frac­ tion o f that figure. Yet today 95 per cent o f the country’s land and 60 per cent of the people live in areas admi­ nistered by the Khmer Rouge.

Sam Adams, a CIA operative until he “came over” in 1973, reported that of the official troop strengths of

Last stand at Phnom Penh airport: sand bags and soldiers

—'continued oh page 5 reduce their population growth rates and the rich must reduce their gross patterns o f consumption; the facts o f the matter are that the Third World has both the greatest numbers and the greatest rates of population growth. Does it have to be an either/ or explanation for our terrible prob­ lems? Why not imperialism and over­ population (plus a few other factors)?

Whatever anyone’s feelings are, the population explosion is going to be controlled eventually by the inexor­ able laws of biology — the death rate solution. I and most people would prefer the opposite, a reduction in the birth rate.

Jan McNicOl Tarragindi, Qld.

India trip In a few months I am planning a trip to India. I had thought to fly Fremantle-Colombo, across and up the East coast o f India to Calcutta, Agra, Delhi then somehow to Nepal going home via S.E. Asia, travelling by train and staying in cheap hotels. ( I would be interested to hear from any of your readers who have done a similar Indian trip and who wouldn’t mind sharing a few hints and their highlights.

Thanks a lot

John Robertson 2/254 Bondi Road, Bondi, NSW 2026.

P.B./Digger

‘Heroes of the republic ” waiting to be honoured for their sacrifices in the Place de la Revolution.

________ ____

Tim ’s in trouble Poor, poor Tim Potter (Letters,

Digger No. 41). Oh furrowed brow!

Oh whatrexistential angst! Ob'what a pompous elitism!

Perhaps Tim Potter should be giv­ en the “I’m Trying” badge for 1975 (in Women’s Liberation mauve) for

trying so hard not to be a male chauvinist; pig. But wait. What do I see in column five, paragraph one o f his letter? A sexist reference to mid­ dle class women “ do-gooders’’. Sorry Tim. We’re going to have to take your lovely mauve badge away from you again. But keep on trying. 'Awards come up again next month.

Who the hell do you think you are, and how much changing can you have done (christ knows what you were like before!!.) when you can talk with such panache (nonchalance) about women’s oppression? Find it tedious to keep on reading about it do you? Bit bored by seeing it all in Digger time and time ¿gain? Frankly I find it rather tedious too. Oh, not the reporting o f it, but the oppression.

It’s a drag. Really. I don’t want to further bore you with all the details o f it (you probably know it all any­ way), but it is a goddamned drag — still being oppressed as a woman.

Find it insignificant, the differ­ ences between the way the dailies and Digger write it all up? As a person who reads Digger regularly, I find the difference in the Digger reporting/ stories from the crap/condescension/ hilarity o f the dailies, quite hearten­ ing. My only complaint is that there’s not quite enough lately on women’s liberation (note Tim, liberation NOT “lib” — which is so glib). Maybe you’re going to have to try even harder.

Like that music you’re talking about “ which keeps most of us sane” .

Did it fever occur to you that a lot of popular music drives a lot o f us insane? (I hope you aren’t feeling too witch-hunted.) Stop and listen hard (try, try) to some o f the womanhating/wOman-loathing/sexist (yes, even racist) lyrics o f almost any sing­ ing group/individual you can listen, to. Are we to remain up on a pedestal or down on our knees or flat on our backs? Which way would you have it' Tim Potter? Or will you settle for all o f the above?

What do you mean? What do you mean “I don’t mind a bit o f political awareness [how gracious o f you] but let’s not go past social awareness”?

What is (are??) polities to you Tim? You never really made it clear except for vague references to parlia­ mentary politics and politicians. As far as I can make out, everything (yes, everything) — including tedious wom­ en’s liberation, access’ radio, movies, indeed, even letters to an editor and personal relationships) is politics. It becomes a question o f whether you see parjiamentarianism as the only way in which politics can be (will be, ought to be) conducted or if perhaps there can be (should be, might be) other ways. To have a social aware­ ness as something ih itself doesn’t hebessarily mean much at all. There are all kinds o f people all over the place who have some kind o f social conscience about a :wide/limited range o f issues, but to sit around merely pontificating about them makes that conscience (conscious­ ness??) worth no more than a pinch of shit. The question is how do you (does anyone) transform that social consciousness into political practice (dare I suggest revolutionary prac­ tice)? What are yon doing? Or are you one o f the social stratum o f navel gazers?

Ok. Ok. So I’m giving you a hard time, but to quote you, “ Sorry, I ain’t finished” yet either.

Who has run out o f energy? Have you? Why do you lump your “ Intro­ spective phase” on to us all (“ we”)?

Who is this mythical “we all” , “ we” , “ most o f us” that you constantly, ig­ norantly, arrogantly refer to? Don’t speak for me Tim Potter. Are you a “ middle class hippie who only wears jeans because creases are too much of a hassle”? (Have you noticed how many workers wear jeans, long hair and smoke dope Tim?) Wait; wait! I still haven’t finished.

Sorry. Hell no, I’m not sorry at a l l . . .

Australia (society you call it — is

P.B./Digger

there nowhere else out there?) “needs us” you claim. Like a hole in the head! Needs Who? Who is “us”? Need your introspection? Who? The workers? The workers! Hah! Who are they to you Tim? A bunch o f ignor­ ant hoons who all read and believe the dailies? Who don’t (any o f them) understand the implications o f their working/sexual/social lives? Yes, you mention nine to five jobs. That’s white collar-workers I presume you’re referring to. Perhaps factory workers and labourers, shift workers and parttime workers and the unemployed just slipped your mind. But then it’s so easy for things to slip when you’re so engrossed in youf own navel.

You think it’s nasty all that HP, that work, the mortgages, the competition . . .? It is. You might be surprised (astounded even) to dis­ cover how many workers think so too.

But perhaps it’s been a long time since you ’ve talked to workers. Ever And it’s probably been a long time since any worker could develop a trust in you to even want to listen to what you have to say. Has that trust ever been there?

But you see, “the workers” in, say * the AMWU didn’t get their award by sitting around “waiting and needing” you to come and “help them”. The BLF in NSW are going ahead with their struggle too (were you involved in it while you liyed in Sydney?). So are the women being laid o ff in fac­ tories in Melbourne. The people of the third world aren’t waiting either.

They just don’t have the time, you seè.

I actually think Digger, in its own way, is contributing to these struggles.

I hope it’s around for a long time to come.

And as for Australia — PLEASE??? — hearing you. Well I’m sorry mate, but at the moment I for >one appear to be a bit on thé deaf side. Or is it just that I don’t want to listen? Could well bé.

Gay Wilson, '

Collingwood, Vic.

Page

THE DIGGER

EARTH NEWS

Published by High Times Pty. Ltd. 350 Victoria Street, North Mel­ bourne, Victoria 3051. Tele­ phone: 329.0977, 329.0512 Postal Address: PO Box 77 Carl­ ton, Victoria, 3053.

Cover price is recommended ret­ ell maximum.

DIGGER COLLECTIVE

Lesbians trash porno club

Melbourne: Terry Cleary, Bob Daly, Grant Evans, Phillip Frazer, Isabelle Rosemberg, Sandra Zurbo.

Working with us on this issue: Helen Garner, Reece Lamshed.

Advertising: Sydney:

Terry Hall

April 10 — Máy

Sweden’s gay women caught the public eye recently with a spectacular raid on a Stockholm porno club, touching o ff a minor riot. The Pussy Cat Club, like several others in the city, specialises in simulated lesbian acts on stage, and its sexist news­ paper advertisements are usually the most offensive.

Lesbian activists attending a con­ ference to discuss their movement’s national development struck at mid­ night, just as the Saturday show moved to its climax. When the loud­ speaker drooled: “ And now the highlight o f the evening . . . ”,the 15 gay women, who had been ad­ mitted free o f charge a few minutes earlier, jumped onto the stage and unfurled a huge banner labelled ‘Stop insulting Lesbian Women’.

At first the audience seemed to think it was all part o f the evening’s entertainment. But when the wo­ men’s song o f lesbian liberation sank in, enraged male customers charged forward, screaming obscenities, to drag them o ff the stage, some by the hair. A ten-minute free-for-all ended with the demonstrators out on the street* battered but satisfied with their action.

"-From Alternate News Service.

Cleary.

Greenland.

DISTRIBUTORS: New South Wales: Allan Rodney Wright (Circulation) Pty. Ltd. 36-40 Bourke Street, Wooloomooloo 2021. Ph: 357.2588.

Victoria: Magdiss Proprietry Ltd. 250 Spencer Street, Melbourne 3000. Ph: 600421.

South Australia: Midnight Distrib­ utors, 12 Chisolm Avenue.

Burnside 5066.

Queensland: Mirror Newspapers Ltd, Brunswick 8i Me Lachlan sts, Brisbane.

Wéstern Australia: Nota Distrib­ ution, PO Box 136. Mt. Lawley, 6050.

The Digger accepts news, features, artwork or photographs from contributors.

Send material with a stamped self addressed envelope if you want it back, to The Digger, PO Box 77, Carlton, Victoria 3053, The Digger is a member of the Alternate Press Service (APS).

lànkee guns on both sides

Address letters, telegrams, manuscripts, artwork, or photo­ graphs to:

When rebel artillery hit a ‘U.S. cargo plane flying supplies into beseiged Phnom Penh recently, the shells were US-made.

105 mm howitzer rounds, sold to the rebels

by Lon Nol’s generals.

While examples of corruption are widely known, senior U.S. embassy officials will only admit to them in “o ff the record” briefings. It was at such a briefing last year that the

acting ambassador, Thomas Enders, just before his departure, told this reporter the Lon Nol generals were more interested in “creating their own private armies” than winning the war. He said the generals, com ­ peting with rival officers for U.S. aid, tattle on each other by showing “little black books” filled with gossip.

Although it is commonly known by high ranking embassy officials and the press that much of the military aid, such as the howitzer shells, often helps the rebels more than the Lon Nol government, that information is not relayed to Con­ gress.

The vintage 105 mm howitzers which were captured last year from fleeing Lon Nol troops, are the largest and most accurate artillery pieces used by the rebels. However, neither the Soviet Union nor China, which uses either 100 mm or 130 mm rounds for their medium guns, could supply the rebels with howitzer ammunition . So the rebels were forced to buy the shells from Lon Nol’s generals who were more than glad to make an extra profit by selling the shells to their enemies.

—From Richard Boy\e, Pacific News

Fantasylandia At a recent army combat train­ ing exercise at Fort Riley, Kansas, US troops fought against an “aggres­ sor” force representing the mythical nation o f “ Petrolandia”.

When questioned by reporters, a Pentagon spokesman explained it was an unfortunate misprint for “ Patrolandia”.

—From the Berkeley Barb.

Chile: workers front Generals The 5000 workers o f the Com­ pañía Manufactura de Pápelas y Cartonos, in Santiago, the largest paper factory in Chile, recently went out on strike to protest the firing of many workers, and the failure o f the company management to pay the already very low wage set by the junta.”‘White strikes’, worker-led goslows, and an information campaign have been the primary weapons used by the workers in their struggle.

Significantly, it was the Christian Democratic influenced press which released news o f this struggle by the paper workers, thus causing embarassment and anger within the junta.

It forced the junta to concede that

Service.

Popeye power Japanese researchers at the Trade and Industry Ministry claim the dis­ covery o f a means o f employing spinach to convert the sun’s rays into commercial electricity.

The scientists state that ultrapure chlorophyl extracted from the vegetable is refined into a film that acts as a semi-conductor, which when exposed to the sun, generates elect­ rical power.

The ministry claims that this dis­ covery is a breakthrough opening the way to the development of economical, large capacity solar-bat­ teries. Popeye was right; it seems that there is <power in spinach.

—From - Georgia Straight.

it would “render justice to the work­ ers” if their protests “ were proven to be true”. However, to save its face, and recoup its authority, the junta reaffirmed its ban on strikes and warned that similar action would be dealt with severely. to have a small chance o f sharing The break in ‘understanding’ be­ power with the junta. tween the military junta and the The Christian Democrats seem Christian Democrats came about now to face the risk o f meeting the through the junta’s refusal to share same end as the (Catholic) German power. This cost the junta the sup­ Centre Party, which collaborated port o f the Catholic Church in Chile, with the Nazis prior to Hitler’s take­ which remained silent only as long over. Following the expulsion from as the Christian Democrats seemed Chile o f Fuenteabla , the former,

leader o f the Christian Democrats who represented the ‘anti-coup’ fact­ ion within the party, the junta claimed that the ex-senator was in contact with the Movement o f the Revolutionary Left (MIR). The junta also claims to be in possession of documents connecting other former deputies of the party-with the MIR.

Copies o f Alan Roberts’ Ecological Crisis o f Consumerism are available from A. McLean, P.O. Box 13, Balmain, N.S.W. 30 cents.

In the wake of the Portugese revolution there’s big changes happening in southern Africa

The Digger

U.S. hit men get African contract

P.O. Box 77, Carlton, Victoria, 3053.

In the past few months the U.S. State Department has nominated sev­ eral high ranking U.S. foreign service officers — all with extensive covert political and counter-insurgency ex­ perience in Latin America — to. key positions in Africa.

President Ford recently nominated Nathaniel Davis to be Assistant Se­ cretary o f State for African Affairs, and William Bowdler to be Ambassa­ dor to South Africa. Both need Senate confirmation. . Of the four controversial appoint­ ments, the nomination o f Davis has caused the sharpest public criticism.

V confirmed, Davis, who was U.S. ambassador to Chile during the 1973 military coup there, would be putin charge o f all State Department acti­ vity in Africa.

The Organisation o f African Unity (OAU), an organisation comprising all independent African nátions, issued a formal protest — passed unanimously — to the nomination on February 21. In the forty-member organisation’s first such public criti­ cism o f thè U.S., the OAU charged Davis with “the odious practice of political destabilisation” in Latin America.

To: Subscriptions The Digger P.Q. Box 77 Carlton 3053.

Name:

Address:

Postcode: I enclose $6.00/$12.00 for 13/26 issues o f the four weekly Digger.

I

I

Make cheques payable to Hightimes _ I Pty. Ltd, crossed not negotiable. I

In addition, Deane J. Hinton was already confirmed as Ambassador to Zaire last June. Jeffrey Davidow was recently appointed as political Officer to the U.S. Embassy in Pre­ toria, South Africa. His appointment in late 1974 did not require Senate confirmation.

Henry Kissingër defended Davis’ nomination as head o f the State Department’s “ Africa Desk”, terming the OAU action as “ unacceptable”, “offensive” , and contrary to “inter­ national decency” . South Africa and Rhodesia are the only African countries believed to favour the appointment. The U.S. Senate is expected to confirm Davis’ nomina­ tion in March.

Among the four nominated to the key posts, only Hinton has had even limited experience in Africa.

All four were top ranking Stati Department officials in Guatemala between 1966 and 1972, when the U.S. conducted a massive counter­ insurgency program there. Until that operation, Guatemala had one of the strongest leftist guerilla move­ ments in Latin America.

Davis, Hinton and Bowdler have also served under Secretary o f State

The Guatemalan National Police force quadrupled in size between 1968 and 1971, and U.S. military aid to the country more than tripled. .According to NACLA, hundreds of Green Berets trained and led Guate­ malan commandos during the period,! and U.S. napalm was used on dozensof villages.

“The U.S. Embassy which Davis headed,” says NACLA, “maintained close relations with the Guatemalan National Police and right-wing terror­ ist groups which carried out this policy.” ^ Before serving in Guate mala ,Davis was a member of the National Secur­ ity Council from 1966 to 1968.

He was also a high-ranking Peace Corps official in 1962, becoming associate director by 1965. It is widely believed that the Peace Corps was first used for intelligence gather­ ing operations during this period.

Davis also worked in the Venezuelan Embassy in Caracus from 1960 to 1962. There he came in frequent contact with E. Howard Hunt, who was then directing CIA activity in. Venezuela in preparation for the Bay o f Pigs invasion of Cuba.

-Kissinger on the National Security Council, the policy making body overseeing the entire U.S. security apparatus.

Davis, Hinton and Davidpw were in Chile immediately preceding or during the 1973 coup. Soon after the overthrow o f the Popular Unity government o f Salvador Allende, Davis and Hinton were identified by the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) as the two top members o f a special “coup team” operating in Chile under the code name “ Operation Centaur”.

“On various occasions during the past twenty years,” NACLA reported, “the U.S. government has employed (coup teams] as one o f the main weapons to combat strong anti-im­ perialist governments. Such special teams are composed o f CIA opera­ tives with special skills in over­ throwing popular governments. Coup teams were employed in Guatemala (1954), Brazil (1964), Bolivia (1971), Uruguay (1973) and Chile (1973).

Nathaniel Davis Nathaniel Davis was Ambassador to Chile from 1971 to 1973 When the CIA spent $5 million to finance the overthrow o f Allende, according to the agency’s own admission. CIA director William Colby and former Ambassador to Chile Edward Korry both have also testified that Davis was kept fully informed of CIA activities there.

Three days before the Chilean co.up, Davis flew to Washington for a special briefing with Kissinger. He returned to Chile the day before Allende was ousted.

Davis also served in Chile as U.S. Peace Corps director at a critical point in 1964 when Christian Demo­ crat leader Eduardo Frei narrowly defeated Salvador Allende in the presidential election. Frei reportedly received $20 million from the CIA to finance his campaign.

Immediately before serving in Chile, Davis was Ambassador to Guatemala from 1968 to 1971.

During this period, the Guatemalan government conducted an extremely repressive counterinsurgency or “ pacification” effort in which 20,000 people were murdered, says NACLA. Davis’ predecessor as Ambassador to Guatemala had been assassinated by leftist guerillas.

; j | | | I !

I | j

Deane J. Hinton \ Deane Hinton was first appointed ambassador to Zaire in June 1974.

According to the book, Who's Who in the CIA, he has been an operative with that agency since 1956. In 1961 and 1962, Hinton attended the U.S. War College. After tours of duty in Kenya and the Middle East, Hinton was assigned to Guatemala in 1968, where he served under Nathaniel Davis.

Hinton was officially in charge of the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID) from 1968 to 1969. He worked out of the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala, and also directed the Office of Public Safety which, during the late 1960s, trained more than 30,000 Guatemalan police.

Four o f the sixteen top U.S. Public Safety officers in Guatemala at the time had taken part in the “ Phoenix Program” , the infamous pacification effort conducted by the CIA in South Vietnam Which killed tens of thousands o f people suspected of sympathising with the National Lib­ eration Front. “ He [Hinton] arrived when the Guatemalan guerrillas were at their

strongest in a twelve year struggle” , NACLA reported. “ Acting in con­ junction with the local military and the Green Berets, AID/CIA forces began their pacification effort model­ led after Vietnam.”

Hinton had overall responsibility for the U.S. paramilitary effort in Guatemala during this period when, according to NACLA, “the tide turned against the guerrillas following a massive terror campaign” .

Hinton served in Chile from 1969 to 1971 as director of AID, when that agency channelled millions of dollars to right-wing labour organ­ isations in an effort to stop the 1970 election o f Popular Unity leader Salvador Allende. In 1971 to 1973, Hinton served in Washington as dep­ uty director of the Council o f Inter­ national Economic Policy, a sub­ committee of the National Security Council.

In this role, Hinton, considered a financial as well as military expert, “organised the econom ic boycott o f the Allende government” , according to the French magazine Jeune Afrique. Serving directly under Henry Kissinger, Hinton was to cut off as much financial credit as possible to the Allende government, including loans from the World Bank, the Export-Import Bank, and the. InterAmerican Development Bank. “ Hinton is an old analyst for the CIA” , noted Jeune A.frique, “ who has always been present when the agency carried out its most suspicious activities.”

William G. Bowdler Davidow.

and Jeffrey

William Bowdler, the most recent State Department nominee, yet to be confirmed by the Senate, is slated to become Ambassador to South Africa. Bowdler, according to the Washington-based Office on Africa, “served as political officer in charge o f ‘special political problems’ in the Bureau of International Affairs and as a member q f the U.S. delegation to the Organisation o f American States (OAS) from 1961 to 1963” .

During the same period, Bowdler played a leading role in planning the Bay o f Pigs invasion of Cuba, according to the Washington Office on Africa.

From 1965 to 1968, Bowdler became the National Security Coun­ cil’s senior staff officer for Latin

America, putting him in contact with Davis and Hinton, then operating in Guatemala. In 1971, Bowdler re­ placed Nathaniel Davis as Ambassador to Guatemala, when Davis moved on to Chile.

Not much is known about Jeffrey Davidow, whose appointment as the U.S. Embassy’s First Political Officer in Pretoria did not have to be con­ firmed by. the Senate. It is known, however, that Davidow was assigned to Guatemala in the late 1960s and later worked in Chile until the 1973 overthrow o f the Allende govern­ ment.

The Recent U.S. Policy Shift.

Events since April 1974 have sud­ denly thrust Africa, which has been largely ignored as a foreign policy priority (in comparison to the State Department’s concern for Latin America, the Mid-East, and Asia), to the attention of U.S. policy planners.

Guerrilla warfare in Portugal’s African colonies precipitated the Portuguese coup in April, whichr has changed the political geography in southern Africa more drastically than the State Department wants to admit publicly.

Mozambique and Angola, both with important natural resources, were headed for independence, and there were indications, many observ­ ers believe, that both countries might have broken entirely with the West, offering a radical alternative to other African countries.

The power shift brought on other profound changes as well. It became apparent even in South Africa that white minority rule in Rhodesia was extremely precarious, due partly to the dependence o f Rhodesia on pre­ viously white-ruled Mozambique.

Zambia, a land-locked country with vast mineral resources but econ­ omically and politically dependent on South Africa, could, for the first time, look towards severing those ties through future trade with the bordering black-ruled states of Angola and Mozambique.

Botswana and Malawi, also land­ locked black states and economic hostages of South Africa, could look to other black states for econom ic livelihood.

The successful’ struggles against white rule in Angola and Mozambique put the lie to the 1969 U.S. National Security Council “ Tar Baby Memo-

randum” that set U.S. “policy pos­ ture” by saying, “the whites are here to stay and the only way that constructive change can come about is through them.”

The Washington Office on Africa (WOA) has learned through State Department sources that in the late spring o f 1974 Henry Kissinger ordered a new National Security Council study o f the situation in southern Africa. , ■V“We believe that a new secret policy decision was reached (replac­ ing ‘Tar Baby’) to meet the ensuing crisis”, says the WOA. “It appears that Kissinger sought to find persons who could be trusted to be hardheaded [and to ] give him the sort of reports and policy implementation the new policy required.”

Following the recent State Depart­ ment nominations, the WOA report-' ed, “ we do not know the exact thinking o f the Secretary o f State”, but outlined a number o f possible policy options which became more plausible given the four new appoint­ ments. “ Destabilization” options include fermenting friction within the current delicate coalition in Angola; a longer term strategy o f economic strangula­ tion o f Mozambique while promoting middle class strikes and disruptions, on the Chilean model; the severing o f the oil-rich Cabinda province from' Angola; and the continued U.S. mili­ tary aid to General Mobutu, allowing him to maintain his repressive rule in Zaire.

The nomination o f experienced “destabilization” experts to the am­ bassadorships o f South Africa and Zaire the two most powerful countries in the region — fits in neatly with WOA’s “nutcracker theory” .

“Their [South Africa and Zaire] pro-U.S. regimes” says the WOA, “can be used to exert leverage on the transitional situation in Angola, Mozambique, Rhodesia and Namibia, where U.S. econom ic interests are significant, although smaller. South Africa and Zaire, therefore, could act as two arms o f a nutcracker around the economically and politi­ cally weaker states to the south, east and west: Tanzania, Zambia, Angola, Mozambique and Rhodesia.”

From Alternate News Service.

\

Ü

STIRRING is a film made in a NSW boys’ high school by Jane Oehr, for the federal Depart­ ment o f Education. Its purpose was to illustrate the handling of controversial issues in schools as part of an attempt to enable schoolkids to explore, under­ stand and make decisions about matters central to their school lives.

Dover Heights Boys’ School lies between Bondi and Vaucluse; Jane Oehr describes its enrolment as “ 60% surfies, 40% Jewish boys with academic am­ bitions.” The class chosen for the film was 4C, a group which thfe school administration coolly described as “ the bottom of thie barrel”. Corporal punishment was to be the controversial is­ sue; but the whole enterprise, from the start, took o ff in quite unexpected directions.

Using all kinds of methods, from role-playing exercises to canvassing the area with video equipment, the 4C boys and their teacher Paul Roebuck ex­ tended the project far beyond the issue o f corporal punish- / ment, and finally confronted the principal with the request, among other things, that the school should be made co-educational. (One boy, on a visit to a co-ed school, remarked, “I never thought anyone could be so happy in a school.’’) The principal, predictably, fobbed them off; and the film ends with the boys heading off to organise “teacher support” for their demands.

Though the film has been fin­ ished since August, and won a silver award from the Australian K ^m jm ustry, the Education oeparument has declared it will be shown only to “restricted audiences” — which, we may be sure, means no kids.

These photographs give an im- I pression o f the school itself — “a six-year-old, one million dollar concrete box!’ — rather than o f the action o f the film.

April 10 —

THE DIGGER

Page 4

styles) first, before we can have a political-style revolution, or is the political change paramount and pri­ mary?

It’s easy to give an abstract ‘solution’ to this much-debated pro­ blem: “ People will and must change themselves in the struggle to change society.” But it’s doubtful if what was at issue was simply an intellec­ tual failure to see the truth o f this explanation of how history happens.

Anyone who thinks that retreat to a commune, or personal refusal to consume destructively, will save the world, has just not appreciated the

by Allan Roberts extraordinary level o f ability and determining role o f the political level in society . Anyone who thinks that Something like a hundred separate enthusiasm they have displayed in doing whatever the “ General” the changing of values is a secondary activities — talks, discussions, work­ consideration, and we can worry shop meetings — made the Melbourne (Gallagher) says. They use their newfound power with discrimination and about all that after the revolution, University Union bulge at the seams can well be asked what sort of society taste, helping to ensure that jobs as over the Easter weekend. This fourBLs will not be available to those who can be expected after that revolution day gathering o f six-hundred plus if people are still pretty well the same are guilty o f deviationist thoughts people was loosely christened as a as before. the said deviants being qualified only Radical Ecology Conference.

The extreme positions one way or by decades in the building game, and Anyone claiming the ability to the other are very vulnerable to cri­ dependence on it for a livelihood. In report all its doings would be (a) a ticism. On the other hand, pettythis process o f selection for the liar, and (b) dead from exhaustion. honour of earning a living on the pick bourgeois individualism, tainted with Everything was going on all at once a recognizable streak o f Christian ego­ and shovel, the new leaders receive — this particular attendant’s agonies tism: / never use detergent or plastic o f decision reached a crisis on Sunday the disinterested help of the Master Builders’ Association, whose speed in milk containers, so my soul will be afternoon, when the choices avail­ sacking NSW branch members is only saved — and as for you, Jack . . . On able included three of major interest: the other hand, bureaucratic elitism equalled by their celerity in moving The Sydney Builders’ Labourers — we will change society, and then the bulldozers on to property for­ people reporting on the Federal they will change to s u i t . . . merly protected by green bans.

Branch takeover and its effect on the Partly because o f a difference in The discussions on technology. green bans; overseas visitors Malcolm life-styles, these opposing viewpoints Can it simply be taken over and run Caldwell and Bafry Weissberg parti­ don’t encounter and wrangle with differently, or is environmental des­ cipating in a seminar on China’s en­ each other as much as they should. vironmental policy, and a discussion tructiveness built in, so that much of modern technology must be scrapped The Radical Ecology Conference on Ecology and Feminism. All, mark provided the opportunity, and just you, simultaneous. in a rational society? If the latter, about every possible mixture o f these what can be retained and what must Any report will thus be selective, two attitudes could be heard in the dis biased and impressionistic, so I’ll be discarded? This question will not cussions. This was far from being the be solved in four days nor in four select some biased impressions: least o f its virtues.

The green bans discussion. This years, but the discussions that went In its apparently chaotic format was made noteworthy by the presence on were illuminating. (which actually allowed everybody o f a Gallagher (BL Federal branch) The politics-versus-ecology de­ bate. This cropped up at every session to discuss everything that interested organiser — the first occasion, it was them) and in its lack o f neat policy stated, on which the forces taking in various forms. Sometimes it was formulation at the close (which over in NSW had allowed themselves the greenies versus the reds — but in would have implied a level o f agree­ to be lured into public debate. After fact pure green w is about as rare as hearing what appears to be their case, pure red, the majority of participants ment the movement has not yet I can well understand their reluctance. being more or less streaked in various achieved), the conference was a true and useful reflection o f the present shades o f red and green.

It emerged that ex-students with stage o f the ecology movement. It The sharpest clashes here were on little background in the building in­ was a thing worth doing and an ex ­ the old, old topic: must people live dustry have been appointed to or­ perience worth having. differently (new values, new life­ ganisers’ positions, thanks to the

Ecologists streaked in shades o f red and green

Denis Walker fights from bench to bench Since 1969 Denis Walker has been involved in political activity to smash government racism in the form of the notorious Queensland Acts.

From early 1974 onwards break­ throughs were made on a number of reserves; the most prominent of these was Palm Island, where a chair­ person and Council were elected to power that refused to bow down to Bjelke Petersen’s racist regime.

In July 1974 Denis Walker and John Garcia went to Palm Island for a fortnight wiih two main pur­ poses: to identify the problems, and to work out priorities for action with the elected Council.

This was done, and it was decided that expertise from throughout Aust­ ralia needed to be involved in a seminar on Palm Island to mobilise the necessary resources; and to create a political atmosphere whereby the racist Queensland government would be hard put to suppress such a move.

Submissions were drawn up and sent to the Aboriginal Publications Foundation for a grant for the Palm Island people to put out their own publication. A submission for public works, education, health, etc., total­ ling almost $3 million was sent to the Department o f Aboriginal Affairs in Canberra to make the Council itself totally independent o f these state instrumentalities.

The seminar content and context was set and its title was to be “ Land Rights and Self-determinion” .

On his return to Brisbane, Walker called a press conference to publicise

the Palm Island peoples’ initiatives.

He also said that he was going to approach both student groupings and trade union organisations, as well as government institutions, for financial assistance to hold the seminar.

Some time later, Walker was in Sydney for the taping o f an edition o f “ Frost over Australia”. He re­ ceived an urgent phone call informing him that Lionel Lacy and John Garcia had been arrested on con­ spiracy charges, and that he himself was sought on a charge o f attempting to obtain monies with threats and menaces.

Naturally, Walker did not return north. Finally, he was picked up by the police on September 12 and the long legal fight against extra­ dition to Queensland began.

Eventually, on January 6 , 1975, the case came before magistrate Briese in the Sydney Central Court.

The first morning’s proceedings revolved around the principle of double criminality, which was argued

by Bruce Miles, Walker’s solicitor.

The principle states that a person cannot be extradited if the alleged crime is not a crime in both states.

While this was rejected by Mr. Briese as not being relevant to this case, it was found that the alleged crime, as written on the warrant, did not satisfy wording from Section 415 of-the Queensland Crimes Act.

By Tuesday morning, a new Queensland cop had arrived with a fresh warrant; this one with perfect wording. Miles then argued that the new warrant required fresh evidence which the court was bound to hear, even if rejected. Miles requested the

court to hear evidence concerning two issues. Firstly, that Queensland is an oppressive state for blacks, as exemplified by its legislative and physical behaviour. This would mean Walker would not receive a fair trial. Furthermore, Miles sought evi­ dence to show that Walker was a nuisance to the Queensland authori­ ties because his political activities directly contravened Queensland gov-* em m ent policy on Aboriginals. In other words, Miles wanted to show that Walker was the victim o f a political campaign in Queensland to silence him.

Mr. Briese rejected the submission that the court was bound to hear such evidence. His reasons are as follows: 1) Criminal justice in Australia is based on the jury system which provided a safeguard for political offences, prosecutions or covert pol­ itical motives.

2) If Walker is extradited, he is extradited to the criminal justice system o f Queensland, which is simi­ lar to the jury system o f N.S.W. 3) There is never any absolute guarantee against unjust convictions, but courts o f appeal are available.

4) It is always difficult to evaluate the fairness or not o f trials concern­ ing Aborigines.

5) Prejudice exists in N.S.W. as well.

6 ) All minorities suffer from pre­ judice and discrimination.

7) He was afraid o f the precedent which may be formed.

The second issue on which Miles sought evidence concerned whether the alleged crime was unfounded

and ip fact whether the charges were bona fide. Evidence was permitted on this issue. Walker was extensively cross-examined by Miles at this point, and briefly by the Crown Prosecutor.

After considering this evidence Briese ordered Walker to be extra­ dited but granted him leave on bail till January 17 to appeal.

On January 17, Walker was given leave to appeal to the Supreme Court of N.S.W. on February 24, 1975.

Mr. Justice Taylor considered the principle o f double criminality and the bona fide nature Of the charge, and then adjourned the appeal. Re­ turning to court, he dismissed it; Walker might now appeal again.

During the extradition hearing se­ veral pickets were outside the court, organised by the Sydney Queensland Acts Confrontation Committee.

The Confrontation Committee was formed in 1974 in response to per­ sistent attacks on blacks, both indi­ viduals and organizations, by the Queensland government under legis­ lation embodied in the Queensland Aborigines Act 1971 and the Torres Strait Islands Act 1971.

It became really active after the three were charged. In addition to its goal o f smashing the Queensland Acts, the Committee is currently working to publicise the plight o f Walker, Lacey and Garcia and assist their defence.

It meets every second Tuesday at 6.30 pm a t 232 Castlereagh Street in Sydney, and is open to anyone interested in its attempt to build mass support around the above ob­ jectives.

—From Alternative News Service.

K issinger’s Indochina dream is over Malcolm Caldwell is a lecturer in the Economic History o f Southeast Asia in London. He is an editor o f the Journal o f Contemporary Asia and has writ­ ten extensively on Asia, including a book co-authored with J.C.Henderson,

The Chainless Mind: A Study o f Resistance and Liberation.

Caldwell was visiting Australia for a lecture tour during the latest offensive in Indochina, so Digger asked him for his assesment of the situation there.

Digger: What do you think o f Lon NoTs latest moves? He has left for Bali, two other leading members of the government who are on the death list o f seven are also leaving, and speculation is rife that the Lon Nol regime is about to fall.

Malcolm Caldwell: They made prepa­ rations to leave a long time ago. It Was only a question o f hanging on to see if their survival could be arranged by the US administration. I think it’s important, though, to look back a bit.

When the Americans deposed Sihanouk; they were still operating with the concept they had when they moved into Vietnam in a big way in the second part o f the fifties. The idea was to get a belt o f control from the Thai border right through to the South China Sea, consisting of southern Laos, Cambodia and South Vietnam, which would act as a stra­ tegic barrier to what they considered encroachments by the North Viet­ namese. This implied that at a mini­ mum they would have to have friend­ ly governments in Phnom Penh and Saigon, and as many bases spread across this belt as they possibly could. Now this concept had to be abandoned, which is what happened during the spring/summer offensive o f 1972 and the subsequent negotir ations which led to the Paris Agree­ ments in January, 1973.

Since then, the objective of US policy has had one optimal aspect

and one minimal aspect. The optimal one was to kfeep puppet regimes in power in Phnom Penh and Saigon, and sustain their credibility as alter­ native governments to the Khmer Rouge and the Provisional Revolu­ tionary Government o f South Viet­ nam. But the idea of controlling such a large belt o f territory was dropped..

In 1974, before this present offensive started, about 400 or 500 outposts of the Saigon forces were simply aban­ doned. This was because the remain­ ing leading objective o f the US in this area — apart from saving Kissinger’s face — was the oil companies that are operating offshore.

The oil from these offshore rigs can go straight on to tankers; they don’t need any onshore facilities.

They get supplies from Singapore.

The oil companies say — Why worry?

North Vietnam has got no navy, and even if they did, the Seventh Fleet is there to protect the oil interests.

But they do need one kind o f on­ shore facility, and that is a govern­ ment in Saigon with which they can bargain. To give any legitimacy to their operations they need a govern­ ment in Saigon which can deal with the leases.

So it now makes a good deal o f sense to concentrate on retaining Saigon, which has a far more defen­ sible perimeter, and with no pretence that it is South Vietnam.

Cambodia has lost its importance in this respect, because the NLF and the liberation forces can now operate quite freely in the broader hinterland

international bookshop 17 ELIZA B E TH STREET, MELBOURNE PHONE 61.2859

Towards A Marxist Psychology Memoirs Of A Survivor (Doris Lessing) Woman’s Evolution (Evelyn Reed) Arabia Without Sultans Mother I’m Rooted Women & Child Care In China The New Criminology

$2.95 $9.50 $4.95 $3.25 $3.95 $1.75 $8.30

Specialists in feminist, radical and socialist literature send for free book/list

and central highlands of South Viet­ nam itself. So if the Cambodian government falls, it will be a severe political blow to the administration in Washington, but it won’t be of strategic significance.

Digger: There wasn't any economic interest in Cambodia?

Caldwell: No. And really the Ameri­ cans set about destroying whatever economic interest there was, such as the French rubber plantations; so they’ve no direct economic interest in Cambodia.

Interpreting the present situation: I would argue first o f all that this manoeuvre of abandoning the peri­ pheral areas has been tried before. It has picked up momentum very con­ siderably, and it may even have got out o f control, but the fact that many of the abandonments have been made without any serious assault by the liberation forces is an indication o f the US trying to get an additional bonus out o f the whole situation.

The bonus they are try ing to get is to steamroll Congress into waiving any kind of final hesitations they have about giving emergency aid.

They are playing a very dangerous game because th e momentum that is happening now, in my view, is out o f their control. I’m sure that in the back o f their minds there was the

pondents in Saigon talk about mili­ tary sources, it usually means a spokesman o f the American embassy.

You’ll notice that the American Chief o f Staff, General Weyand, has just gone to Saigon to assess what kind of help Saigon needs to stabilise: the situation. This has resonances o f a much earlier period, in the iearly sixties.

The whole scenario has been played for when the Congress comes back after the Easter recess. They want a quick decision on aid. I’m sure they’d be prepared to let Phnom Penh go, although just before I left London I spoke with the represen­ tative o f GRUNK (Royal Govern­ ment o f National Union o f Cambodia headed by deposed Premier Prince Norodom Sihanouk) there and they were still prepared for two contin­ gencies. One was that Phnom Penh would go quickly and the Americans would do nothing about it. The other was that the Americans would seek, by replacing Lon Nol, to keep a pretence of a regime in Phnom Penh until June or July, when the rainy season will come, the Mekong will be greatly swollen and then to send in for a short period a direct American and South Vietnamese marine force to clear the river so that they could pour in supplies during the rainy season to enable Phnom Penh to survive for a little bit longer.

The logic behind this is the logic which has propelled the American administration for many years now.

From the point o f view o f Ford and Kissinger, the most important date is scenario that General MacArthur had the 1976 election. They don’t want during the Korean war, when there to approach that election having lost was reluctance to undertake the full- Indo China. And however temporary scale military activity that MacArthur the measures and however precarious wanted in Korea. The way he did it they can still go to the American was simply to retreat before the public in 1976 apd say that they enemy advanced.

To set fire to haven’t lost Indo China. cities and towns, and to get hordes o f Once again I think their power is refugees to pour out of these des­ disproportionate to their ambition. troyed cities, and to get this carried They are not going to be able to through as a public relations image. muster Congressional.support or pub­ And to say that the people were lic support for salvaging something fleeing from the Communists and that from the situation in Indo China. it was an American obligation to do To me it was significant that Ford something about it. The same tactic had to come out and say that Kissin­ was used during the war in Laos. ger’s position was guaranteed in his Where the US seems to have mis­ administration.

Kissinger has an­ calculated is that they don’t seem to chored his broad global perspective be having too much success in getting ever since 1968-69 on preserving his the army to regroup around more own nominee in Thieu. And many restricted defence perimeters such as forces are now. meeting in Saigon Saigon. The ARVN forces seem to who are opposed to Thieu — some have completely disintegrated. Now have been arrested just recently — even fairly bourgeois press sources who are beginning to raise the are beginning to refer to ‘anti-Saigon’ demand more strongly for some form forces. This is a clear indication that o f Government o f National Salvation. many ARVN groups are going over Kissinger’s position in this is ex­ to the side o f the NLF. tremely difficult . . . in 1969 he told the Russian Ambassador in America that whatever happened he would Digger: Who now has control of the never allow his paid man in Saigon to MacArthur tactic in South Vietnam? be replaced. This was Kissinger’s ul­ timate statement that he could do what he wanted in international af­ Caldwell: For 20 years the effective ultimate direction of Saigon military fairs. And he made it quite clear that he would be prepared to destroy positions and tactics has been in American hands. But when corres­ North Vietnam to keep Thieu in

power. But o f course this is crumb­ ling underneath him.

Digger: So we have two factors: the

economic ones you mentioned, and now the politicians in the American ruling class wanting to maintain their position. Now what about the mili­ tary strategic dimension vis-a-vis the rest o f Asia? What are their plans there and how are they going to justify their manoeuvres to the ASEAN (Association o f South East Asian Nations) regimes for instance?

with China and hope to stabilize it in that way. And then dig in in the Malayan peninsula, Indonesia and the Philippines.

Digger: There seems to be some con­ fusion in the western press abrm tthe relationship between SihanoWnSficrthe Khmer Rouge. How do you view the evolution o f the struggle in Cambodia ?

Caldwell: The Khmer Rouge has not tried to use absolute maximum effort to take Phnom Penh. Why? Because they have seen the political disinte­ Caldwell: The situation in Indo China gration o f the forces inside Phnom has developed very much more rapid­ Penh. It’s a force which operates in ly than most people could have per­ their favour. They’ve seen the traitors ceived. The US administration is go out one by one and they are going having to rapidly revise its contin­ to be left with people who will be gency plans to establish the next prepared to co-operate when the time comes. The traitors have been scutt­ defensible rim in Asia. Even the ling for a long time. government in Bangkok — which I don’t really think there is any represents very little, an interregnum perhaps between military regimes — problem between the Khmer Rouge has asked the US to move their bases and Sihanouk. It is in the interests of out within a year. The fact that the the bourgeois press in the west to say US has made little o f this means, I that these forces are very divided. On think, that they may be thinking o f the one hand, they say, you’ve got building the' next line ¿long the the Hanoi-trained communists, and got Sihanouk as a peninsular archipelago from the is­ then you ’ve lands o f the Philippines down through figurehead. The claim that Sihanouk, Indonesia and Malaysia, and are pre­ once he re-entered Cambodia, would pared to see a neutralised Thailand. appeal to the popular base he had in Obviously, with the fulfillment of the 1950s and 1960s is a complete the Indo Chinese revolution, the libe­ mirage. Sihanouk accepts the fact that ration forces in Thailand are going to there has been a five year politici­ be very greatly encouraged and are sation o f the people, both in Phnom going to develop their strength rapid­ Penh and outside. The ordinary mass ly. And if the US wants breathing o f the people are no longer as poli­ time in order to consolidate their tically innocent as they were port­ positiori, then they won’t want to get rayed to have been — and even that involved immediately in anything in innocence was a mirage, o f course, Thailand. Up to now they’ve been because there have been peasant directing the counter-insurgency in struggles in Cambodia since long Thailand from their embassy in before 1970. Sihanouk has said that Bangkok. he has accepted this and is prepared to So, in Thailand there are two serve the movement in whichever way things which could easily happen it wants — mainly as a nominal figure­ within the next few months. One, head, and maybe in diplomatic acti­ the reimposition of military rule, with vities where he has a great deal o f ex­ the Americans backing their man and perience and knows people all over taking the consequences in terms o f the world. He has always said that escalation o f guerilla war. The other the future o f Cambodia belongs to is to allow the neutralization of Thai­ the young people who have been land, and allow it to open relations steeled by the fire o f revolution.

travel TRA VEL THE STUDENT WA Y TRAVEL AUS! 84 Cleveland Street, Chippendale, NSW. Eh.: 698.3719 220 Faraday Street, Carlton, VIC. Pk.: 347.8462

April 10 — May 5

Page 5

THE DIGGER

The last am bassadors, alone w ith their dom inoes by the Digger in Phnom Penh The politics o f diplomacy has left more embassies empty than full in Phnom Penh. In early March, Siha­ nouk warned foreign embassies to leave the capital. It would be con­ sidered an “ unfriendly act” to stay, hinting that those who left now would be given first preference when the Khmer Rouge government took over in Phnom Penh.

When the offensive began (Jan­ uary 1 ) most embassies evacuated non-essential staff; the first to leave fully was the Australian, on March

15, for Thailand, where they main­ tain an informal embassy within Aus­ tralia's Thai legation. “ For months we had been unable to do anything”, an Australian dip­ lomat explained, although the deci­ sion to leave was a political one.

Conflicts within the ALP over the recognition o f GRUNK have existed since its formation. • The French embassy’s decision to leave left the large French population without representation. The former colonial power was making an ob­ vious political manoeuvre in favour of Sihanouk. Many o f the French people

remaining have lived through the Japanese, the Vietminh and the Ame­ ricans. In the French colonial style, Phnom Penh is their home. “ Une belle ville” .the owner of La Taveme told a Swiss camera crew with no­ thing better to do than show to Europe the tragic effects o f war on a French businessman in Indo-China.

By March 18 few embassies are left. For those that remain, what happens to Cambodia may be a pre­ lude o f what’s due in their own countries. The South Vietnamese who will stay to the end are the most fer­ vent supporters o f Lon Nol. The

South Vietnamese Ambassador, who airports, close to the city. He adds: wears two watches and is dapper in “ Cambodia’s problems will never be the true Ky style, has claimed “ South solved until Red China is defeated.

Vietnamese troops could open the The nationalists never had any terri­ Mekong to Phnom Penh within a torial ambitions on anyone. The re­ week” . There are 12,000 South Viet­ gion will never ,see peace until we namese in Cambodia. In January they return to the mainland.” had them all ready for evacuation The new Thai government advised down the Mekong in South Viet­ namese navy barges. The communist its embassy that it was free to leave “when it wishes” . Rack home in offensive closing the river ended that dream and they o f all nationalities Thailand, the former military right have the most to fear when the Rouge wing and the press continue to push take the city. the domino theory, headlining acti­ vities o f Thai insurgents daily. The The Taiwanese Ambassador has the military solution to PhnomPenh’s | new government has opted for kick|j problems. He would build two new j ing the US out in a year to eighteen

O f 39 successful contractors for the airlift, only 14 have planes rare appearance to read “an appeal from his country”. The speech, we were told, was straight from the pen 70,000 for GRUNK and 220,000 for o f John Gunther Dean.

FANK, FANK had only 40,000 com ­ With no chance o f a negotiated bat troops who had to be kept at the settlement and GRUNK poised for a front constantly. The rest are all complete military victory, the US support troops. All GRUNK troops Embassy is planning evacuation pro­ have combat experience and through cedures.

One scheme is that they’ll the length of Cambodia, which is cut down the trees and power tines in their supply line, another 200,000 Phnom Penh’s wider streets to land support troops help carry their make­ transport planes there. Meanwhile shift equipment towards Phnom Penh. they fly in US marines from aircraft Some opponents o f GRUNK see carriers o ff Vietnam to shoot anyone the wet season as the salvation of interfering with departing US citizens.

Lon N ol’s government, but the Bri­ No third party nationals, Dean told tish Military Attache in the capital, us, would be evacuated under any who doubts that the regime can sur­ circumstances. We were edgy about vive at all, believes the FANK our chances o f getting out.. We saw a forces’ greater reliance on heavy French journalist getting out his equipment will make them more Khmer Rouge flag and a Sihanouk vulnerable once the rain begins. For scarf — journalists tell o f 21 reporters GRUNK, on the outskirts and by or photographers who were captured While Lon Nol is now an exiled then (August) most likely as the and had their throats cut, regardless vegetable, his cronies today are in of their professed sympathies. government, the rains will be merely their final fling o f ripping o ff the last a welcome relief from the heat.

The Americans will escape this dollars and arranging for life in exile. city, with its stench of death in the * * * While we were there, at one cabinet market places and the parks. Others minister’s house across the Mekong, won’t, and faith in the Americans is a Cambodian rock ’n’ roll band rapidly deteriorating.

At the Ministry of Information entertained guests at his son’s twenty,: th ey explain the Marshal does not On the streets the Chinese express first' birthday party. give interviews. most vehement anti-American feeling.

Today Cambodia is run by the US As elsewhere in Asia, the Chinese are One journalist tells the Minister Embassy and aid organisations who the wealthiest of the merchants and that an interview would help dispel run the food handouts. rumours about the Marshal. shopkeepers.

There are 200,000 The US Embassy is built like a Chinese Cambodians, “What sort o f rumours?” asks the 120,000 of world war II bunker. Inside glass whom hold Taiwanese passports, ma­ Minister. “ Well, that he can talk for a doors, US marines bar the way. king them the people with the most Ambassador John Gunther Dean, late to fear from the Khmer Rouge. Their start” , says the journalist. of Laos and Vietnam, drives around sense of betrayal stems from looking * * * town in a black Manhattan, steel for over 20 years to America to help plated thick enough to take a mortar them fight their Own ideological Marshal Lon Nol seized power, rocket. Being Dean, he needs it. In battles against communism. Today with a little help from the CIA on 1970 a Khmer Rouge sapper wheeled most of their shops are shuttered and March 18, 1970. In 1971 he suffered a cart past the Embassy — the cart barred, protecting the few goods that a stroke paralyzing 80 per cent of his was full o f explosives and the explo­ remain. body. He lived somewhere in Phnom sion killed a bodyguard and the Penh, sometimes at the Presidential chauffeur and injured then Ambass­ ifc Palace which was ringed with anti­ ador, Thomas Enders. aircraft guns since his own airforce On Dean’s desk there proudly Five years ago, Cambodia was bombed the palace in a coup attempt stands a letter from Richard Nixon, poor but not starving. Today, ninety late in 1973. thanking Dean for his help in the five per cent of the country’s goods According to the Filipino Am­ Laotian peace agreement. come from the USA, 2-3 per cent bassador, any bad news was kept At the Embassy, they now talk, from the old soldier. As all news was about a “conditional surrender”. A from other countries, mainly Japan, bad news he was told nothing. His week ago it was a “controlled solu­ and the other 2-3 per cent is genera­ chief military adviser was General tion” . The official policy according ted in internal revenue. Sihanouk Am Wrong, the position of Chief of to Dean is “to strengthen this side recently said: “ The rial is worth less Staff having been vacant since a week until the other side realises it cannot than shit paper.” Last month a plane before we arrived owing to the fact win militarily”. Even Dean, according load of 500 rial notes, the largest denomination (about 20 cents) flew that it’s hard to get starters for the to insiders, knows this is bullshit, but from London job on top o f an army that’s about he’s dealing with a President who has into Phnom Penh to cope with racing inflation.

When to be beaten. In fact Cambodia is a | revived the domino theory. When a asked why a larger note' was not country without a government in its j US Congress, team visited Phnom printed, a government official replied capital city. At 10.30am on our first I Penh in February, Lon Nol made a “they did not wish to cause panic” .

At the doorways of banks, guards with machine guns frisk you on entering and leaving, despite the fact that y o u ’d need a cattle truck for a $ 1,000 robbery.

Today the city survives on the air­ lifts, as does the corruption business.

Thirty nine contracts were le to u t to airlines for ammunition and food to be' brought in to Phnom Penh. Only 14 o f the airlines have planes.

Rice is the staple food flown in daily. Prices are lower for civil ser­ vants and the army, and the standard ration is a bare survival minimum. The r m rest of the rice goes onto the blackRUSKIE RELEASES market where, as in any free enter­ In our latest Two Year Plan — Putsch For prise econom y, those with money Profits’ — Gregorich Youngov has left for can get more. Bourgeois Cambodians Moscow and we’re expecting a grand new are stockpiling in anticipation of a load of 25 kilos solid quality bakerlite LPs long siege. including ‘She Loves You Da, Da, Da’ by A front-line foot soldier gets about $8 and 21 kg of rice for himself der original Beakles and backed by the and family each month. On all fronts Siberian String and Husky Mush Band; soldiers said they wefe getting only Chick (?) Korea and his version of the 13kg — the rest, paid for by the USA, Kruschev Polka. ‘Midnight In Moscow’ finds its way to the black market and W

by John Hal pin and the ProgressiveDothe money ends up in the pockets of berman Choir. low-rank officials and the Swiss bank So, Bon Voyage to our Gregorich, the accounts of the generals. Five hun­ Dick Van Dyke of the Old Left. Bring us dred and seventy tons of rice are back a brand new limpet mine or Jaffle consumed daily in Phnom Penh.

Iron.

Whenever the airlift is forced to slow down or stop, the reserves of R E C O R D C O L L E C T O R - T W O SHOPS: CN R . T O O R A K RO AD A N D D A V IS AVENUE, SOUTH YA R R A , 2 6 7 .1 8 8 5 , ANC rice estimated to last a months are hit.

710 G LE N FE R R IE ROAD, HAW THORN, 8 1 9 .1 9 1 7 .

The Lon Nol government received US$277 million in aid for 1975, including US$100 million 1 for the — Continued from page 1.

morning in town I went to the Mini­ stry of Tourism to get a street map.

Its three floors were empty but open.

Typewriters sat on each desk, ob­ viously untouched in months. A young Khmer explained that, civil servants were paid little and irregu­ larly, and with nothing to do they left at 10 . 00 am to go home, and cook.

Lon Nol’s pet project at that time (in mid-March) was for a zoo in Phnom Penh. He had a team of civil servants working on the plans. Mean­ while the Ministry of Information was planning the introduction of colour TV — in a city where electricity is only turned on three times a week!

Walking round that city, in shops, offices and in taxis, Lon Nol’s pudgy face beams foolishly from the walls.

Journalists said the photos had pic­ tures o f . Sihanouk on the back.

RECORD

COLLECTOR

Top: The Phnom Penh central market where rockets fall regularly, and an AK47 gun sells for $75.

months.

The Philippino ambassador has on his table a battle helmet, a flak jacket hangs on the back o f the chair and an M16 used of (course “only by the guard” , leans in the corner. He is taking nof chances since being hit by shrapnel last year. He believes the Americans will carry Lon Nol out kicking, before he resigns.

These are the embassies left — the nations that Gerald Ford is con­ cerned may no longer trust America’s intentions if it allows the Lbn Nol government to fall.

American ambassador, John Gun­ ther Dean, when questioned about

largest refugee camp is the National Stadium where one water tap in the arena supplies everyone there.

There are a few aid organisations still handing out food but their numbers diminish as the Khmer Rouge approach, fearful as they are of the consequences of their biased handouts. One of the big ones is the Catholic Relief Services which has •been backing up US military adven­ tures in Indo-China for ten years.

The city’s temples are now nearly all refugee camps. Buddha’s heads be­ come useful anchor points for ham­ mocks, archways and ruins become shelters and walls are made from 7-Up (Leeds) or Coca Cola tins.

Walking these streets we also saw several hospitals and as white men, we had entry everywhere. In a make­ shift operating theatre a soldier with a leg gone and no arm was being ope­ rated on. His chest wide open, the only swabs available were used ones.

A Cambodian doctor told us he and his team o f six doctors have done up to 146 operations in a single day, and that they lose 30 per cent on the operating table. They are lucky to be a military hospital because they get drugs from the Americans. For the civilian hospitals where there are three times as many casualties, “there is nothing”. Victims o f shrap­ nel were lying 60 to a corridor at the civilian hospital we saw. Families move in with the wounded because that’s the only way they’ll get fed.

March 18 — the fifth anniversary of the overthrow o f Sihanouk — opened with a rocket attack close by the hotel at dawn. We headed for the Place de la Revolution, where crooked rows o f limbless soldiers sat or knelt on school chairs waiting, as returned “heroes of the republic” , to Receive, some dubious honour fro nj official. To one side, soldiers herded people dressed in rags into an area far from the official dias. Some o f these people were presumably rela­ tives o f the luckless ones, the small percentage of the maimed who were given free food that day and then next day would have gone back to the streets to beg or play a musical instrument, virtually the only jobs open to them.

Everywhere we went there was a common understanding o f who was making money out of the war. Some people said there should be new elec­ tions. When asked about the generals, P.B./Digger o u r Cy eiG driver motioned to his pocket and then pointed at the far­ away saying “ Swiss banks” .

About the Khmer Rouge nearly all were reticent. They are uncertain but no-one believed there will be the bloodbath about which Dean has been repeatedly wiring Washington in an effort to swing Congressional votes. People we talked to called themselves nationalists,' not commu­ nists, nor supporters o f the military.

All wanted peace first, and in our simple exchanges, they brightened at the mention of Sihanouk’s name, symbol as it is of the past and espe­ cially the past peace.

The military propaganda is per­ vasive and much of it specifically anti-communist, but there is also a campaign directed at women. Women in Phnom Penh work as labourers cleaning the streets if they can work at all. Some are in the armies, but for many the war means prostitution and government posters ennoble fucking for soldiers, in fact presenting it as a woman’s duty. A poster on every street corner shows a long-haired man tapping a girl on the shoulder. She is saying: “ Come back when you are in uniform.”

When FANK forces have captured soldiers from a Khmer Rouge wo­ men’s batallion, FANK generals find the women’s behaviour particularly galling. “The generals were so angry” , one diplomat told us. “They com-, plained o f the audacity of these virgins who had the nerve to look a man straight in the eye and who didn’t shuffle their feet demurely like good Khmer women.”

Above: A downtown cinema which, on March 18, was featuring Nights of Violence.

Below: A soldier who lost a leg fighting in Lon Nbl's army, waits to receive a medal.

‘Commodity Import Program’ which now pays for the Americans’ airlift.

Pilots receive $500 a trip, some making five a day from Saigon or Bangkok. At a small street cafe I had breakfast with three American pilots, all working for small Khmer airlines supported and set up by US aid.

They flew supplies daily into other encircled garrisons. White-shirted and brushing little beggar kids away, these were the men who once flew secret night bombing missions and flew around South East Asia for the CIA’s Air America. Today, March 17, they were convinced night bombing was once again going oh. “ Something fishy is happening here. Someone is doing it and it sure as hell ain’t the Cambodians.” | It’s not only the rice that comes from America to be hoarded or sold by privileged ranks: so too does the equipment. Enough Ml 6 s have been supplied for both sides and the civi­ lian population at the fronts as well, yet still the FANK forces are short.

In the market I could buy one for $60 and an AK47 for $75.

US aid will make little difference; as the US military adviser said: “If all aid was cut back to the last dollar, 50 cents of it would find its way into the generals’ pockets.” *

*

contingency plans in the event o f anti-American riots if the aid bill is rejected, admitted their possibility but made no plans. The sight o f John Dean, de facto head of the govern­ ment since his arrival in the country, escaping the final push by the Khmer Rouge might well stir even the most fatalistic locals to action . . . A pos­ sible scenario: US planes taxi along the streets in central Phnom Penh to rescue Dean and his pals, suddenly to be swamped by the rich crying for help, attacked by the routed FANK forces and by the incoming Rouge as betrayers. Dean might call it a “no win situation”.

As dark comes in on Phnom Penh, people climb the trees planted along the wide avenues in Sihanouk’s day, and cut the branches for firewood.

The City Iihrary long ago lost all its books for fuel. Young kids spend all day selling Coke bottles full o f twostroke by the roadside, black mar­ keteers for Phnom Penh’s dwindling public transport system.

*

Phnom Penh, once a city o f 700,000 now has 1.8 million people in the surrounding 250 square miles.

Sixty per cent are hungry and in­ cluded in the top 40 per cent are cyclo drivers earning $1 a day. The P.B./Digger

Page 6

THE DIGGER WMrnm.

155 poets, reclaim ing w om ens experience

by Jenny Pausacker This is one book you have no chance at all of reading standing up in the bookshop, because it contains four to five hundred poems, and if you want to read one of them you might as well accept that you’ll want to read all of them.

There are poems by Known Writers and Unknown Writers and Writers-whohave-published-but-not-so-as-every-D/gger-reader-will-have-read-them. This is a fairly irrelevant comment, made to get it out of the way. Because the exercise of reading Mother I'm Rooted is not one of star-spotting —“ I predict that Jane Brown will be 1984’s answer to A.D.Hope, a nice little talent to watch.”

The book turns out as a collection of poems, not of poets, and that’s an im­ portant first step towards one of the aims of feminism, the demystifying of occupations. After all, the same system that say, “If you know about science you can’t know about the humanities” , or, “If you change nappies, you don’t change fuses,” says that if you write poems you are a poet and had better try to get them published in the right places and then you will be a good poet and will have a duty to write more poems. Whereas it’s pretty obvious that a lot of us will only want/need to write a few poems in our lifetimes, but there seems no reason why these should not be as valuable and considered as ser­ iously as each individual poem by a writer whose name you know before you start reading. In a recent book of feminist essays the author’s name was given as a footnote to the article —here it is, if you want to know, but it isn’t real­ ly that important. The names of the poets are there in prominent type through­ out Mother I'm Rooted, but the general effect is the same. The poets aren’t pushed apart by two line biographies, but stand together as Australian women poets with only names and poems. The photographs illustrate the book, not the poets.

What creates the unity of the collection? Well, it’s not style, because poems range from the concrete poem, W OMEN S T R U A T E to <i fully conventional use of language. There are poems like the lyrics of a rock song, and poems like conversations, and poems which send up the lang­ uage of advertisements, and poems like surrealistic paintings, and poems ....

And it’s not a unity of mood either, because there’s bloody nearly every kind of mood you could think of, which is what makes it such an exhausting read.

There’s even funny poems, on a very individual definition of humour.

Mrs Genevieve Parslow, after trying to poison her own family with me(n)tal poison, went to the local police station and told them “I AM A WITCH AND THOUSANDS OF YEARS OLD.’ “ I have got to kill everyone in this world. Even babies.”

There are also long poems and short poems, poems centering on one image and poems that don’t use images at all, poems about people and poems about concepts, simple poems and highly complex poems. It’s an amazing variety of responses.

And the unity I was talking about? Well, evidently it lies in the subject matter. Women’s experience.Mother I'm Rooted covers a wide range of wom­ en’s experience —it’s not just the liberated woman’s experience, but the ex­ perience of suburban women, old women, happy and unhappy women. (The fact that the odd man —double meaning perfectly intentional —has manag­ ed to slip a poem in under a woman’s name doesn’t discredit the book’s pur­ pose in any way. Male writers have been parasites on women’s experience for centuries —it’s going to take us a while to really get it back.) This is what makes the book as a whole. There it is —so many things we have thought and felt as women, said clearly back to us by so many women. Reading through Mother I'm Rooted is a cumulative experience. Insight enriches insight, and from reading poetry you come to find yourself evolving theories.

By their poems ye shall know them: poem.

All I know about poetry is that it has something to do with sex, something very close to sex, polarised sex — all the words erect and pointing in one direction — urgent — or not urgent in the least but ponderous and heavy with slow rhythms and long, deep sighs.

Others prefer craft, making an art of it, delicately and with fine workmanship interweaving bodies in words lovingly.

Some poems fall anyhow, all of a heap anywhere, dishevelled, legs apart in loneliness and desperation, and you talk about standards.

Sylvia Kantarizis

Non-Violent protest

This morning I won’t open my eyes.

The sun, can sit by itself on the chair out there in the arbour so nicely arranged.

Visitors point it out to one another, How nice for the oldies they say.

Jane Austen, ag “R un mad as 1 * * *

This is how I know her: You hou! my friend Rosa gat-toothed Rosa the trooper the fuckin’ little ripper copping it sweet in the kitchen comer.

Mistress of the guffaw, the nudge and the sly twinkle, she guiltily rolls a skinny fag with her elegant long fingers (nails a mite grubby but we have a new front garden).

She grins & shrugs a fine shoulder at the world’s bum deals.

Wosa my Wosa sing the children Rosa our Rosa come home now heavy-footed down the hallway.

Tea’s on the table and I want to see your gumboots & pistachio nuts and the way you squint when you smile.

Propositions

After the last glass has been c They will observe her mascara The last Dietrich eyelid dropp A limbless puppet of the part Dancing out of tune

After the last kiss melts like i She will drift out across passr Notice the lovers have fingers The nights always were numbi The harlequins have torn then This girl will find herself Faced with a weighted raft A lack of spontaneity It has always been this way Sexless when there’s too mud

— Helen Garner

This morning I won’t open my eyes.

Oh how they’ll rattle the breakfast tray snap the thermometer and keep my teethbut that hat can walk by itself on the balcony, peer out through its gauze-knotted eyes at the view and clutch at the rail when the silk-swathe trembles.

This morning I won’t open my eyes.

I’ll know by smell what they bring, the scent, the soap; and the lilac handkerchief I can smell its colour through all the layers of fancy paper.

The biscuits will keep till .they’ve gone.

These poems are taken fro hi j anthology of poems by Australi Jennings and published by Outfc Outback Press have also just ] book of poems, Come To Me M; Mother I ’m Rooted is review« My Melancholy Bahy is reviewei

— Vicki Viidikas

Inauguration of t] Ida

Today I won’t open my eyes, They can show the cake with its mocking candles to my ears and my nose, and sister can pin that note on the door: ‘Don’t be upset by your mother, She’s playing up today’.

Washing dishes, as expected, you said shyly “I don’t have time to read”.

I turned the glossy pages for you as I would for a child and we came to a photograph of the world’s most beautiful jewels.

“Would you murder for those, Ida”, and firmly adjusting your apron, you said “yes”.

— Christine Churches

— Rosemary Florrimell

~ ~ -----

i have a fear sitting here in this gigantic kitchen where the light throws glares of jaundiced stares on that wriggling hole in the floor, will the mouse pop out sniff about and run for the crumbs on my shoes then shocking, shocking up my stocking and into that other hole?

Virginia Coventry

i have the fear as i sit here perfectly unstill waiting and debating how long i’ll have to keep my legs together I guess i could hide right inside ' the blankets of my bed if it weren’t for the snake snoring there We are just getting into the ghetto. Not a literal physical ghetto, but a ghet­ to of collective understanding, women’s society as somewhere we can actual­ ly live, rather than as somewhere we go briefly to get a rest before returning to a male environment. For us to achieve a ghetto is a good and neccessary thing, but it can be depressing at times, because it’s also quite clear to us that it’s necessary to break out of the ghetto too. Theories of return to the mat­ riarchy or of natural female superiority due to innate female qualities are tem­ pting —they offer a lot of consolation to the oppressed. But they won’t do, finally. It’s not enough just to turn the present order upside down.

So we have to do more than see the class of men as enemies to the class of women. To see the enemy is not to understand him —we have to define what we are up against, and only then will we be able to work out a strategy. You will not gain that sort of understanding from this anthology. And you will not see much of women as workers, professionals, domestic workers, indust­ rial workers, workers for our own ideals. Work keeps women going, just as much as it does men, but it is something that women’s culture hasn’t yet be­ gun to explore. This isn’t so much a criticism as a reflection of where we are at, at the moment. One of the powers of art is, hopefully, to make us dissat­ isfied.

A last word of advice: don’t skip the introduction. It’s got a lot of things you don’t expect to find in introductions to anthologies. Like this statement. “ A lot of people write poetry, and some people read poetry. Many more people wouldn’t touch poetry with a fifty foot barge pole because most poet­ ry they might happen across is, for want of a better word, male poetry. It is posturing, in-group, obscure, tricksy, mystified bull-shit.” Now if that’s what the editor thinks, the editor, mind, doesn’t that get you interested .... ?

i sit, scared to shit thinking of Leda and the Sws that did always turn me on but can one good myth deserve a let me see . . .

‘Mickey and Me’? but how do i know it’s not Minnie?

Joanne Bums

/

Page 7

A p ril 1 0 — M ay 5

Door in Berlin

e

15:

ten as yen chase; )ut do not faint.”

Mother I ’m jiooted, a new an women edited by Kate >ack Press. mblished Kate Jennings’ first y Melancholy Bahy. id at left and Come To Me d at right.

irunk has run ed y

ce into despair vity missing >red suits

Me T oday

It was silent today As loud as the singing behind tight lips.

I said it — to myself that I was silent, And it echo, echo, echoed, in that hollow drum — like space drum — tight space, Til even a shrieking and a shaking couldn’t shift it.

Damn it tight lips Speak tighter lips Shoot lips Shout lips Bust lips Bust mouth — — Aha The last man’s head right off CHOP.

i desire — Helen Bansemer

he M ou sek afear C lu b

nother?

I think I chopped a bit too much I think I chewed too little I think I’ll chop another piece And then spit out the gristle.

— N o e lle R attra y

The keys. They lock up everything.

Cupboards, bicycles, doors, Cars and libraries and fears.

We played a game of postman, My child and I. ‘I knock, You let me in, okay?’

He smiled and understood.

In boots and scarf I braved the snow For mail. I knocked, he ran and turned The knob to double-locked.

A sweaty panic on the landing.

Then I attacked the door.

Shoulder and fists to the oak.

It suddenly splintered down.

‘Look what you made me do!’

I shouted. Fishwife as mama.

In retrospect, how fine In this walled-up, locked-up city, To smash a door down all alone.

In films it takes two men.

Penelop^ Nelson Paranoia

for the last few days now there’s been someone else in my head she started out i think in one of the remote unused areas but she’s getting closer and says she wants a share of the action she’d like to do some of my talking she says. she’s been using my eyes for some time discreetly taking a view every time i’m not looking, she wants to get out. i don’t think my friends would really like to know her with her nasty insinuations and her endless repertoire of slimy comments. fuck her. then again, she can’t stay there — i’d go nuts. i think i’ll get rid of her. eliminate her. like it was in the late movie . . . a bullet through the head a vampire at the neck . . . i’d go . . . but she’d go with me . . . but wait — there’s a few things i’ve got to do . . . my first million, the nobel prize, and not forgetting the guy down the street with the lovely balls. perhaps a hypnotherapist could coo her into sensibility and render her powerless . . . aahhmm . . . perhaps a numbing snort of dope.

Pamela Cocabola Brown

A rtful fem inist poet swipes Pooh-Bah program

by Meaghan Morris

Kate Jennings’ first book of poems, Come To Me My Melancholy Baby, has just been published by Outback Press. Kate Jennings is a feminist poet.

That identity is still what one might call a disturbing anomaly in the other­ wise happily organised Land of Literature. A few decades ago most of the poets settled down there somewhere over the rainbow to fight epic battles undisturbed with stray phrases or their souls; and in odd moments to chase butterflies in complicated ways incomprehensible to the uninitiated who lived this side of the rainbo^v, but who occasionally peeped their heads over to try to figure out what the poets were doing.

The feminist poet disturbs this arrangement. She heaves herself heavily over, hobnail boots and all, denting the rainbow and squashing a few butter­ flies en route. So the poets and their fellow delicate travellers find that she is not a “real” poet. Too crude, too direct. But on the other side, of the non­ poets, she is received with equal suspicion. Either she doesn’t trail enough of the odour of the ethereal which marks a “real” poet whom nobody reads but everybody recognises, or she trails a bit too much of it; she can’t be a “pure” feminist. Too subtle, too wavery from the direct line to liberation. . Publication makes the identity of the feminist poet all the more precarious.

The genteel poetess is safe as a role; so is the writer who says she just happens to be a woman but so what etc. The movement which these women often re­ nounce has, at least, made it possibleTor them to have a public pose as artists which is received with some kindly consideration. The feminist poet is only safe as long as she remains comfortably underground. There she can either read sweetly in the sugar circle of sisterly consistency, all writing simply “self-expression” and it better be the same as everyone else’s; or she can write rage poems with everyone else in some separatist backwoods where there’s noone to be frightened but the odd male platypus. But publish a book, put it out and want feminists and poets and everypne else who is neither to read it; then if the critics don’t get you the movement will. What is this lady? Wants to be a male? Got a superstar complex? Those comments echo in and out with the other response; “ I’ve got nothing against the lady, but she’ll never be a poet . . . ” That I feel it necessary to say I am not talking about Kate Jennings the person is perhaps an index of what I am talking about. That it is still extremely difficult for a committed woman artist to publicly take up that stance in her work and be accepted as both feminist and artist, whoever she is, wherever she lives. The pressures from all sides are enormous to conform to the more comfortable self-definitions made available to the poet by society (and let us not forget that society comfortably includes the women’s movement). That is the first thing I would want to say about Come To Me My Melancholy Baby; that it is a record of the creation of an identity for a woman which has been made virtually impossible. Kate Jennings writes of all the things that make it difficult to be a feminist poet; loneliness, the distresses and “temptation” of love, the distresses and “comforts” (ha!) of sisterhood, the mirage of being able to go mad, the struggle with a language and an art form that seems so distorted and damaged from the start that the whole practice of poetry seems contradictory. But it is in the difficulty of writing these things that Kate Jennings succeeds in creating her identity, in the leap written into “ All That Nothing Causing All That Pain”; When you are crying like that how long before you stop?

I’ve stopped.

The distance between the crying and the stopping is written from the first poem to the last, and through every poem in the book.

Come To Me My Melancholy Baby bears the dedication “ For my friends, and, of course, Panama, in the hope that in the process of revolution we will reinvent love and not pass this way again” . Many of the poems speak of the absolute failure to reinvent love in the process of revolution to date; so, at the end of “Words Are AÜT have To Take Your Heart Away' 7“ We live in the space of the idea of freewheeling loving.

Words are all I have.

If there are no unmuted poems of love reinvented —and how could there be —the words are reinventing a way of writing about love. In the poem “ One 'Kiss Too Many” (which incidentally brilliantly revives the lost art of effective and splendid cursing) the poet writes; I will be fettered imaginatively and emotionally if I cannot be more involved with matters other than love has died, friendship has faded.

Yes; but then in writing of these things, and in writing of madness, Kate Jennings has taken on the hardest possible matters that a poet these days can attempt. There have been more awful poems written about love than about anything else in the history of literature, and I wouldn’t mind betting most of them have been written in the last ten years. The awful madness poem, I would say, belongs almost entirely to that period. We have effectively talked and analysed love and madness to death, so that one hardly has any reality in our lives any more, and the other has assumed so much for everybody it’s got none for anybody. In best boomerang fashion, language has had its revenge; unless you’re totally milk-eared, the words of love and existential anguish and co. are virtually unpronouncable. The real wonder of Come To Me My Melan­ choly Baby is that Kate Jennings has been able to reinvent those languages; with a little help, not from the Great Artists from whom we’ve been taught to expect such feats, but from country and western songs and other impossible feminist poets. To write of love and pain and get away with it is an extra­ ordinary achievement; yet to do it in a simple and direct fashion without always bringing in Tutenkhamen’s left toenail and other such esoteric signs of Poetry is, I think, a sign of some hope for all of us.

But writing simple and direct poetry is a very artful business; and Kate Jennings’ cunning success is due to an admirable resistance to the let-it-all-dripout school. The way she has worked and worked on her art to the point where that impossible simplicity became possible may be read through the range of styles in the book as a whole. There are some poems there (e.g. “ Piecemeal Chatelaine” , “it was a quiet room . . .” ) which read much more like conven­ tional Poetry in their relative obscurity and mystifying impersonal privacy.

But their place in the book is an essential one. They show Kate learning to master the conventions of Unconventional Poetry, then leaving it behind, keeping only the need to work on language to create something new. The history of this learning process and its outcome (and, among other things, the history of the creation of the feminist poet) is spelt out in what seems to me the finest poem in the book, “ A Poem For My Therapist or Psychiatry Is His Trade (Peter Jonathon, loving respect)”; Well, here I am,

a flick knife swearing pleasant experience writing you a poem not for therapy but because poetry is my trade.

I should add that Kate’s poems do not at all lend themselves to the random quotation I have been using with gay abandon through necessity.

I would like to be able to praise this book so that I could wind up with a fanfare proclaiming Copie To Me My Melancholy Baby the finest book of poetry produced in Australia since when. I can’t, for the basic reason that I hardly read poetry any more now that I don’t have to. Of course I could al­ ways pretend that I do, and make my proclamation anyway; but I won’t because I want to say something even more basic. I hate poetry. I always have.

Practically none of the feats of comprehension I performed as a good little girl excelling at formal education has stayed with me, and I had never read a book of poetry for pleasure until the publication of the work of the American feminist poet Robin Morgan in Monster. Now, with Come To Me My Melan­ choly Baby, and the publication of the anthology Mother I ’m Rooted, there is something else to read with pleasure. It is more than a matter of simple ideological empathy, though obviously that is enough for me. Ezra Pound wrote donkeys years ago about resuscitating the dead art of poetry. He only succeeded for those poets who are still (in large numbers and in dreadful earnest) retracing the lines on his tomb. Otherwise it’s deader than ever. I think that poets like Kate Jennings are swiping the survival-for-poetry pro­ gramme that the poetic Pooh-Bahs have been announcing for 75 years right from under their professional pariah noses. And they’re putting it into prac­ tice. If Kate Jennings isn’t a “ real” poet, then I hope she never becomes one for the sake of poetry; and if Kate Jennings isn’t a “real” poet, then I say, ALL POWER to phony poets (artful ones).........

Page 8

April 10 — May 5

THE DIGGER I

NICARAGUA §A traitor is one who wants to sell his country

“Tachito’,’ the m an who won tomorrow’s election

Generals trading transistors for Tim or

by Joan Barnes

by Helen Hill

The recently leaked intelligence reports of an imminent Indone- j sian invasion of East (Portuguese) Timor are all part of an Indone- i sian campaign to break the morale of the people and their desire >| for independence.

I was in East Timor while these reports were hitting the front pages of Australian dailies and from what \ could see the Indo­ nesian campaign was in fact achieving the opposite of its in ten -\ tions. Every day the people of East Timor are becoming more opposed to, integration with Indonesia, and more of them are supporting FRETILIN, the leading independence prirty.

In January this year FRETILIN formed a coalition with the Timor­ ese Democratic Union (UDT) another pro-independence party which has, . the support o f the elite in the towns and the more traditional elements in the villages. The coalition was for­ med mainly to oppose the third party, APODETI, which is campaig­ ning for integration with Indonesia.

Between them FRETILIN arid UDT have the support of well over 90 per cent o f the population, although FRETILIN is ahead o f UDT both in numbers and in carrying out their programme.

In the weeks following the April 25 coup in Lisbon, it was UDT which managed to gain most support as it played pn people’s fear o f change and desire to remain with Portugal.

However, with the coming to power pf the Armed Forces Movement in Portugal and the realisation by UDT’s leaders that decolonisation was the priority of the new Portuguese go­ vernment, there was no alternative but to favour independence.

But FRETILIN had got in first with their call for independence and within a few months had mobilised an impressive number o f people in villages to build schools for literacy classes in their own languages, to set up marketing co-operatives to Under­ cut thetip-offprices oi-lhe t funesT.' and to prepare in some areas for a possible military invasion by Indo­ nesia by forming local militias armed with only knives and spears.

The whole emphasis of * FRETILIN’S work has been to en­ courage local initiatives to prepare the people for independence., I asked some people in Dili Why they thought FRETILIN was now so much more popular than UDT. They replied that although the coalition has meant that there is now little difference between the two major parties (particularly in relation to independence), people generally

support a party which looks most serious about actually governing the Country. In this respect, FRETILIN was far ahead o f the UDT, especi­ ally as its self-reliance projects were j actually operating in many of the villages. .

Although not many people in East Timor know a great deal about life in Indonesia there is a strong feeling against integration. This is partly based on the attitude that integration would be a,form of ‘selling out’ of some sort of rights.

When I asked the people of one village I visited what they thought of APODETI, they replied, “ Why is it that some people want to run the country and others want to sell it?” .

This theme is also common in the slogans one sees scrawled on walls in Dili; two common ones are “ Down wjtjh traitors” and “ A traitor is one who wants to sell his country”.

Another aspect o f anti-integration feelirig is that Indonesia is a relatively recent creation compared to the four centuries o f Portuguese rule in East Timor. One traditional chief pointed out to me that the Indonesian nation - was united by its struggle against Dutch colonialism. Prior to that Indo­ nesia did not exist, only separate king­ doms. “ Our relationship with the Portuguese goes,¿back more than 400 years and has affected our culture so that it is totally different even to the culture of Indonesian Timor, and certainly that o f Java.”

The people living near the Indo­ nesian border, in the enclave o f OeCusse, seem to be among those most vigorously bpposed to rule from Jakarta. In Oe-Cusse I was told that many people from Indonesian Timor come across the border for medical treatment and to go to the markets, and that many have stayed. The people o f Oe-Cusse are also aware o f the dissatisfaction o f Indonesian Ti­ morese with the government in Ja­ karta and claim they had been warned

Helen Hill

by many Indonesian Timorese not to support integration with Indonesia.

In fact, the tide of public opinion in all parts of East Timor has gone so much against integration with Indo­ nesia that APODETI, the party which supports this policy, has had to resort to some really extraordinary means to get members. Initially their form o f recruiting was simply to send o ff a pile of membership cards to a sympathetic chief and get him to distribute them to as many people as possible. He would be given a tran­ sistor radio or some sugqr or oil for his trouble. (The radio would also en­ able him to listen to Radio Kupang broadcasting pro-integration propa­ ganda in the local languages o f East Timor.) The APODETI membership records simply consisted of the num­ ber o f cards which had been printed and despatched to chiefs in this way.

In some areas they were actually dis­ tributed, but in other areas where there was no co-operation, people ' were,told that when East Timor be-; came part o f Indonesia they would be given a radio, or a tractor or a motorbike if they were a member iof APODETI. I met countless former members of APODETI at FRETILIN rallies who told me they had joined APODETI for this reason.

In the FRETILIN office in Dili I saw some thousands of APODETI membership cards returned by for­ mer APODETI members and a pile of letters from people in all parts of the country explaining why they had joined APODETI at first and then left to join FRETILIN. In mariy cases they had originally joined APODETI

Picturé a jungle-covered country whose president owns 25 per cent of the arable land, the country’s only aiirline and shipping line, the largest cement company and textile faetbries, newspapers, TV, hotels and banks while 9 9 1 per cent o f the people have rio safe drinking water.

That’s no fictional cliche — that’s Nicaragua today.

The scene is less than tranquil in the heart of Central America.

Sources in Washington fear that with the present political divisions in Nic­ aragua, the best organized political force may be the underground Com­ munist Party. They are worried about the specter o f a new Portugal rising out o f the Gulf o f Mexico.

Nicaragua today is still feeling the aftershocks from apolitical earth­ quake which struck last December — an earthquake which shook the gov­ ernment more than the devastating quake of 1972.

Guerillas from the revolutionary Sandinista National Liberation Front Taecause of family pressure or pres­ (FSLN) invaded a party in honour suré from a village chief. of the US ambassador and made o ff In thé last two months APODETI with Nicaragua’s foreign minister and has been taking up increasingly de­ ambassador to the US, high exec­ fensive positions and none of their utives o f the Bank o f America and ordinary members are allowed to Esso-Standard Oil operations in Nic­ speak on party policy. The party | aragua, the mayor o f Managua (Nic­ has withdrawn from all committees aragua’s principal city) and even some of the government on which it was members o f the president’s own fam­ represented along with the other par­ ily. ties. It has refused to take part in the Within three days the FSLN kid­ local elections for village chiefs which nappers flew to Cuba and released the Armed Forces Movement have their hostages, but not before all o f organised in which FRETILIN and the nation’s newspapers and the ofUDT co-operate. Recently, following "ficial radio network publicized a the banning o f its radjo programme 12,000 word communique denouni for 45 days,*APODETI announced cing the regime o f General Anastasio that it did not recognise the Portu­ (“Tachito” ) Somoza — the first crit­ guese Administration any more. icism o f the government heard This tactic could backfire against through official channels in the 40 APODETI, or it could turn out to be years the Somoza family had ruled. a very clever mov:. A Portuguese The guerillas also secured freedom army officer told me that, according for 14 o f their members and $1 to the Armed Forces Movement’s million. Somoza^ did not agree to programme for decolonisation, they their demand for an increase in the wanted to give the parties as much influence as possible .in the forming i minimum wage for all,workers, but of policy. But i f any of them refused,; the general did raise the salaries o f to co-operate, as APODETI appeared' his soldiers. to be doing now, and the administra­ Then the government clamped tion could riot càrry out its prog­ down on all sectors o f the popul­ ramme of decolonisation in such areas ation. It proclaimed a state o f mart­ as education, health, the economy ial law, imposed strict censorship and local government, then there ¿ and announced the. creation o f a woüld be no alternative but to call special counter-insurgency unit with­ on the assistance of Indonesia and in the National Guard to crush the Australia.' ÀPODETI, sensing its fai­ FSLN. The government also estab­ lure to gain support by normal means lished a permanent military tribunal may be waiting for just such a break­ down. In any case, it seems that Indo­ to deal with “crimes against the nesia is claiming that such a failure in internal and external security of the the decolonisation programme has al­ state.” ready occurred and could use it as an The following month, January, excuse to move in militarily. the military tribunal was trying one

of the nation’s wealthiest and most people and destroyed 90 per cent influential men^ after the president of the commercial establishments, — newspaper editor Pedro Joaquin Relief aid from the US and internÇhamorro. The state o f martial law national agencies was used for land was re-classified as a state o f war. speculation and black market pur­ International newsagencies couldn’t chases by public officials and Nat­ file reports from Nicaragua with­ ional Guardsmen. Even badly needed out approval from the censors — food was taken by the corrupt o f­ many messages just never left the ficials. country - the National University Two years following the earth­ was stormed, students were arrested, quake, little rebuilding has taken house to house searches were under­ place. Refugees live in tents around way, and people stayed in their the edge o f the capital city, with homes at night, for fear of the the city’s centre cordoned o ff and military equipment always in the virtually dead. streets.

Somoza himself has a financial The FSLN then released a com ­ foothold in almost every sector of munique which spoke o f beginning the econom y o f Nicaragua, as well “a new stage in the struggle for as investments in Guatemala and national liberation.” In fact, the Costa Rica. But beyond his econ­ struggle has been going on since omic control is his political import­ the 19 2 0 ’s — when guerillas moved ance in the region. Somoza is rep­ to end the US military occupation uted to be the one man whose of Nicaragua which had been in ef­ actions affect all o f Central America. fect since 1912. The US military And his tactics abroad may parallel was forced out in 1933, but it his tactics at home. In the space left a trained National Guard Force, of a few months ih the spring o f commanded by US-appointed Gen­ 1974, Somoza was charged with help­ eral Anastasio (“Tacho”) Somoza, ing to rig an election in Guatemala father o f the present ruler. and with plotting to overthrow the Although there were no armed government of Honduras. confrontations for the next 20 years While Somoza plays a pivotal popular discontent remained high. role in Central America, his people Finally, “ Tacho” Somoza was assass­ suffer from ever-worsening condit­ inated by a leftist in 1956. Two ions. Conservative estimates put un­ years later, a former freedom fighter employment at 35. per cent in rural formed what was to become the areas. Eighty one per cent o f the FSLN. rural homes have no sanitary facil­ Opposition to the Somoza reg­ ities. Seven doctors and 18 hospital ime seems now to be more than a beds service every 10,000 people.

Forty per cent of the population radical phenomenon, however. Before “Tachito” was re-elected in Septem­ is illiterate.

Since 1973, the people have par­ ber, 1974, opposition forces led by ticipated in a wave o f strikes and Chamorro urged the electorate not demonstrations. The protests have to vote at all. Although voting is included students, Standard Fruit mandatory, less; than 50 per cent employees, and hospital, textile, con­ of the people cast ballots. struction and metal workers.

Throughout the entire campaign Still, Somoza continues to push Somoza drove around the country an image of stability. Late last year in an armour-plated black Cadillac, the Wall Street Journal published an surrounded by trucks o f soldiers ad by the Somoza government which with riiachine guns. He gave election called the 1972 earthquake a “ phen­ speeches from a bulletproof glass omenon of development” and wel­ booth, called by Nicaraguans the comed foreign investors to a stable “ticket booth” . The day before the political environment. And just two" jlf|çtiq n Somoza was dubbed by one weeks before the FSLN kidnapping, newspaper the “candidate who won Nicaraguan police claimed to have tomorrow’s election” . the FSLN guerillas “completely under When the ballots were counted he won by a 20 to 1 margin. Various control” . voting irregularities were reported.

Somoza’s line is more optimistic In fact, the number o f people regis­ than that taken unofficially by Latin tered to vote in the election exceed­ American specialists in the US govern­ ed the voting population by 240,000. ment. These'sources have conceded “ Scandals o f the type o f Water­ that the FSLN action had a trem­ gate occur everyday in Latin America endous affect on the stability o f and we simply laugh about them,” Somoza’s regime. Fearing that Nic­ Somoza has said. aragua could turn into another Port­ Corruption is the main gripe of ugal, officials in Washington are back­ the more moderate opposition. The ing Somoza as the one strong'man extent of this corruption was reveal­ capable o f keeping a lid on the ed in the aftermath o f the 1972 country. earthquake which, killed . 10,000 —From Pacific News Service.

Brazil’s Indians are the great scientists of the jungle Imperialist, keep off the trees I said.

No use: you walk backwards', admiring your own footprints.

— Margaret Atwood When the Portuguese arrived in Brazil four centuries ago, there was an Indian population o f at least one million. Today- the total Indian, population o f Brazil is thought to be no more than 120,000 people.

The conquering Portuguese from the outset regarded the Indians as either slave labour to be exploited, or pagan savages to be converted — and very often as both. Most of the Indians who have survived four cen­ turies of steady genocide — by way of disease, slavery and cold-blooded massacre — ended up in the remoter parts o f the country where contact with whites was limited or non­ existent.

But through the ambitious road­ building schemes o f recent military governments, more and more o f these previously remote tribes hatre been “contacted”, as it is euphemistically called; and along with new roads come cattle ranchers, miners and land development companies eager for vir­ gin land. In the wake o f the roadbuilders come the camp 'followers, liquor sellers, brothel keepers and squatters.

Most o f the forest people don’t fight back. They are soon enmeshed in the money econom y, and easily succumb to it.

The inevitable consequences of

this encounter are glossed over by Brazilian government officials and businessmen. The country’s most im­ portant civil engineering contractor said recently, “ The Indians? There aren’t any. It’s all been exaggerated by the press.”

Far from being exaggerated by 1 the press, the destruction of the Indian peoples in Brazil is largely ignored. ^Vhat is known as “the Indian problem” went unnoticed by | the press until last year' when the Waimari-Atroari o f the northern Amazon killed Gilberto Pinto, a leading government expert on Brazil’s indigenous people'.

The^ basic doctrine o f the govern­ ment is simple. In the words of General Bandeira de Mello, former head o f Funai, (the government body set up to “ protect” the Indians), “The Indians cannot be allowed to become an obstacle to national de­ velopment.”

Funai was set up in 1968 to replace the completely corrupt Indian protection service. Its original charter promised ‘ to protect the rights of the indigenous peoples to life, cult­ ural freedom and land. In December 1973, by which time it was already apparent that Funai had failed to stem the tide o f “ progress” , a new Indian statute, was approved by con­ gress. This, in theory, strengthened the protection offered the Indians by barring access to them by scien­ tific, religious or educational mis­ sions. But in practice they continue to suffer constant erosion by in­ vasion, while Funai officials in Brasilia look the other way.

A well documented recent case involves the Kadiweu reserve in the Mato Grosso — a plateau of savannah

and tropical rainforest — where 344,527 hectares out of the total 373,024 hectares belonging to the tribal reserve have been leased by Funai to local farmers.

Ironically, the land was granted to the Kadiweus in 1903 in belated recognition of their participation in the Brazilian war against Paraguay; Information dealing with the Kadiweus’ present plight has been collected by a local school teacher, Pedro Taves, who is a frequent visitor to the reserve. According to Taves, Funai collected '400,000 cruzeiros in rents during 1973, applying vir­ tually none of this money to the benefit o f. the Kadiweus. When O Estado de Sao Paulo attempted to publish an article on the subject of these abuses, which are theoretically illegal under the 1973 statute, it was cut out by the censors. Meanwhile, the leaseholders of the Indian lands have formed an association to “de­ fend their interests against the autho­ rities, especially Funai”.

Other individuals seeking to pub­ licise and remedy the situation have formed a new pressure group, the Sociedade Indigenista Brasileira, which seeks to educate public opin­ ion and comment on government policies. The Church, too, has been speaking out in defence of the Indians’ rights, and some spokespeople have admitted that the Church’s methods arid policies have often been wrong in the past.

Some o f Funai’s field workers, including the internationally known Vilas Boas brothers, have spoken out against the invasion of Indian lands, and the policy of contacting pre­ viously isolated tribes regardless of

the usually, disastrous consequences.

One young Funai worker, Antonio Cotrim, was dismissed last year after saying he was ‘tired of being a grave digger’; and Claudio ' and Orlando Vilas Boas are shortly to retire. For many workers, the con­ flict between their desire to be of use to the Indians and the actual ! role of Funai as an arm of the I Brazilian state is irreconcilable. Gil- j berto Pinto, who had worked in the ! government Indian service for 33 years since he was 13, left a docu­ ment. spelling out his own doubts about his work.

While whité, workers leave Funai filled with doubt and disillusionment," a tentative national Indian conscious­ ness has been developing. Overcoming traditional enmities, Indian peoples are beginning to form a united front as the best .hope of making some gains, vIn April last year, nine caciques (tribal chiefs) from different tribes met for the first time in Diamantina, Mato Grosso, and talked about their problems. Agreement was easy. The basic problem for every tribe is the invasion and seizure o f their lands, which means the end of their inde­ pendent and self-sufficient way of life.

Then, in October, indigenous peoples from five countries — Brazil, Bolivia, Argentina, Paraguay and Venezuela — met near Asuncion in Paraguay for what they described as the first American Indian parlia­ ment in the southern hemisphere.

As a long term aim, they are seeking a permanent voice at the United Nations.

After seven days’ debate they issued a long document denouricing “the white man’s negative actions”

and clairriing the return o f their lands: “The lanjj belongs to the Indian. The Indian is the land itself.”

The Brazilian government sees things differently however. It has consistently chosen to disregard the productive Indian system o f shifting agriculture, in favour o f fixed Euro­ pean methods, with disastrous results.

Almost a year ago the magazine The Ecologist carried a story called, “ Brazil: the way to dusty death”, by Peter Bunyard, which talked in part about the consequences of ignoring the Indians’ sensitive adaption to the rainforest environment.

Dr. Mary McNeil, a specialist in lateritic soils (soils rich in iron, man­ ganese, tin and aluminium, which in time are oxidised in the air and form a hard brick-like ' substance which makes an unworkable hardpan over the surface) talked in the article about the Brazilian government’s attempts <to farm the lateritic /soils of the tropical rainforests. “ At Igta, an equatorial wonder­ land in the heart of the Amazon , basin, the Brazilian government set up an agricultural colony.

Earthmoying machinery wrenched a clearing from the forest and crops were planted. From the ' very beginning there were ominous signs of the presence of laterite. “ Blocks of ironstone stood out on the surface in some places: in others nodules of the laterite lay just below a thin layer of soil.

What had appeared to be a rich soil, with a promising cover of humus, disintegrated after the first or second planting. Under the equatorial sun the irori-rich soil began to bake into brick.

In less than five years the cleared fields became virtually pavements

o f rock. Today lata is a drab despairing co l o ny . . .

“The dismal failure at lata is all too typical . . . Yet Brazilian agronomists and indeed experts from FAO (the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisa­ tion) still believe it possible to establish such an agricqltural sys­ tem in Amazonia primarily be­ cause they want to develop large settlements o f population.

“The terrible irony is that the indigenous tribes, who are the only people to have developed a satisfactory and long-lasting sys­ tem of agriculture in the Amazon, are fast having to abandon their way of life — that is if they sur­ vive at all — in the face of the white man’s ruthless advance into the jungle . . .

“Many agronomists sneer at [the Indians’] slash and burn shifting cultivation. But not only is shifting cultivation the sole method of agriculture which ap­ pears to leave the forest un­ damaged over any length o f time, it can also be as productive, if not more so, than a conventional agri­ cultural system based on perma­ nent fields”.

“Brazil” , added Peter Bunyard, “in one generation is determined to shake itself free o f anything that Seems outmoded and laborious in its attempt to make itself into a power- , ful and respected nation.

“To the Brazilians, the Indians in the Amazon represent more than just backward, archaic man; they represent nature, and nature is some­ thing execrably gross and inefficient, to be banished from the earth as soon as man can bring his dazzling knowledge and technological ingen­

uity to bear on the problem.”

Perhaps the most realistic hope for the Indians is that the goveriimerit will suddenly decide that re­ quire their expertise to exploit the resources of the forest more effic­ iently.

With pesent schemes o f colonisation close to collapse in many cases, the government is paying more respectful attention to men like Pro­ fessor Pedro Paolo Lomba, who argues that “the Indians are the great scientists o f the jungle.”

Lomba, who is the architect o f Cidade Humboldt, the laboratory city set up in the Aripuana National Park in 1973; argues that only the Indians can teach whites how to live in the difficult environment o f the Amazon jungle. If the Indians are seen as having a technical contri­ bution to make to modern Brazil, rather than as twentieth century misfits, then some at least may be able to survive on their own terms, and not at the bottom o f an exploit­ ative order.

On the other hand some cynical observers believe the present flurry of concern with the lives o f Indians is welcomed by the government as a qseful diversion to distract attention from the general plight of 60 million non-Indians living in poverty. They may be first class citizens in theory, but the protection this affords is no less flimsy than that offered the Indians by Funai.

Very often, when people discuss what might be done to “ help the Indians,” they find themselves con­ cluding that nothing will be done without total social change. | —Adapted from Latin America.

Page 9

THE DIGGER

April 10 — May 5

S H E danced like a Fairy, S he sung like a Frog, S h e squeaked like a Pig, S h e barked like a dog.

Cole’s Funny P icture B ook

Interior o f the Arcade in the 1880s.

by Jill Jolliffe

Cole of the Book Arcade: A Pic­ torial Biography o f E. W. Cole, by Cole Tum ley. Cole Publications, Melb­ ourne, 1974. $5.95.

E.W.Cole o f Cole's Funny Picture Book fame held to enlightened views on child-rearing and education which led him to produce a book for children which would be good fun to read, unlike the usual moral medicine they are dispensed. Like Cole's Fun­ ny Picture Boo fe, Cole Turnley’s biog­ raphy o f his grandfather is good fun to read. It is not just a biography, but an illustrated biography full o f 5 interesting and often bizarre snippets

by Justin Moloney To the Loritja people this place is Aputala: the whites call it Finke.

On February 1 , 1 9 7 5 an incident occurred between some Aboriginal men and a few of the crew on a Commonwealth train which runs: through the town on the line between Alice Springs and Port Augusta.

Some of the Aboriginal people were called “black bastards” by thè white crew.The Aboriginal men reacted to the intended insult — the ultimate denigration There was a scuffle which also involved the white policeman who was called in on the side o f the

SOURCE BOOKS Une Shipmente Splendide Est Arrive, Pas Pour La Bourgeoisie.

Postage charge in Italics H AW KLINE MONSTER: A GOTHIC WESTERN. Richard Brautigan (50(f) $5.95 TALES OF POWER, Carlos Castenada (50(f) $7.95 JO URNEY TO IX T L A N , Carlos Castenada (35(f) $1.50 THE CONNOISSEURS H A N D ­ BOOK OF M A R IJU A N A , - William Drake (50(f) $4.95 LADIES & G ENTLEM EN L EN N IE BRUCE, Goldman & Schiller (40(f) $2.50 WHOLE EARTH EPILOG, Stuart Brand, etc. (got) $4.00 THE COBB BOOK, Ron Cobb (50(f) $4.95 O RIG IN S OF M A R V E L COMICS, Stan Lee $ 5.95 ' DALI — E D IT IO N , David Larkin (50(f) $4.95 EROTIC S P IR IT U A L IT Y : D IV I­ SION OF KO NARAK , Allan Watts (5 0 t) $4.50 RO YAL ROAD TEST, Ed. Ruscha / (30d) $2.50 JEAN DUBUSSET - A RETRO ­ SPECTIVE G UG G ENHEIM MUSEUM (50d) $9.50

j Mail orders snipped anywhere —

4 HOTHLYN HOUSE ARCADE, MANCHESTER LANE, MELBOURNE.

from Cole’s own publications, as well as photographs from his life, which recapture the sense o f reading one of those lovely childhood stories with absorbing illustrations on most pages.

Cole was an eccentric, radical man whose freaky and childlike activities are a delight to follow. He amused and outraged Marvellous Melbourne of the 1880s and 1890s, personally designing the interiors o f his shops in his inimitably vulgar democratic style, bringing the reading o f books and the joys o f a literary culture within the reach o f ordinary people.

Kubla Khan would have marvelled at his beautiful arcades where the famous rainbow motif repeated it-

self endlessly, glassed ceilings created the atmosphere of an aery chamber and lashings o f potted palms, repeat­ ing mirrors, resplendent brass columns and gaslit signs saying things like “The Palace o f Intellect” offset the hundreds o f thousands o f books which Cole made his fortune selling.

At one stage Cole boasted that his book arcade contained: 140 brass pillars 100 mirrors 3.000 cedar drawers 10.000 house ornaments 10.000 pictures ' 1 ,000,000 books —to make the “ prettiest sight in Australia.”

crew.

1. Why did the two policemen make such an issue out o f arresting a man who, while having publicly resisted arrest, had hit neither o f the police nor had he thrown either o f the spears which he carried as an expres­ sion o f honourable resistance, nor was he a danger to the community?

was a temporary replacement and was in Finke for only 8 weeks.

It is this refusal by white authority to co-operate with the people who are the real owners of this country that Is the main theme that emerges from what occurred on February 1.

There was an incident in which the Aboriginal community moved in to control themselves. They had it under control, so how is it that now there is an image, around the Centre, o f the Aputula community as a threat to the whites, and a call out for a second constable to be stationed at Finke? All this onTop o f six men now awaiting charges to be heard against them in the Alice Springs court on March 7.

While the initial exchange between the rail crew and the Aboriginal man may appear trivial, it was actually an act of extreme abuse and intrusion by the white men against the people through whose country the train runs.

Certainly, the conflict could have been contained, just as a fire can be confined, but the panic o f the Finke constable finalising with the firing o f shots in the presence of men, women and children sent the incident bla­ zing throughout the whole commu­ nity: everyone was affected.

The aspect obvious to all present was the fear o f the constable.

He ran and skittered before the people as a rabbit before a dingo. His own fear led him to take extreme, rather than logical, action, the latter path including recognition o f the control measures being taken by the Aboriginal community itself.

At no time was the community, black and white, in any danger from any person pther than the man in uniform. The relations and friends of the Aboriginal man had moved about him, encouraging him to let events cool down and to move back to his home.

It was obvious to all that honour lay with the Aboriginal man, and that the constable was acting in a manner only describable as panic. The point had been proven. White and black persons present asked the constable to leave the scene for the present, to allow matters to cool down. If he wished to pursue matters, then it was sensible that discussion'take place the following morning.

His refusal to co-operate on this request and his blindness to the controlling role played by the com ­ munity reveals a second characteris­ tic of the constable — ignorance. He seemed to be operating under some

2. Also, why did the Finke police­ man make a statement to the com ­ munity that he would not do any­ thing till the morning, then go back on his word?

3. Furthermore, why did it culminate some four hours later, with two po­ licemen entering private property when all was quiet and firing their pistols?

The overall result was a series of actions which led to the whole Abori­ ginal community being socially and physically invaded and a campaign by a number o f white people in both Finke and Alice Springs to exaggerate and misrepresent, so stirring up fear with consequent racial tension.

This is not an isolated occurrence.

At Yueridumu, in the central N.T., and at Laverton, in Western Australia, police have recently been involved in obviously brutal actions against Abo­ riginal people. From reports, the Laverton incident is quite the most spectacular o f these, but the Finke and Yuendumu incidents repeat past ignorant and outrageous behaviour (at Papunya in 1972 and Roe Creek in 1973).

The Aboriginal people at Finke make up about two thirds o f the population, some hundred persons.

Aputula is Southern Loritja and Lo­ ritja country, but Aranda and Pitjantjatara people also live and work here.

The principal reason for an increase in the Aboriginal population and the inflow of relatives from other places such as Emabella and Oodnadatta is the presence of a housing factory, owned and mostly staffed by the Aputula community. There is a strong council o f older men. In the past and present this body has shown a readi­ ness to work and co-operate with white authorities in matters affecting both Aboriginal and white people in the region.

As the main white authority is the police constable, manifestation q f co­ operation has been based on the rela­ tionship between this person and the Council. But only two constables in the history o f the Council have shown any preparedness to co-operate with Aboriginal authorities. One o f these

Oh yes 1 Oh yes !■ She did! She d id !

And Frog-gy played a tune.

S h e mooed like a Bullock, She baaed like a Ram, S h e leaped like a Goat, S h e skipped like a Lam b— O h y e s !

S h e brayed like a D onkey, S he cried like a Hare, Sh. neighed like a H orse, S h e growled like a Bear— Oh y es I S h e munched like a Rabbit, S he gnawed like a Rat, S he popped like a Mouse, S h e flew like a B at— Oh yes J

O u r d e a r little d au g h ter o n ce w ent to a ch ild ren 's ball d ressed as a fairy. S he w as p ro u d of being a fairy, an d looked so n ic e th a t I p u t to g e th er th e above n u rsery d o g g erel to please h e r, an d in h o n o u r o f th e event, little th in k in g th a t sh e w ould so soon leave us for th e o th e r w orld.

I t m ig h t b e co n sid e red b e tte r by som e to rem o v e th is page, b u t as ch ild ren like it I v en tu re to le t it stan d w ith th is ex p lan atio n .—E. W . C.

An abiding principle o f his shops was that anybody could come and read for nothing for as long as they liked.

Comfortable chairs were provided for that purpose and many people/came to read books by instalment. Many early Melbourne socialists claimed to have educated themselves at Cole’s Book Arcade.

In 1880 Cole rented the whole of the recently rebuilt Eastern Market, which had failed to attract stallhold­ ers. He offered rent-free stalls for six months to carnival people, sideshows and merchants. The result was the creation of a brilliant fun palace to which the whole o f Melbourne flock­ ed on Staurday nights. Charlie the

divine illusion o f power that his was the almighty and final word. Even when the police tracker, the other officer then present, assaulted one o f the peacemakers with a truncheon, splitting the man’s head, the con­ stable failed to control his off-sider, but allowed this event to pass with­ out aippearing to recognise the wrong committed.

His call for reinforcement by the constable from Kulgera, 92 miles to the west, shows a further action which could only achieve an enlarge­ ment of the issue.

What emerges is a loner, who hap­ pened to be the police constable in Finke: a man quite inept at working with people, and who had to resort to extreme violence to mairftain what can only be regarded as personal ego­ tism. There is a claim made later by the police in court that the town could have been in danger.

But a number o f people present : witnessed that the Aboriginal man with the spears specified that his ar­ gument was only with the policeman: when a second Aboriginal person attempted to join against the con­ stable, the man with the spears pushed him away, saying that it was his dispute, no one else’s. While it * was his dispute, at no time did he raise a spear into a full throwing position.

One can only conclude that the Finke constable and the Kulgera con­ stable,; who later proved pretty handy with belting a nulla nulla on the man’s head, saw nothing immoral in crea­ ting a complete disturbance in the whole community, in placing the lives o f women and children at risk with haphazard pistol shots, and in rejecting the whole-hearted assistance offered them by the Aputula com­ munity.

On two occasions the Finke con­ stable agreed he would let matters quieten down until the following morning: on both occasions he im­ mediately set about doing the exact opposite.

A second feature of refusing to act by his own word was the disrespect the constable showed the people o f the community, black and white. On the second o f these occasions, which was followed by the two constables 1 and the tracker entering a peaceful house and firing shots, the contrary act of the police placed some of the white persons working with the Abori­ ginal people in a quite untenable situ­ ation. These persons had earlier con­ veyed the constable’s statement to

Tattoo Man illustrated the bodies of members o f the various larrikin pushes like the Crutchies and the Flying Angels. A few problems flowed from Cole’s carnival atmosphere:

There w ere. . . some half-dozen shooting galleries. They employed real rifles and on one occasion an attendant was accidentally shot I dead. A lady wrestler who chall­ enged any man to try and kiss her was felled by one of her success­ ful challengers who, while kissing her, managed to break her jaw.

(This gentleman had possibly availed himself earlier of one of Madama Xena's Shilling Shocks from Scientifically Controlled

the man with whom the police were forcing theTssue. He had accepted this word and had just completed his dinner, when the police entered with pistols drawn.

After the police had disarmed him o f his spears, and bashed the man be­ fore taking him away in the wagon, some o f his friends accused these white people of having misled them and the man; with having given theta the wrong word. So the police action also raised a temporary division with­ in the Aputula community.

The police initially attempted to rush the case through the Monday morning court in Alice Springs. De­ fence for the men procured an ad­ journment until March 7. The men appeared twice before the court in an attempt to obtain bail.

On the first o f these occasions the police prosecutor strongly objected tobail being granted, saying, the men* would only return to Finke and create further disruption. Two days later, when it became obvious that the defence had a strong case for ta­ king action against the police, the prosecution changed their stand to one o f allowing bail for each o f the men. . Events since then seem to give a clear picture o f why this about-turn occurred. A number of incidents have occurred-which can only be termed harassment o f the Aputula communi­ ty.

So that this possible tactic of the Authorities could not succeed, the

His educational ideas were ad­ vanced for the time. He believed that children should learn through play As an obscure seller o f second­ and natural inquiry and that “educat­ hand books Cole first caught Mel­ ion” should merely consist in provid­ bourne’s eye with a series of front­ ing children with the tools to educate page advertisements in the Herald. themselves. Useless knowledge should The first advertisement announced be avoided and learning and pleasure the discovery of a race of human should be one. To this end, he print­ beings with tails. It had all o f Mel­ ed Cole's Funny Exercise Books to bourne in its grip as it was embell­ be distributed in Victorian schools. ished daily for a whole week. On the They had riddles, jokes and funny last day the column concluded: pictures on the cover and a “ Notice E. W. Cole, 1 Eastern M arket . . . to Teacher” stating Cole’s belief begs particularly, earnestly and that children would learn better if most affectionately to inform all school could be made enjoyable. the tailless inhabitants of Mel­ His children were brought up in a bourne that he has for sale a great free and enlightened fashion. variety of This point highlights a weakness TALES o f Cole Tum ley’s book — we have Indian tales very little idea o f the intellectual in­ Australian tales . . . fluences which worked to form Cole, The vulgar clowning o f his o f the books he read himself. Had his Herald advertising at times scandal­ early ideas on comparative religion ised, but almost always enthralled, been influenced by reading Darwin, Melburnians. It was through his for example? And although we are column that Cole met his wife. At told that he was influenced in his ed­ age 42 he decided he should marry. ucational ideas by the German “ Kin­ Extremely shy with women, he did dergartener” movement, there is not know how to tackle the problem. frustratingly nothing to indicate how Being a free-thinking, secular and 'he came into contact with its ideas. rational man, he decided that advert­ E. W. Cole’s biography encomp­ ising was as sensible a way as any: asses the history of the polony of . . . nineteen out of every twenty Victoria in the second half o f the of the unions that take place orig­ nineteenth century and the creation inate from the merest accidents Of of the democratic/intellectual trad­ life, from a chance meeting at a ition which has been associated with ball, at a relation's, or a friend's Melbourne. Henry Handel Richard­ . . . I take what I believe to be the son’s portrait o f her father as Richard 5 most reasbnable course of looking Mahony springs to mind continually wide around to fin d . . . a good, a and the similarities are close: Like sensible, and a suitable wife . . .

Mahony, Cole originally emigrated He stipulated that the lucky wom­ from his homeland for the goldfields. an should be sober, sensible and Both were attracted by the entre­ thrifty and offered a reward o f 20 preneurial scope the diggings offered pounds to anyone who helped find rather than the gold-digging itself. her. He found precisely the advertised Their fortunes waxed and waned with qualities in his wife Eliza, who re­ the fortune of the colony. And both mained a companion to him for the expressed the radical, free-thinking rest o f her life. temper o f the times. As well as His views on women were not arguing for world federation, Cole exactly radical, as evidenced by one was a committed anti-racist and of his favourite literary creations argued vehemently against the White “Woman Our Angel (Not Our Legis­ Australia policy. Like Mahony, he lator)” , the last verse o f which ran: dabbled in spiritualism and partic­ Oh! woman, fairest flower o f earth ipated in the various debates and public lectures which enriched Mel­ Since first our race began bourne life then. It is probable Oh! be our love, our angel still that Cole actually knew Walter Don't try to be a man Lindesay Richardson, on whom They were nevertheless probably Mahony is based. in advance o f the time. One of his ; Cole of the Book Arcade is essential several radical pamphlets, titled Federation of the World, envisaged a reading for an understanding o f the world in which people were educated intellectual traditions o f Melbourne life. It is also plain good fun and will beyond all prejudice. His world was enhance your life as Cole himself en­ one where “The reasonable rights o f women will be established throughout hanced Melburnian life by the app­ lication of the pleasure principle. the world.”

Electricity which were guaranteed to Double Male Vitality.)

whole Aputula community met and agreed that, for the safety o f the men, it would be advisable that they all live at Ernabella in South Austra­ lia until the trial. This was carried out, the six men readily complying with the community decision.

There is no doubt that had the men stayed in Finke, and if for any reason they had been pushed into a confrontation, the police could have used this situation to argue that their initial claims were correct: that the men were the troublemakers.

The Centralism Advocate wrote up the initial court appearance under the front page title o f ‘Kill you like a Kangaroo’. This threat was alleged to have been made by the Aboriginal man to one o f the constables when they had invaded his house. The story that followed left the reader with the impression that the unfor­ tunate constable at Finke had been placed in a completely untenable ¡position by ah unreasonable Abori­ ginal ¡population.

What was not .told to the court was that the Finke constable, ob ­ viously in the interests o f peace, had made it known earlier in the day that he could shoot the Aboriginal man.

All present, including the recipient o f the threat, were aware of what had been said.

The Advocate was also involved in an attempt to spread the myth that Ii whites in Finke were afraid for their

GOING Sumner Locke Elliott What’s Going? .

It’s a yellow bus.

It’s the day you turn 65.

It’s the day they’re going to put you to sleep — because you’re too damned old. .

Like a dog, they used to say in the old days.

But it's 1990 — and society is 'supposed to be perfect!

Going — is by Sumner Locke Elliott, the expatriate Australian author.

Going — is rocketing into the American market, and is published simultaneously in Australia by an Australian company.

Going is devastating — a chilling, uncomfortable, yet hypnotic stab at the future of the world and the life ahead of us. $6.95

personal safety at the hands o f the Aboriginal people.

The following Saturday the Finke publican started a petition which was played up by the Advocate, calling for a second policeman to be station­ ed in the town.

While the petition has still not been shown to about two thirds o f the tow n’s population, namely the Aputula people, only a couple of Aboriginal people who drink in the bar having been approached, a large number of the white community in the town and on surrounding stations^ have put their names to this piece of paper.

It seems ironic that one of the reasons given for the need is the rise in the population, a fact due almost solely to the em ployment offered by the Aboriginal construction firm. Of interest in association with this peti­ tion is the background o f the man who supposedly drew it up, and be­ hind whose bar it is based.

The publican not only abused and called “two-faced” one man who requested to read the petition and then refused to sign it, but he was also a member o f a white vigilante squad which, twp years ago this Easter, attempted to create its own form of justice in conjunction with yet one more constable with rabbitlike characteristics.

From — Alternative News Service

Badge is evil.

Badge is the animal. .

Badge1is the badge of existence.

The badge of membership you . get the day you face the animal in yourself.

Badge is ‘something new in Australian writing — we think it’s worth reading. $5.95 John Duigan

BADGE priée recommended not obligatory

The

Macm illan Company of Australia

Page 10

THE DIGGER

Polanski, Lumet, and others reviewed.. .

Chinatown: the Book o f Creation aloud (to himself?).

This was all a very awesome exper* Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (Ra- ience — even for an athiest — and I pallo Theatre, Melbourne) is a marvel­ jumped about eight feet out o f my seat every time his voice boomed lous all-american shooting gallery or through for sometime afterwards . . . characters: private detectives, police And all years before Eric Clapton was detectives, morgue attendants, cor­ elected god. rupt tycoons, engineers, water-board But back to Chinatown. Polanski’s officials, Chinese servants, family handling of violence is very interest­ men, fathers, husbands, beat-up bat­ ing. After Jack Nicholson’s nose is tered poor wives, rich wives, daught­ ers, poor Italian workers, Okies & cal­ sliced open we are not allowed to for­ get this act: the rest o f the movie his ifornia orange farmers. It’s beautif­ nose is swathed in a bandage, and ully cast with the perfect face and after this, an ugly scar remains. Faye voice for each character and a superb Dunaway’s fragile, rich lady’s face is sense o f the last and smallest detail last seen slumped over a car wheel (right down to the newspapers with with one eye blown out like jelly in photographs of Seabiscuit, the legen­ a face full o f blood. It’s very heavy dary American race horse o f that stuff and so different from an earlier tame).

Polanski film like, for instance, Rep­ ulsion (which is still my favourite This is Polanski’s ultimate Amer­ feature film of his). This violence ican movie: a salute to the great Am­ really is realistic unlike the machoerican private detective genre movies ballet sequences o f Peckinpah’s grue­ (he even uses the original mono­ chrome title credits to open the film). some holly wood tomato sauce fact­ ory.

This reverence (a quality which is The first time I saw Chinatown I mostly hard to take) towards the found the opening sequences very type o f movie Polanski is making is both the film’s strength and weakness. slow-paced. Polanski’s use of PanaIt’s such self-conscious art. Chinatown vision-size screen and technicolour is saturated with references to detect­ seemed disappointing and the sound track didn’t become effective until ive movies and to conventions of the the movie was almost half-over.. But genre that turn it from a who^dunnit the second viewing I just sat and mar­ to a kind of who-made-it. And the usual auteur theory conventions, too.' velled at the expert way each seq­ uence is acted, filmed and put togeth­ Polanski appears in his movie as a er. It’s about the only film on in town sadistic thug who almost slices off worth Seeing more than once (if you Jack Nicholson’s nose inr a particul­ can afford it these days). arly grotesque sequence. N ot only A friend came out saying it was that: Polanski, as thug, works for the “most manipulative” film she had John Huston who plays the corrupt seen. Her companion replied: “ Don’t tycoon ( who o'wns the police and worry. Polanski is a dinosaur” . Well, wants to own the future, too). Hust­ on directed one o f the greatest holly- I don’t know: huge and spectacular but certainly not obsolete. Although w ood detective movies The Maltese he didn’t do much with the ordering Falcon. So the main theme o f the plot and directing o f the last sequence: (the effects o f the inçestuous relat­ the cliche o f the shoot-out/showdown ionship between John Huston and which is in many ways very weak esp­ Faye Dunaway, his movie-daughter) ecially the very self-conscious (and isn’t half as incestuous as Polanski’s much praised) last line “ Forget it, relationship to holly wood detective Jake. It’s Chinatown. . . ” movies which is, maybe, the real Like the detective photographic theme o f the movie anyway. assistant said in the movie: “ You ask me to take pictures. I take pictures.”

Huston gives another great per­ The defective replies: “ Lemee explain formance as Noah Cross, the halfsomethin’ to ya, Walsh. In this busi­ mad tycoon. That great voice has ness you need a little finesse . . . y* been blowing my mind since^ many know what I mean?” years ago when I was tripping down in the front stalls ofea city theatre * '* , * * watching The Bible on one o f those wrap-around cinerama-type screens: A very learned friend once exthis huge, immense, gigantic screen | plained the difference betweemAmer tuT tnrfK m ^ aoqve and te the le ii " rican private eye genre and English and right o f us, and nothing behind Cjetective stuff: the Americans are but the great black void o f the backconcerned with motives (psychology) stalls). Hollywood was showing us whereas the English do it through the creation o f the oceans out o f dues and the Triumph o f Reason nothingness, while god (played by (from the British empiricist tradi­ Huston) is off-screen reading The tion). Well, I don’t want to come on

by Tim Pigott

all schematic and elevate a clever insight into a Theory but it works if you compare Chinatown to Sidney Lumet’s film of Agatha Christie’s Murdefon the Orient Express (Bercy Theatre, in Melbourne).

It’s one o f those (always disast­ rous) gallery-of-stars movies with Al­ bert Finney as the oddball little Bel­ gian academic criminologist/dilett* ante/detective acting the arse o ff Ing­ rid Bergman, Laureen Bacall, John Gielgud, Sean Connery and Anthony Perkins. Everyone gets type-cast and only Richard Widmark as the veteran Mafia man is very good. Sidney Lum­ et’s film is real misty, white snowcovered postcard “beautiful” photbgraphy with everything in the train like a filmed play and Macbeth gets quoted a lot on murder. The ending is monumentally silly — everyone dunnit 1.. The film had one o f those old “ House Full” signs outside. Was the theatre filled with Family Enter­ tainment freaks, Agatha Christie fans, fans who like their celluloid sprinkled with stardust, or was it the easter hol­ idays, or the rainy afternoon?

Two possible reasons to see this film: private eye/thriller fans can compare it to Chinatown; and, o f course, the great and eternal goin’to-the-movies excuse: boredom. It’s so light it’s almost not happening and the best thing is the opening seq­ uence using newspaper stills. Every­ one is in it: the princess, the English colonel, his British gel, the conductor -with-a-secret-tragedy, the simple mis­ sionary, the gangster, the nervous young man (Anthony Perkins again)----*

*

*

intone with thersolemnity Only si “1 five-year-old can manage: “Why do you keep laughing” after Flash Gor­ don has restored the Clay People from the Martian Caves back to life and they inform him “ Flash Gordon the Clay People will never forget you for this”. Over the last month Charlie

More joy Law m aking Com panion to The jo y of Sex EDITED BY ALEX COMFORT, M.B., Ph.D. Illustrated by Charles Raymond | and Christopher Foss

The author takes the reader on a joyous journey jnto the realm of developm ent and relation— to discover the More Joy possible through a fu lle r understanding of sex in our interpersonal,relationships.

Available from your local bookseller or newsagent

Chaplin, Orson Welles, R.D.Laing, D.W.Griffiths and a whole history of great horror movies, Mekas and Hedy Lamar in Ecstasy. So get on down there. r That’s Entertainment is still showing all that show-biz razzle dazzle 1 down at the Forum in Flinders Street in Melbourne. Astaire, Gene Kelly, Ann Miller tap dancing like her life depends on it, Garland and Rooney growing up through old holly wood musicals, Busby Berkeley and Zeigfeld spectacles in some great and funny footage from the MGM mus­ icals. Even Clark Gable (as carracer/ aeroplane pilot/all-round daredevil) doing a superb send-up softshoe. Un­ fortunately the filmcfips have been carelessly selected to make a quick buck. Otherwise this could have been a wonderful couple o f hours.

Still, it’s worth the price o f admis­ sion just for the amazing shot o f about eight thousand girls in white chiffon with one solitary hair slicked down male crooner singing (you gues­ sed it) “ A Pretty Girl is Like a Mel­ od y”. Times sure have changed.

And for all those kitsch fanatics: throw away your Tarzan com ic books and go out into the streets. Well, out into the movies anyway, ‘cause Max J.RoSenberg and Milton Subotsky’s production o f Edgar Rice Burroughs The Land Time Forgot is shbwing around the corner at the Chelsea.

Full o f corny ep ic “terrified” acting and monsters that Ray Harryhausen would trip out on. A totally absurd movie to waste an afternoon re­ living your childhood on. Maybe the popcorn will fall right back but o f yoUr crazy m outh—

*

The Digger is now a monthly. It’s hard to cover lots o f movies as they come and disappear so fast. The last two issues have cpvered basically hol­ ly wood popular movies: disaster mov­ ies and a detective movie. So its about time to recommend the Mel­ bourne Film Co-op at 382 Lygon Street, Carlton with lots o f good, cheap films to watch from 2pm un­ til the weekend midnite shows:everything from reshowings o f old classics, shoe-string budget Australian short films, American and European under­ ground movie experiments, to Buster Crabbe as Flash Gordon in Mars Vs. the World on weekend matinee shows (for the kids, o f course. . . ) who will

Another bestseller from Penguin Books

dunnit

In Saudi Arabia an old geyser just got drilled and Fred Halliday looks forward to ..

A rabia W ithout Sultans Arabia Without Sultans, by Fred Halliday. Published by Penguin Books. (Australian release, April, 1975) Recommended price: $3.25.

by Grant Evans ’ T* ' T 1 sJ The assassination o f King Feisal o f Saudi Arabia by his “ nientally un­ sound”, “ playboy” young nephew on March 26 sent waves o f panic through the capitals o f the advanced capitalist World. In Indo-China, Kissinger’s front men, Lon Nol and Thieu, were on, their last legs, and — wham —some ‘maniac’ decides to knock over the leader o f the country which is the lyn.chpin o f US imperi­ alist strategy in the Middle East.

Saudi Arabia occupies this posi­ tion within US strategy by virtue o f its size — it covers four fifths o f Arabia and has common borders with all o f the peninsula states; it also con i tains an estimated quarter o f the world’s known oil reserves. By 1980 it could be supplying the US with half o f its petroleum needs, making the US dependent on the Saudi re­ gime. How long before personages like Kissinger begin their pilgrimages to Mecca?

Feisal consolidated his power in Saudi Arabia in 1962. Thé wealth and power oil brought to his regime meant he was no simple puppet of the US. But it was in the interests of the ruling classes in Saudi Arabia and the US to co-operate in promoting ‘stability’ in Saudi Arabia itself, and ‘stability’ in the surrounding region.

This entailed extreme internal re­ pression at home and counter-revo­ lutionary expeditions into surroun­ ding states such as the People’s De­ mocratic Republic o f Yemen (South Yemen) and support for and co­ operation with reactionary regimes, such as those in Oman and North Yemen. Feisal was in complete con­ trol o f this strategy, and now there is fear o f this control collapsing fol­ lowing his death.

Fred Halliday’s book Arabia With­ out Sultans is timely. With Arabia back in the world spotlight follow? ing Feisal’s death it provides inval­ uable material for understanding pol­ itical developments within the Arab­ ian peninsula. His argument is lucid and rational I f a welcome respite from most discussion o f Arabia which presents a picture of nomadic \ Arab sheiks, camel trains presumably loaded with gold, holding ‘the rest of the world’ to ransom.

Halliday, who has been one of the only leftists covering Arabia for some years now, has produced a lengthy (527pp) and detailed book, whose “intention is to provide a comprehensive analysis o f the con­ temporary Arabian peninsula, by presenting and interpreting inform­ ation that has, till now, been disper­ sed or inaccessible.”

There are very few systematic studies o f Arabia and much o f the

material in this book is new. The wide ranging nature o f the book makes it difficult to discuss. It is introduced by two general theoret- ■ ical overview chapters on Arabian politics, its history and historical rel-

atio-Mc imperialism This is folio we d"

*

by twelve chapters which deal with I f ’ all the peninsula states in detail — Saudi Arabia, North Yemen, South Yemen, Oman, the smaller Gulf States, and a special chapter on Iran.; And a concluding overview chapter which situates Arabia in the context o f international capitalism in the 1970s.

Broadly (very broadly) Halliday’s argument is that the discovery o f oil has brought irreversible changes to the Arabian peninsula. From being peripheral to world politics and ‘hist­ ory’ at the beginning o f the century, it is now a central part o f internation­ al capitalism. Its oil is crucial to the major capitalist countries, and so the imperialist nations will do almost anything to maintain capitalist reg­ imes in Arabia. Oil has broken down, ments in Yemen, or indeed any nat- ‘ the centuries old traditional social ion on the peninsula. While Halliday structure; and it has given rise to an «hows that the various Arab nations increasingly powerful local capital­ have a common history he insists ist class. that we can only understand them if we recognize their differences. Thus The rise o f this capitalist class and in North Yemen the centrifugal pull its claim on world power has given of tribal forces acted to destroy the j rise to conflicts such as those bet­ construction of a republican state, ween the US and the Arabian states while similar tribal forces provided during the 1973 ‘energy crisis’. The revolutionary momentum in the price for the US o f stability in these South. regimes is to give them increasing power politically, and reluctantly increasing ownership o f their oil res­ ources. But as both the Arab ruling classes and the US and British rul­ ing classes have an interest in keeping Arabia in the imperialist camp, they unite to crush any revolutionary movements anywhere in the penin­ sula.

Halliday scrupulously documents the military assistance these regimes receive from the US and Britain. He is especially scathing when discussing Britain’s role, for instance in the Sul­ tanate of Oman, which Britain has dominated for the last hundred years.

Here, out o f sight from the rest of the world, the British have been carrying on their own Vietnam war since the outbreak o f guerilla fight­ ing in 1965. The British deny that they are directly involved in the war — while British officers direct thq dropping of napalm and supervise torture.

It may come as a surprise to many to learn that a revolutionary state exists in the peninsula; South Yemen.

Halliday’s discussion of Yemen is, like his other specific studies, excel­ lent. He shows how it is vital to understand tribalism, the traditional culture, Islam, and the pre-capitalist foi;ms o f production, if one is to under&tand modern political develop­

delusion which is central to a discus­ sion o f Arabian politics. In this resp­ ect it is disappointing that the book doesn’t contain a separate discussion o f Islamic religious ideology, its var-, iations. how it meshes with the ideol­ ogy o f pan-Arabism, and its fusion with the different tribal practices in the various areas. Islam remains a spectacularly vital and reactionary force in the region and, as Halliday says, “there is a need for both a theoretical break with religion and for a political handling o f its role”.

It is here that the book could have been of even greater political use.

The struggle by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Oman (PFLO), says Halliday, has “become the focal point of the anti-imperialist move­ ment in Arabia”, It is vital for the A quibble: he correctly attacks survival o f neighbouring South Yem­ both the USSR and China for their en that revolution spreads, and it is opportunistic definition o f Arab reg­ vital for the freedom o f the oppres­ imes as anti-imperialist. But I feel sed people in Oman. It further weak­ there is also a fuzziness in his use o f ens the hold o f imperialism on the the term ‘anti-imperialist’ when des­ peninsula and provides another \ cribing some Arab regimes. (Again base for revolutionaries. And for the dead weight o f some marxist these reasons all of the reactionary formulations). Capitalist develop­ Arab states and the imperialist count­ ment in various countries has shown ries are intent on crushing this move­ extraordinary differences and a rem­ ment. Some o f Halliday’s more ‘jour­ arkable flexibility. There are no pre­ nalistic’ descriptions o f his excursions destined ‘stages o f development’. into Oman’s liberated province o f Thus conflicts between emerging cap­ Dhofar may jar with pedantic acad­ italist nations and established ones emics, but they provide a vivid under­ aren’t automatically ‘anti-imperialist’: standing o f the problems a revolut­ Misuse o f such formulations has led ionary movement which has to work revolutionaries into many disastrous in an extremely poor and ‘underdev­ class alliances this century. There are eloped’ country against a ruthless no ‘progressive’ ruling classes in these and technologically superior enemy. countries, and the order o f the day Problems which too few revolution­ is ‘permanent revolution’ — that is, aries in the advanced capitalist world socialist revolution. This is, in effect, understand..

Halliday’s argument, but formulat­ ions have been misread before!

Halliday has provided an inval­ uable marxist analysis of Arabia, and A failed Lawrence o f Arabia who it is only rarely marred by that an­ could only get a job as an academic noying marxist habit o f invoking the in London wrote that Halliday’s ^wisdom o f the people’ with categor­ book added little to the 1001 Arab­ ical statements that the people were ian Nights — well, it’s certainly not “never deluded” by the maneuvering bedtime reading for the British ruling o f imperialism. When it is precisely class.

i i

April 10 — May 5

THE DIGGER

OF Rubber Legs is back Chuck Berry arrived in Australia April 1 for concerts in capital cities.

Travelling with Berry this time will be his 15 year old daughter, who opened shows on his recent tour of Europe. She’s reportedly a very talen­ ted young singer, but promoters are either coy or they genuinely don’t know whether she’ll sing during the tour.

A Radical Sources Guide from the Light, Powder and Construction Works

Pedal Power

r?t£r Back-wash

Early in May, over 300 cyclists from Melbourne and Sydney will pedal to Canberra to protest the Government’s uranium mining policy policy.

This was decided at a meeting held on April 2 at Friends o f the Earth in Melbourne. This meeting was the culmination o f a series o f meetings o f local and interstate organisations con­ cerned about uranium over the past month.

Melbourne riders will leave from the City Square on Saturday May 10 after a farewell concert and demon­ stration. Sydney riders will leave a few days later so that all riders meet in Yass on May 19 and enter Can­ berra together the following day.

A large demonstration outside Parli­ ament House is being planned by Canberra activists.

On Chuck’s last tour here he attempted, mistakenly or otherwise, to take $2,900 in Australian cash out o f the country, and subsequently was detained overnight.

Promoter Tony Mororiey visited Treasurer Dr. Cairns having disco­ vered Berry’s trouble to be outstan­ ding after booking the tour through major cities. Cairns agreed to allow On the route, fo o d will be pro­ the artist into the country without vided from a special van, people will further trouble on this matter if sleep in local halls or tents, and ve­ Moroney cleared up outstanding tax hicles will be used at the front and due on the previous tour— since the rear o f the riders to ask motorists to late cancellation of this upcoming exercise caution. one would mean the direct unemploy­ It is also intended to set up antiment o f at least forty or fifty people for each concert in each city. uranium groups in all towns along the way.

Throughout Australia, Berry will be backed by Adelaide rock’n’rollers Former Olympic cycling cham­ The Keystone Angels. The Angels pion, Nino Borsari, has offered to opened Berry’s concert last year in coach the riders at training sessions their home town, and he nominated which w ill take place every Sunday them for his backing band this tim e starting at midday from Friends o f around. the Earth, Mac Arthur Place, Carlton.

The Keystone Angels were formed Media representatives are welcome in early ’73 around three members o f to attend meetings on this project the very popular Moonshine Jug and at Friends o f the Earth each Wednes­ String Band. They have; played Sunday night at 7.00pm. bury ’75 and tours with Gaz Glitter and Little Richard.

1 A fortnight ago we received the following covering letter in response to the story “ Great Wave Cometh” in The Digger No.42:

PKICi: 85 ct'ifts.

“The accompanying response is in reply to your defamatory “The Great Wave Cometh” . “ Because o f the gross distortion and fabrication o f vie ws ascribed t6 us, we feel you owe us space to re­ fute them in the columns of The Digger, as prominently as the orig­ inal distortion. Our credibility is as important to us as we presunie yours is to you.

Yours sincerely,

The “accompanying response” was a very long letter in which Gale Kelly baldly cited paragraphs by num­ ber (e.g. paragraph 7, paragraph 56, etc.) and then stated what their real position is — as against what that paragraph says it is in the original story. Only trouble with this proced­ ure is that any rèader would need a copy t>f the last issue beside them and be willing to number the paragraphs 1 to 135 to follow the letter.

Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein. She was also married to Percy Bysshe, the poet: “While Percy labours over the second re-draft o f Prometheus, I gave birth last week no yesterday to another daughter. We shall call her Fanny after my sister. William has fallen ill again, and hasn’t eaten or spoke for two weeks. Outside, grey cumulus clouds gather, i t ’s going to rain. I wish it would never stop. Beautiful sunsets, i Tim Robertson ’s Mary Shelley & Thé Monsters is playing at the Pram Factory. a j /

In the interests o f a more effect­ ive and comprehensible refutation o f the alleged misquotations, we have written to the three women sugg­ esting a more easily followed refut­ ation. Regrettably our response was slow, but we should have a reply from them ready for our next issue.

Pictured are Bruce Spence & Claire Dobbin. ^

U Jonr^ en

6 p.m. to 7-30 p.m.

ROOM E, TRADES HALL, MELBOURNE . (enter basement from Victoria Street entrance) Affiliation fees o f affiliated unions assure classes being FREE to all student:

C - a ^ > H < 5 ir v t ó

o m d l

b W fo c ^ r /a /Y ic * Ç uA l o r u /n o>c

or

TH E L I V I N G F O R C E O F H ISTO RY com m encing Wed., May 7 at 6 p.m.

ECOLOGY, TECHNOLOGY AND SCIENCE WORLD POLITICAL ECONOMY EDUCATION AND COMMÚNITY

d t w

o -

Special Ecology Issu e:

MAN’S (SIC) RELATIONSHIP WITH NATURE

Subscription rates (12 issues) are $5.00 for individuals and $10.00 for libraries and other institutions.

SencU« The Light, Powder h Construction, .M e lM b x e .3 0 0 5

e r s

abortion referral

4k *

.

oU‘^ V \V d L .

¡¡i

YvascX Vo b-o^

7

w

ÉÉÉM É *Ov

1

cxiaOv b ia d i

‘

Do you need help with abortion referral?

Contraceptive advice?

bujh

Period o f classes is 12 weeks Full details o f classes, postal courses, film screenings, etc., are available FREE on application to Secretary, Box 39, Trades Hall, or by phoning 317—9224.

—

\A ^ H W T i u

Vo

PHQNE WOMEN'S ABORTION REFERRAL SERVICE SYDNEY 617325.

WEEKNIGHTS6-9P.M WEEKNICHTS 6-9P.M. SAT.2-4P.M.

WÊ

Ut

q> M M

Victorian labor Cnlleae

tttÖ L B o O Ä v fe

Womens7Music

DRum m o

©

will be playing music at 222 Nelson St., Annandale on 26th April, 1975 af8p m

V \1 1

Jan Feb

•Latin American Film

S U B S C R IB E

6 3 /7 1 4 4

8*3o

Pm

BOOKSHOP ■The Sexual Dilemma of Dora Carrington

m

tor

.

six

NOW ! „

issu e s

A COCKERATI VE NON-PROFIT B(X jK S W

k

Non-xenist & qualify homosexual' ptr.iti.fv FEMDsflsraGAY LIBERATION RESOURCES »«Sth books like:.

■Feminism and Film Criticism

1 S P R IN G S T R E E T . C IT Y .

ADM ISSION:2.50. with membership Audition nights: 1.00..

2. IQ F O R R E S E R V A T IO N S : 6 3 .9 0 8 9 &

SK* C ARLTON

Issue No 6

•GORE VIDAL interview

■PLUS reviews» poetry & fiction

* « « v id u a ls /* u 8t r a l i a

J 6-00

Overseas • AUS$7-50 Institutions .........AUSI15-00

IGLP PO BOX A 76 SYDNEY STH 2 0 0 0

AUST

LESBIANS SPEAK OUT: Lesbian/Femiriist anthology. $ 2 50 MOMMA: A Start To All The Untold Stories: Much heralded Alta novel $2.00 MOTHER I'M ROOTED, An­ thology of Australian women poets, ed. by Kate Jennings $3.95 bxcellent mail order service (please add postage). Free catalogue.

Monthly Booknews $2.00,p.a.

P.O . B O X I 2 'N O R T H A D E L A I D E

THE PEOPLE’S YELO PAGES a resource guide to living in melbourne OUT NOW available at city and suburban bookshops and newsagents or by mail order from po box 386 prahran 3181 $2 (postpaid)

OvD

DOCTOR DUNCAN

Benefit performance for equipment

APR IL /M A Y LINE-UP FRI.11 Shadow Pacts Richard Clapton Band SA T.12: Phil Manning & Friends Richard Clapton Band SUN.13: Heavy Metal Rock Night Coloured Balls, AC/DC FRI.18: Jets, Billy Thorpe &Azetcs (Exch.)

SAT.19: Richard Clapton , .

AC/DC SUN.20: Jeff St. John, Wendy Saddington & Guest Group (Exclusive) FRI.25: Coloured Balls La De Das SAT.26: Main Street, Ayres Rock, Special Guest Bob Hudson (Newcastle Song) SUN.27: First C&W Night — of many] Bluestone, Greg Quill F R I.2 .

Hot City Bump Band Ayres Rock SAT.3: Split Ends (N.Z.) (Outrageous plus) FRI.9: Jets, Capt. Matchbox SAT.10: Red House Roll Band, Billy Thorpe SUN .11: Ayres Rock FROM M ON.12 Schoolkids' Week — with AC/DC. BYO

NO. 6/7. MARC H 7 5 .

IN THIS ISSUE:

to o k o f

commencing Monday, May 5 at 6 p.m. commencing Tuesday, May 6 at 6 p.m

CLITORIS BAND

DOUBLK ISSUE.

Gale Kelly Sue Bellamy Diana Caine ”

iKAHMSI STUDY COURSES

P H IL O S O P H Y E C O N O M IC S

Page 11

“There are 300,000 hard drug addicts', 80,000 triad gang members; sever­ al hundred thousand squatters; sickness and squalor all around. The post box­ es are red. It is hot. The policemen wear short trousers. No doubt about it: this must be a British colony. Of the past one would think. No, the time is now. The location: the South China Coast The name: Hong Kong; the 4frag rant Harbour’, ‘’p earl o f the Orient’. Little wonder that Fmnce’s most imag­ inative sado-masochistic novelist, Alain Robbe-Grillet, sniffing the repression, should situate a sexist phantasy, La Maison Rendez-vous, in this colony. For Robbe-Grillet, Hong Kong may be a locale for phantasy. For most who live there it is a reality o f exploitation and degradation — while for most o f the inhabitants of Britain, their country’s Crown Colony is just one big blank. ” —Jon Halliday, member of the Hong Kong Research Project.

Hong Kong: A Case to Answer, by the members o f the Hong Kong Res­ earch Project created a big stir in Britain and the government was forced to respond with their own booklet, Case Answered — which was only available to MPs! Single copies o f Hong Kong: A Case to Answer cost A80c and bulk orders can be arranged with the publishers. Send cash with order to: Partisan Press, Bertrand Russell House, Gamble Street, Nottingham NG7 4ET, UK.

m oSST E R S

BOOKINGS 3Y77I33 CELEBRITYSERVICES m m

Spokes Bicycle Shop WE’VE GOT BIG BIKES, LITTLE BIKES WITH 10 SPEEDS, HIGH SPEED LOW SPEED AND HAYSEED. UNDERWATER BIKES, FLYING BIKES, BAKERUTE BIKES, ICE BIKES, EDIBLE BIKES (BOTH MACRO AND NON BIOCYCLABLE).

IN FACT, ALL TYPES OF BIKES, BUT NO CHEAP BIKES. OUR SLECT CLIENTELLE INCLUDES BRIAN DIXON. COLIN TALBOT AND MARY POPPINS.

169 Elgin St.f Carlton, Ph.347-1674

/r

M <.

fJ # X f t A / D * * ^ ■ Z jtV P «O ßL £"

® ir ! ( d - ^ -

.... M j„

H w n.,.

'd tftC tO

..Ato— Ato,

M ty .- J M T ] £

' ' j Better ..

IU. -HAVE To GIVE W 7

SMOKING..

w e u i HAvenY

NCCTHER.

Hftp ft S rtifce

M e m ourn T)V tR TH£ §A S ¿ e r o M in e

Set.....

j

h a v e I ....

Bur ( H*Ve *n> Pur

me e r r o e * 1 b u r I’m I

W ADPicreD fnl tö fjlU f^ S A te

f t P al^oWi GlVIH6~m) W \vp HFFeCTiN6 I m B B m m

Jo oer a *82 | B last J o s r ■Lib G e r Me ^

In toOSltfiJG t/\> j

IllTH e MofWfA/d

S Pie OF V i s e n ? .

M s o a t r s o Wi£ *

m mm. Hem Ll?n (*$. %RPNCAmi

\o e u c

m v

L yeki

I CoiJLP cJusr-As £ASU-y Q e r Kom voojas By a ßüS

IMASTfe A l

u

pp

¡ K ~ ^ v T ? # A r G oop Ü C flU H /

jT— rj— l |

< -m

& ß > M C M (« , T U B S ’ O f A M it M «

S N S T S M ’

P

&>&£Ofl&S CLOQfCSQ ¿StMoKSmS Coo Gth) tHeoA i-WN<Sj fiu . w> WfTH CWC« «opt*/*©

•> i/ftTAÄ-

?»T A ITSSye < 7 > te p . T f le

ffcoM PtySSlrJG,

O F A C lG A teT te

AWPT&tfg A FVR5“

I, ►Tissue

m o u th

•I'lYfl

Lung $okfhxSf&in s lt>

"Rte & €TTM

5tOo£) STpgftrO

f/eoatessivfec-i *'jo»«. &.««p

A*n>

fw/?j>ei2. ?/47 |^ n g r o w in g ,

'Jw M 6tot>D

Cl o t s *

\/&ssevs SMiNk,

W0& i*€fvar FuWfS^^^eß^l rifr ftrto ttflRPeR...... „ OR a m i>

KAftpsft

Published by High Times Pty Ltd, 350 Victoria Street, North Melbourne, Vic. Printed by, Peelprint Pty Ltd, Peel Street,