Pearls and Irritations

It’s true.

The night fears have come to pass.

The evidence is too great to ignore any longer. My country, our nation, is racist.

The seer carrying and spreading the dreaded message is the man who may be Australia’s next leader.

The blinkers are off. Decades of hard-knock journalism have shown the primitive fears that drive prejudice and loathing, yet things were getting better. Slowly.

Australia was advancing, fair in acceptance if not always colour.

Facing our brutal history, the courage to say sorry; Wave Hill, land rights, the legal service, language revival, Makaratta, Reconciliation, the flag, Welcomes to Country and more.

The shuffle turned to stride. All accepted. Or so it seemed.

But the gut-thumping loss of the Voice stopped the long march. It let the regressives regroup and use the mood shift to undo the wins.

Mr Dutton will no longer speak as PM if there’s an Aboriginal flag on the stage.

Time to be logical, erase another foreign part of our past and follow Canada’s 1965 decision to discard the Union Jack.

To Indonesians, retention proves we’re not an independent nation but a colony, still governed by a European power; volumes of historical facts will not dissuade because the reality is obvious.

In the 113-year-old Majapahit Hotel in the East Java capital Surabaya, the gracious lobby is dominated by the painting of a young revolutionary. It may be apocryphal for there are no names.

He’s scrambling up the flagpole after Soekarno had declared Independence on 17 August 1945 and ripping off the bottom blue stripe of the Dutch flag leaving the red and white.

These are now the colours of the Republic.

Neil Diamond’s rousing anthem America celebrates the emotion, energy and principles that once drove the US, and which many thought we shared. They’re now revealed as fictions by Mr Trump. His acolyte Down Under is doing the same.

Moral concerns get shredded when flags are used as simplistic explanations of a nation. But we can understand how the blinkered believe a piece of cloth can get charged with emotion – and so does Mr Dutton.

Demands we scrap the striking Howard Thomas black, yellow and red design don’t choke the archives. A few diehard racists may mutter, but most Aussies are puzzled: Why stir this possum? The answer is a sleight of text to divide and call it unity and hope it flags the way to The Lodge.

This didn’t complete the evil list delivered this month, and which finally turned this writer’s dreams to despair.

The Adass Synagogue firebombing has been rightly condemned and may well be revealed as terrorism rather than a one-off by drunk nutters. Let’s pray they have Anglo names,

Armed security is a frightening thought but may be temporarily necessary with an apparent upsurge of another ancient curse, antisemitism. The latest involves graffiti and firebombing cars.

To be condemned without qualification. Bad, vile, whatever you say, but Kristallnacht it is not.

Mosques have also been attacked, so the posting of guards should not discriminate. Aren’t Muslims people also worthy of protection?

The Islamophobia Register claims an average of 18 reports a week since 7 October last year. That hasn’t cracked the carapace of bigotry and uncritical support for Israel.

Mr Murdoch’s propaganda press, once a broadsheet to admire, has refined the power of one-sided reporting. Its abandonment of journalistic moral codes sickens those who thought we worked in a profession and dashed public trust. But it’s also done something else.

It’s shown us that we favour Jews over Muslims because they’re part of our culture. The Old Testament and its crazy myths are in our Bible. We’ve seen and loved Fiddler on the Roof and the partial acceptance of women, not in every nook, but more receptive than Islam.

The faithful drink, dance, have parties and sing. They celebrate the intellectual. Israel – population under ten million – has won 13 Nobel prizes. Indonesia, population of 280 million has none.

We can relate to aspects of Judaism rather than some of the practices of Islam, a faith we find difficult to fathom and with few willing to try.

Indonesia, where this story is being written, has more Muslims than any other country in the world.

Almost all our neighbours follow the 7^th century faith which came to the Archipelago 600 years later dislodging Hinduism and Buddhism. The five-times daily call to prayer ricochets off the rooftops. It’s OK -we’ve become immune.

On Friday mornings men walk down our street in sarongs and white caps to pray at one of the three mosques within earshot. They say ‘hello’ and smile with pity at the kaffir (unbeliever) in his garden.

Your deity, your choice. It’s personal. The pact is mutual. Disapprove but respect. Do your thing and I’ll do mine.

Few guys on the many building sites nearby knock off to pray; they need money more than a sermon. The others rib their returning clean-clad mates and raucously remind them of their impious private behaviour.

On Sundays, cheerless families in Western dress clutching bookmarked Bibles, stride to the only church within five kilometres. There are more Christians in this country than people in Australia.

This church has austere Dutch roots, so it feels sterile. Joy stays unrevealed, and the congregants’ nods are forced. Our ID cards list us as Protestants, the catch-all category for attendees at weddings and wakes.

To live here legally the government demands all must show which of the six approved ideologies she or he allegedly follows. To be a Jew is not an option; it’s banned and the few tombs of those who died during the Dutch colonial years have been robbed, the headstones smashed for builders’ rubble.

The Surabaya synagogue was razed early this century and will not be rebuilt by anyone.

This is what happens when ignorance and intolerance thrive.

We shouldn’t damn Mr Dutton but thank him for being frank. Since the 1960s the self-proclaimed progressives have dusted this land with hope. The Opposition leader’s cultural climate change willy-willy has blown away that optimism.

Gone is the topsoil of hope that we’re a better people and can, ‘with hearts and hands / To make this Commonwealth of ours / Renowned of all the lands.’

This keyboard is wet with tears.