THE LINE VIDEO

NOTES ON "THE LINE"

The first time I spoke in a school about "The Line", I was asked to address the question: Is conflict avoidable? I don't believe so. I don't believe there is any evidence of that in either human history or nature. For me, the question in regards to conflict is - how do we manage it? There's a lot of popular cynicism about politics but I've never forgotten hearing the Dali Lama describe politics as a means of resolving conflict.  Basically, I believe that in journalism, as in politics, you can choose to be either a bridge-builder or a bridge-burner. Being a bridge-burner isn't hard. People do incredibly well out of it. They appear brave and decisive. They invariably trumpet the fact they appeal to common sense when what they are really appealing to is common prejudice.

The first story in the series I've put together is about a war cameraman called Steve Levitt. I have a deep skepticism about journalists and politicians who call for war without having experienced it. That's not to say war is never justified, but people who call for war should be in no doubt about the version of reality they are summoning into being. That's one way of looking at "The Line", or my father's part of it - it's a truthful account of the reality of war as distinct to media-managed images of war. I wrote this story in May 2004, at the time of the invasion of Iraq, when the Australian media was full of voices confidently telling us this was a military action that had to be taken because Iraq supposedly had weapons of mass destruction - an assertion that was never proven:

Pub: The Age
Pubdate: 10-May-2004

Martin Flanagan

STEVE LEVITT FORMER WAR CAMERAMAN

His father flew Lancaster bombers in World War II. The fatality rate from raids to his last destination was almost 100 per cent. In the event, the mission was averted by the ending of the war, but by then he had spent a night in the almost certain knowledge he was going to die. "Like a lot of blokes," says his son, "he was too young and sensitive for war."

Steve Levitt's first job was as a psych nurse. He went in at what he calls "the deep end", dealing with the severely handicapped and people who were otherwise restrained. After two years he concluded the work was "just too hard". Having studied film and television for a couple of years, he fronted Channel Ten and asked for a job, saying he had previously worked as a psych nurse. "Go to the newsroom," he was told. "They're all mad in there."

Journalism had an allure for him. He had an uncle, a journalist, who died on the Burma railway. Levitt has great admiration for people of his parents' generation who endured the Great Depression, fought a world war, came home and built a society. He believes in their virtues of honour, courage and sacrifice. Of sacrifice, he says: "What other measure of love is there?" But, later, he also says the idea of heroes can be a dangerous one. It leads young men to try too hard, he says, to take fearful risks.

He soon became a hard news hound, camera on shoulder, not so much telling the stories the others wouldn't tell as telling them first. What frustrated him was that there was nowhere in Australia telling "the big stories". He also saw that tabloid TV was self-editing. The search for big stories and networks prepared to pay for them led him overseas and into wars, often with the cash to pay his crews stashed in his cowboy boots.

I ask him for a list of wars he has seen. He is still remembering places an hour later. The list includes Beirut (twice), Eritrea and Ethiopia (three times), the '91 Gulf War, Bosnia, Mozambique, Rwanda, the Kurds. Over what period, I ask. He shrugs and says: "Ten to 15 years." He doesn't have a sense of his life in chronological terms.

I ask him to show me some of his photographs. They arrive in a pile of uncatalogued file sheets, a loosely assembled clippings file, a photo album. Photos of dead children killed by a cluster bomb. A photo of a cobra with its belly slit. At the invitation of the Khmer Rouge, he drank its blood; he remembers the adrenaline hitting him like a thump in the chest. There are photos of the Sparrows, an assassination squad in the Philippines, with two pistols cocked at the head of man who is masked and bound. The leader of the Sparrows was having wife troubles and kept wanting to discuss domestic matters.

"Most of these people are dead," he says, waving his hand towards the pile. That's when he joined World Vision as an adviser, having worked in many of the places World Vision now wants to operate in.

He says he'd be rich if he had a dollar for every man who's asked "What's it like to be in a war?" Instead, I ask him for his conclusions on war. One of them is: "Once the killing starts, the difference between good and bad quickly disappears." He says nothing irritates him more than people who insist killing can be done within a moral framework. "Killing is the opposite of civilisation. You can't put a moral framework around the impossible."

He also tells me about a time in Eritrea when he needed footage of a bombardment. He suggested to some Eritrean gunners that they lob a few shells at the Ethiopians, who duly fired back. Animated, the Eritreans then mounted a challenge that almost took a position held by the enemy for six months. He realised he had started the engagement. "Journalists need to be more honest about the role they play in making war."

He tells me lots of stories, but it's hard to order them in a simple way. Their meanings are so particular. When I ask him for just one story, he tells me about a recurring dream he had. In the dream, there's been an explosion, a lot of people are dead. The place could be anywhere in the world. He uses one of his old tricks, telling the police he's a doctor to get him to the scene first with his camera. But the word goes around a doctor's arrived and people approach him, asking him to help. Now he's working for World Vision he doesn't have that dream any more.

The dream coincided with the arrival of his first child. "Once you have a child, every dead child you hold is your own." He also stopped being a war cameraman because he wanted to change the myth he hands to his son. And he believes in World Vision's work. In Third World countries he sees people living in tents. His mother lived in a tent during the Depression. "Look what was done in this country in one generation," he says with sudden enthusiasm.

2. The second story is about my father. It appeared about a year after The Line was published. As the story explains, one of my brothers went to Japan and met a group of elderly Japanese women interested in world peace and the truth of Japanese military behavior during World War 2. They asked if they could meet Dad, which presented him with a major dilemma..

Pub: The Age
Pubdate: 02-Sep-2006



MY FATHER had only met one Japanese person since World War II, a medical student. Then last year, one of my brothers visited Japan, tracked down the site of the coalmine where my father worked as a prisoner during the final year of the war, and was put in contact with a group of Japanese women wishing to unearth the truth of Japanese military conduct during that conflict.

If they came to Australia, could they meet my father?

Dad's 92 now, which is a gift considering only one in 10 of the old Burma Railway men are still alive and he only survived because he caught cholera. The guards left the cholera victims alone since the disease was contagious. He also had malaria. He was sick for the first 15 years after the war.

My father was a sergeant in C company of the 2/3 machine-gun battalion, a largely Tasmanian outfit. On the line, one of his fellow sergeants, Mickie Hallam, was stood to attention and bashed to death in front of his men, several of whom had slipped off into the jungle and dodged work.

The Japanese women were late arriving. As they walked to the house, one of them was holding up a camera, filming the moment. I wasn't sure my father would like that. There was a long moment during which the absence of any ritual meant no one knew who should go first into our family home. Inside, there was an exchange of gifts, but the woman with the camera was also rearranging the curtains and setting up the camera to do more filming.

Fuyuko Nishisato is a Japanese journalist who lived in Australia for some years. Bilingual, she become involved in ABC and BBC documentaries on the war. The stories led her to the activities of a Japanese unit in Manchuria who used human guinea pigs in experiments to do with germ warfare. She wrote a book about it, asking why the doctors involved were not prosecuted by the Americans after the war. One of her companions, Nori Nagasawa, worries for her safety.

Nori was 19 when Tokyo was firebombed, an event that incinerated more than 100,000 people. In Hawaii in 1993, Nori, a widow, met a former US air force pilot who said he had been in Tokyo that night. This angered her as she thought he meant in the air, dropping the bombs. In fact, he was being interrogated in a building remarkably close to where she was sheltering with her terrified young cousins.

Upon discussion, they found they had the same view of the event. A friendship started.

Yohko Ishizaka, the third woman, married a prisoner of war. At the time he was held, Yohko was a primary school student who had already been taught that death was preferable to the shame of being a prisoner. Her husband was deeply troubled by some of the things his unit had done in China and, as a prisoner of war, was well-treated. He returned to his home town and learned of a nearby camp where 60 Allied prisoners had died and eight Japanese guards had been hanged as war criminals.

Fuyuko, the journalist, wanted to interview Dad. When he agreed to the visit, he hadn't been told about an interview. I don't recall him speaking about the war when I was growing up. Then, between the ages of 70 and 90, he wrote four fragments, reflecting on the experience. Under what amounted to a cross-examination, he told his story sparsely, without embellishment. Initially, things weren't too bad; the worst of their treatment was being slapped and hit for not bowing to Japanese officers. Did you bow to Japanese officers? he was asked. "Yes." I'd never asked him that.

It was like a police interview, really. I saw a great weariness enter his body. He was asked if he knew about bashings. He outlined the case of Mickie Hallam. What was the worst thing about being on the line? "The weariness," he said. They were used as slaves and worked to death, one man dying for every sleeper laid. "The starvation," he added, "the overwhelming sense of hopelessness."

The three women knew about Weary Dunlop. Dad said his reputation started when he stood between some Japanese guards and an English soldier named Bill Griffiths whom they were about to bayonet.

Griffiths, who was in a hospital bed, had lost his hands and eyes when made by the Japanese to defuse a bomb.

Forty years later, Griffiths came halfway round the world and sang Two Little Boys ("Did you think I would leave you dying when there's room on my horse for two . . .") at a dinner Weary attended. If that doesn't move you, you don't know how much of a boy Weary Dunlop was all his life.

As prisoners, they all hated. Weary said he couldn't believe how much he could hate in the first two years of his captivity.

Then, in his third year, he was asked to treat a Japanese soldier who had attempted to amputate his own leg and then hobbled from the Burmese border. The leg had turned gangrenous. Looking into the soldier's face, he was persuaded of the Buddhist belief that in the face of suffering, all human beings are one.

Dad told the women that he would have liked the statue of Weary at Benalla to have been of Weary reaching out to the Japanese soldier. I hadn't heard that before either.

They came for two hours, stayed five. There were lots of cups of tea and plates of biscuits. Like a visit from neighbours, really.

3. The Cronulla riot was news around the world. In the weeks before the 2007 federal election, I went to Cronulla to see what it told me about Australia at that time. It's another story about bridge-builders v bridge-burners.

CRONULLA  (Published in The Age, November 17 2007)

Cronulla beach lies just south of Botany Bay where the modern state of Australia was founded.  Ron Smith, president of one of the four surf clubs on Cronulla beach at the time of the 2005 race riot, takes me on a drive and shows me round.  If the Cronulla riot were a movie,  Smith would be played by Bryan Brown - big and muscular, he's in his 50s and humorous in a colloquial way.

Ron Smith was there when the riot occurred. Tension had been building all week, here the trouible happened. the beach at Noerth Cronukllaars. I gather he'us and has a smilar e round. If it were a movie,  stories of Aussie women being insulted on the beach by Lebanese youths, other groups getting involved - far-Right groups - Alan Jones on the radio calling it like a D-Day landing, text messages spreading like a virus about "bash-a-Leb" day. Jones didn't explicitly endorse the message. But he broadcast  it.

Ron Smith head the chant of "Kill the Lebs" from within the restive crowd of about 5000. "That was frightening," he says. He was at the North Cronulla club, where the riot occurred, for the launching of a new surf boat.  Some of those whose passions were taken to such a pitch that day on the issue of identity subsequently bashed a Greek a boy on a train who looked Lebanese and terrified two Indian children in a car. Everyone I speak to  agrees what happened could have been worse.  As it was, Muslims youths massed at the Lekambra mosque, fearing an attack on their holy place, and there were retaliatory raids in what are called "Anglo" suburbs.

Bruce Baird, the Liberal Member for Cronulla, was in Hong Kong when and learned of the riot when it led the CNN world news.  Baird looks a bit like Jack Nicklaus, a gentleman with a physique. He's swum for the Cronulla club as a kid and again, after an absence, as an adult. He is currently its champion in the veteran class. He was in the NSW parliament for nine years, the federal parliament for 20. With Victorian Liberlas Petro Georgiou, Russell Broadbent and Semator Judith Troeth, he also withstood the wrath of his party and its leader to finally make a stand on behalf of refugees. Baird describes himself as "a God-botherer" - brought up Baptist, he likens his present beliefs with the American Episcopalians. This story is  about leadership, about a good Labor man and a good Liberal member.

What happened at Cronulla was world news.  North Cronulla Muslim life saver Sohel. was with relatives in America when news of the riot started appearing in that country. His relatives were startled. 'Everyone was saying, What is going on over there? " A genuine fear exists among many Moslems that, if the world situation is further mishandled,  we could descend into a world war.

Baird denies he led what happened after the riots in Cronulla. "A group came together," he says.  When asked the most important person in the story, he says, Nada., a Lebanese-Australian.... Baird, along with the Mayor of Cronulla and the presidents of the four local surf clubs met leaders of the Lebanese community on the Thursday following the riot. The following Sunday, Ron Smith's club, Wanda, launched their new boat. He invited the Lebanese community to attend the ceremony. "A lot came," he says.  "It was brave". One of their number assisted in carrying the new boat into the water.

Smith also got his club ironman, an Australian champion named Chris Hallam, to speak in a Lebanese club. Hallam was worried about how he'd "go over". "He went over big," says Smith. Hallam told his audience that if he swam out to two drowning men he would save the one he judged to have the best chance of surviving. Then he told the story of two Lebanese youths he'd saved one day, getting back to the second just as he was sinking, hauling him up by the hair. I ask Smith what he thinks about John Howard. "Did he show any leadership? Did he say I'll go down there and talk to those people?"  What about the retiring Liberal member Bruce Baird? Smith says: "He was fantastic".

Smith is a Labor man. Now  waste manager at the local council, he was a working man much of his life. The biggest issues for him in this election are IR laws - he has two kids entering the workplace - and climate change. He looks at the sea every day, often for long periods, and started at the surf club in his teens.  The first thing he says when I ask him about the Cronulla riots is "We're over it". But he does answer my questions and we have a few beers and watch ocean waves pounding to shore not 70 metres from his clubhouse.

In the wake of the Cronulla riot, Norm Smith heard a radio program on 10 great speeches.  Martin Luther King won. The Sermon on the Mount came second which was of no use to Ron, an atheist. Keating's Redfern speech came third. Australia is the place where everyone gets a fair go, he says, quoting from the speech. It's strange when he says it. How many people actually believe that any more? Well, he does.

Basically, what happened in the aftermath of the Cronulla riot is that the right people were in the right place at the right time. That's not to score the operation a complete success. The green bank above the Cronulla club with its trees handy for shade where the Lebanese families used to come and sit is empty. "They haven't come back," says Baird. Overnight, Cronulla also ceased to be a weekend holiday place. Shop revenues plummeted.

Baird, 65, is retiring at this election. "There comes a time," he says. His son has just entered the NSW State legislature. "He needs space". Baird will be remembered as a Liberal "wet"  in a time when that was a term of derision. He was never a Minister but he may have done something that all politicians aspire to do and the rest of us secretly envy. He may have a legacy.

One of his initiatives was to organize funding for a program whereby twenty kids from the western suburbs could train to become surf life savers. Not all were Moslem but most were. To be frank,  Sohail. does not look like a surf lifesaver.  He is a 21-year-old masters student in communications from.who works in the library at Channel 9, having previously been a sports reporter on a local paper. He identifies as Moslem but doesn't practice. He's clear, detached - what young people call cool.  The best part of the surf life training for him was jumping out of the helicoptor. He's trying to say to other young Molsems, hey, it's okay to go back to Cronulla. "Look around," he says. "It's hardly a war zone. It's a nice place to be."

He says he's confident it won't happen again, but, later, when I probe a bit, I found he is worried about what's going on in the rest of the world and its capacity to impact here. I meet his father, a good-looking agreeable man. Ron Smith explains the Cronulla riot by describing the rioters as "boofheads". "There's boofheads in every culture," he says.  I describe Norm's theory of boofheads behavior to Soheil and his father. At first Solah's father thinks the words I'm using are poofter behavior.  We correct the word and he asks his son,"What this boofhead mean?. "Idiot," says his son, translating from the Australian. Oh, yeah, says his father agreeing.  He knows exactly what Ron Smith means.

Ron Smith says harmonious relations within a society is "just about talking to people". Bruce Baird says he knew he was getting somewhere when the two groups started swapping jokes. "Started taking the piss". Both Smith and Baird say they have had overwhelming support from the surf clubs. Smith rates his support at 95 per cent. "But it can surprise you when you find out who the ones who are against you". Ron Smith says the issue is not about who is and isn't Australian.  "It's about being part of a place called Australia".

In my sports column today I describe meeting 21-year-old Mecca Laalaa, Australia's first Muslim woman lifesaver.  Mecca is a formidable young woman. In the course of this series, I've asked one question more than any other of the people I've met - what is the big issue for you in the election? Some have struggled to find more than one sentence. Mecca has eight on the table before we get started, beginning with health and education. She says Bruce Baird restored her faith in Australian politics.

4. This is an article on one of the greatest bridge builders I've met, Koori singer Archie Roach.  I don't write the headings for my newspaper stories. Sub-editors do. This one was given a fine title -  "Too long apart". It appeared in "The Age" on August 18 2007.

ARCHIE ROACH AND I are the same age but he looks a lot older. It's the ageing that comes from having lived on the streets for a number of years, from giving a kidney to a brother who needed one.

And, for an Aboriginal Australian, he's an old man. He's past 50.

Archie has just made a documentary, Liyarn Ngarn, with English actor Pete Postlethwaite. The story behind the film is that before making movies such as In the Name of the Father and Brassed Off, Pete was in an English seminary studying to be a priest along with a bloke called Bill Johnson. Bill married and came to Australia, adopting an Aboriginal kid taken by the authorities from a family in Alice Springs and given the name Louis St John. The Johnsons lived in the Perth suburb of North Beach. On January 4, 1992, his 19th birthday, Louis St John Johnson was attacked and killed by two white youths while walking home at night after a party. He was just five streets from his home when he was murdered.

The first stereotype Postlethwaite had to dispense with on his journey into understanding Australia was that the two white youths weren't Australian. They were English. One of their mates had been assaulted by blacks. They went out to get a black. Johnson blames a local talkback radio king. "It had been a terrible summer," he says. "Every day on the radio they were attacking Aboriginal people." Johnson's forebears are Irish. Over his son's grave, in the Irish manner, he swore his son would not be forgotten. Johnson paid for Pete and Archie to make the documentary. Johnson's original idea was to publicise, both here and overseas, the lack of progress in the reconciliation movement over the past 10 years. The effect of the project, however, was that Pete saw Australia through Aboriginal eyes.

After Louis' death, Bill Johnson took his son's body back to Alice Springs. The Johnsons had previously visited Alice Springs when Louis was 14 and tried to track down his family but the local bureaucracy stoutly resisted their inquiries. Now they got Aboriginal help. Louis' family were found, more than a hundred turning up for the funeral. Bill Johnson remembers hearing people talking in an Aboriginal language and the English words: "That baby Warren". Louis had started life as Warren Braeden.

Special Place, one of the songs Archie wrote in making the film, is for Louis, as he is still known. It's about the place where he's buried just outside Alice Springs. The song is like an Albert Namatjira painting of the same country - blue skies, desert colours - only the picture is darkened and scratched but is nonetheless beautiful and joyful because Louis is finally part of it.

ARCHIE ROACH IS a hard man to write about. His story's so big. His early life is something Charles Dickens might have written, the story of an orphan tossed upon the world, where he is exposed to an extraordinary gallery of characters, some cruel, some kind. One of the kind ones in Archie's life was a Scotsman called Cox who gave him a love of Scottish music and the poetry of Robert Burns. Archie saw good in white culture.

When he was three or so, he was taken from his parents at the Framlingham mission, outside Warrnambool. I know a Gunditjmara woman who was there that day and saw Archie being taken. She doesn't like to recall it. "The ones who got taken are scarred," she says, "but so are the ones who saw it." When he was 15, he got a letter from a sister (he didn't know he had a sister) saying his mother was dying (he thought his mother had died when he was an infant) and that he should hurry if he wanted to see her. He ran away, but arrived too late. Started living on the streets. Hopped into a car not knowing it was stolen and was sent to prison. Fought in the boxing tents. I could go on and did when I addressed the Charles Dickens Society some years ago in Melbourne. Meeting Archie taught me to appreciate Dickens' view of the world.

If you ask people who know Archie to speak about him, their views reflect different values - some white, some black and some values that are common to both cultures. That's the world Archie inhabits. His new CD, Journey, was engineered by Nash Chambers, brother of Kasey, and produced by Shane Howard, formerly of Goanna. Nash Chambers says, "It's a privilege to work with an artist who brings as much passion, as much belief, to his art as Archie does". Shane Howard believes the new CD, which had part of its early life in his shed studio outside Warrnambool, is a feat of philosophy, a balancing of western and Aboriginal beliefs. He calls Archie a "deeply considered man".

David Arden was Archie's first guitarist and like him from a Gunditjmara man on one side of his family. He sees great significance in the fact that the CD is a collaboration between Archie and Shane Howard since, in his view, they're both from the same "country" - that is, the lands of the Gunditjmara around Warrnambool. Aboriginal rock musician Bart Willoughby sees it that way, too. He says Howard and Archie are songmen from the same place. "There must be some big power down there," he says. David Arden is a quiet man who works hard for his words. He views Archie as an elder. "Uncle Archie simplifies things," he says softly. He means feelings and emotions that are more complex for Aboriginal people living in this country than the rest of us can imagine.

Paul Kelly produced Archie's first album, Charcoal Lane, in 1991. He says his view of Archie's art is unchanged. "Archie's songs are at once both love songs and political songs," says Kelly. Bart Willoughby, whose '80s Aboriginal band No Fixed Address earned the admiration of bands like the Clash and the Blockheads, says Archie is the voice of Aboriginal emotion. He says he appeared when mainstream Australia equated Aboriginal music with Jimmy Little singing Telephone to Glory. "No disrespect to Jimmy Little," he says, "because Jimmy was at the forefront of the forefront (of the Aboriginal music movement). But suddenly Archie was singing about children being taken away." And, for once, non-indigenous Australia was listening.

THE 18TH CENTURY MYSTIC POET William Blake said life was about three stages - innocence, experience and what he called organised innocence. Rather than be defeated by experience, or collapse into cynicism, Blake said we should organise our understanding of experience in a way that preserves our appreciation of innocence and capacity for wonder. Blake believed in the power of the imagination to transform reality. It's a path that takes courage. For Archie it meant going to the suburban street where Louis was beaten, then dragged on to the road and driven over. Passersby thought he was a drunk black. Watching Archie stand there, listening as Pete tells the story of what happened that night, you see the blows connect with him.

Archie talks about looking for "the glimmer of light" in the most pitch-black of places. Later in the documentary Archie and Pete visit the cell where Robbie Walker, a young Aboriginal man who died by "misadventure" in Fremantle jail, spent his last night. It's night-time when they go. Archie sings a song he has written from a poem by "Grandfather Koori", Kevin Gilbert, himself a former prisoner. Archie loses the song, or whatever it is that guides him when he is singing. "Are you all right?" asks Postlethwaite. "I'm not singing it for me," he says, almost angrily. "I'm singing it for this feller." He's pointing to the corner of the cell. He starts again and carries the song. Shane MacGowan of the Pogues said the only measure of a singer's voice is how "lived-in" it is. A lot of people live in Archie's voice. Bart Willoughby says it's the voice of Aboriginal people.

The film took its early ideas from Bill Johnson and then evolved of its own accord. After dealing with the death of Louis, Robbie Walker and another death in custody, Pete and Archie go to Broome to talk to the former chairman of the reconciliation council, Patrick Dodson, who gives the film its political muscle. There is footage of Pauline Hanson in the parliament giving expression to racial resentment against Aboriginal people and the newly elected Prime Minister, John Howard, pointedly declining to criticise her. Then Dodson says he's crossed too many bridges, there's been too many sorry days, it's time for action. Archie makes a blues song out of that - too many bridges, too many sorry days, just repeating the facts, making a rhythm out of them which in turn makes them bearable.

The film details a land claim from the Western Desert outside Fitzroy Crossing. The people hold the land their people have always lived in. No one disputes that. In 1996, they made a giant painting to assist their claim under the Native Title Act but 10 years later the claim still hadn't been decided and a third of the original claimants were dead. Dodson describes the process as a pantomime and calls for justice.

The documentary has two endings. One is Pete's. He has had to absorb what he has seen, and make some sense out of it as a visitor from another country but one who knows also that he is connected to this history. The most haunting idea in the narrative he has heard is terra nullius, the land of no one, the fiction by which the land was taken. With the acceptance of that, Postlethwaite reasons, a screen closed around our senses. Then Archie sings the title track of the album, Liyarn Ngarn, two Yawru words from Broome, the first meaning inner guide, the second being a place where fresh and salt water meet. "We've been too long apart," he sings to black and white Australia. If Archie Roach is an Aboriginal William Blake, the songs that have arisen from the tragic fate of Louis St John Johnson may be our Jerusalem.

HIS VOICE IS OLD NOW. Sometimes it sounds broken, but its reverence for life is undiminished. His biggest belief, he says, is that we all come from one source. Neil Murray, formerly of the Warumpi Band, speaks of Archie's "astonishing grace and humility". Murray says Archie brings with his art "the belief that spiritual healing is always possible, even in the damaged land he has walked". Over the past year, he has been in and out of hospital and when he speaks it is with a conscious awareness of his mortality. "Before I go, before I leave, I want to go back to my mother's country and bring back its songlines. I'm a songman among my people and I have to start fulfilling that role." Archie says songs can guide and protect you.

The light in his eye is not one of serenity. Although he is easily drawn to laughter, his manner is mostly distant. It's like he's looking at something bright but broken, wondering how to fix it. Journey, the CD, was recorded at Sing Sing studio in Richmond two months ago when the media was full of reports of the Federal Government sending troops and police into the Northern Territory to protect Aboriginal children. When Archie was taken from his parents, it was for his "protection". He says he still misses his mother every day and now he can see it all happening again.

Someone in the studio said what was happening in the Northern Territory was a land grab. Archie stopped, turned and said in mock surprise, "Really?". Then there's associated issues for Aboriginal people like living with the white perceptions of them which are almost exclusively media-based. What do we think now when we see an Aboriginal grandfather? What dark thought flickers? He has to be a possible child abuser, doesn't he? Archie's an Aboriginal grandfather. He says what's happening in the Northern Territory is going "to wash over all Aboriginal people regardless". "You can't just come in and override us with police and army. There has to be a better solution, a better way."

A lot is changing in this country. The terms black and white Australia are increasingly imprecise - there's more than two colours involved and lots of shades in between. But some things stay the same, like the land, or, rather, the creative spirit in the land. During a break in the recording, sitting around a table, Archie said if he had one wish it was not that non-Aboriginal people understood Aboriginal people. It's that non-Aboriginal people understood how Aboriginal people feel about the land. He got emotional when he said it. The land is our mother, he said. Then he got up and went and stood alone for a while.

Later, he said, "We've run into a brick wall called politics. It's up to us now. If people come together, the pollies'll have to follow". He still trusts Australians. Because he trusts people. He believes people are starting to see through the political tricks that have been used over the past decade to foster division. "Things are changing," he says. "They're starting to go our way."

5. Finally, I would like to explain why, in structuring the book, I chose to make Dad's story "Brother's Keeper" the book's climax. The prisoners on the Burma Railway were in a life-and-death situation. As the story suggests, each prisoner's chances of survival were related to the way in which he inter-acted with the other prisoners. When you're semi-starved and being used as slave labor, your physical condition can give away quickly and dramatically. This is a story about an individual who is equipped to survive. He knows what he has to do, he knows how to do it - part of the trick is keeping separate, remaining detached, from the other men. Then he over-hears a conversation which leads him to an understanding which shocks him - one of his fellow prisoners is prepared to make a sacrifice that jeopardizes his own chance of surviving for a friend. The story ends with the survivor having to make a choice.What I like about the story is that it isn't sentimental or melodramatic. It's very finely measured but the statement it makes is clear. And it's written by someone who was there.