These are the lads at Sydney Airport. I forget the job now, but we show up all over town, dignatories coming and going, disasters. If you see me coming you know you're having a bad day, I quip, and that's basically true. We are not harbingers of good news. I'm the dead persons roundsman; on general news it's only disasters or scandals that get our attention; particularly on a national paper. The daily mayhem is largely forgotten, but when things turn truly bad, when a scandal threatens your entire career, when you're a high flyer brought down by indiscretion, then we're there.
For us it's just business; we're just doing a job. Vultures, they scream at us from their overlooking apartments, as if such insults were likely to dent our equilibrium. Hard, fast and cynical, not just making reality readable but twisting the narrative into stories which in themselves become part of the play. There was no conscience. We're not evil, I say, we're all parents, we understand the situation. But what we really understand is the need to file on time, the need to be accurate but above all fast, for filing on time takes precedence over everything. There's no use trying to discuss the nuances or ethical dilemmas with anyone higher up the food chain; all they care about is filling a hole and not getting sued; getting a pat on the back because nothing went wrong.
While for the people we deal with, everything has gone wrong. For many of them, it's one of the worst days of their life. If you get to them fast enough; before their skin has thickened or they take their anger out on the media, a natural reaction to blame anyone for the mess their life has suddenly become, the grief that overwhelms them over the untimely death of their son, their daughter, their mother, their father. We're professional empaths, tuning into their horror and their sadness. That's the mother, has to be, I say, putting down the phone after ringing every one in Tasmania with a particular surname. We could send a photographer round to pap her, I said, if we wanted. How do you know? They ask. Too upset, I say. Yes, there's no mistaking that grief, the boss says. We didn't send round a photographer, but that's the way we work.
One day, sent out to photograph the wife of a man, a notorious murder who had just overdosed in jail. She was rough as guts, one of those women who fall for jailbirds. But rough as guts or not, she didn't seem a bad person. We knocked, were told to get lost. We parked outside, in a dreary street in the dreary backlots of Penrith in the western suburbs. We followed her to the school, photographed her as she dropped off a couple of her kids while keeping an eye on her youngest. Please, she begged, just leave us alone. I rang the office. Any further approach to this woman is harassment of a woman in grief with several young children, I said. "Oh, we wouldn't want to do that", came the response. "Door knock the neighbours." That was the job. I sighed, doorknocked the neighbours in their dreary, unfriendly unloved housing commission apartments, full of lives that had gone astray. Almost no one answered their doors. Those that did protested not to know her, or told us to get lost. A bikie type, thickset with tatoos and sunglasses, clearly up to no good, speeding off his tits, knocked on her door and was allowed in; all the windows covered. He no doubt showed her more kindness than any of us.
THE BIGGEST STORY:
The tide in Iraq is turning against America in almost every conceivable way; and intellectuals and commentators are increasingly critical. Dick Cheney has just been in Sydney for four days; provoking demonstrations and creating traffic chaos. It's hard to see that he won any friends downunder.
On the opinion pages author of the Peace of Illusions Christopher Layne writes in today's Australian that Dick Cheney has led America down the road to hell in Iraq.
"VICE President Dick Cheney's Friday speech to the Australian-American Leadership Dialogue in Sydney was merely a stale rehash of justifications for the George W. Bush administration's policies, especially in the Middle East; policies that have been rejected by a majority of the American public and by Congress. Still, Cheney's comments are important because they demonstrate that he and Bush are determined to give no ground in their goal of attaining victory in Iraq.
In November 2006, of course, the Democrats won a resounding triumph in the US congressional elections: a victory that was essentially a repudiation of the administration's Iraq policy. It was widely speculated that the election returns - coupled with the publication of the Iraq Study Group report, and Robert Gates's appointment as Secretary of Defence - heralded the return of the foreign policy realists to influence in Washington, and a major shift in the administration's Iraq policy.
But Bush's surge-escalation in Iraq, and Cheney's Sydney speech indicate that the administration remains indifferent to the views of Congress and the American electorate, and to the counsels of the foreign policy realists who held high office in the George H. W. Bush administration. Already having put itself in a deep hole in Iraq, the administration seems determined to dig itself an even deeper one."
He goes on to quote Jim Mann saying Iraq is "Dick Cheney's war".
"It is a war born of a blinkered, black and white view of Iraq and the Middle East: a view that manifests scant understanding of the region's geopolitical, historical, cultural, ethnic and religious complexities. As evidenced by his Sydney remarks, Cheney and the administration remain prisoners of their illusions.
"We now know - in large part thanks to the "Downing Street memos" of 2002 - that the administration's rationales for war were disingenuous. And Cheney was the prevaricator-in-chief. The Iraq War is not, as Cheney argued during the run-up to the war, about Iraq's non-existent weapons of mass destruction. Nor does it have anything to do with terrorism or the alleged link that Cheney claimed existed between Saddam Hussein and al-Qa'ida (a canard that, amazingly enough, he dredged up in his Sydney speech).
"Rather, almost from the day it took office, the administration had Iraq and Saddam in its crosshairs. With Cheney in the vanguard, the administration came to office determined to go to war with Iraq in order to overthrow Saddam, establish American geopolitical dominance over the Middle East, control the supply of Persian Gulf oil, and democratise Iraq and the Middle East."
He goes on to say: "When historians allocate responsibility for the US's tragic mis-adventure in Iraq, the lion's share of the blame is likely to be placed at Cheney's doorstep."
This is Sammy and his friend Todd at Central Station, probably on Sam's 16th birthday. I have to do the Driver Qualification Test to finally get off my Ps so he can drive. You have to have a fully qualified driver when you're on your Ls. He has been driving around with Suzy, and loves it of course. I lost my licence over parking fines, $10,000 worth in fact, not all of which were mine, in a classic circle only Sydney could devise. We were living in Riley Street, Darlinghurst, when Sammy came home from the hospital. He was much beloved by the gay boys who ran the trendy cafe come eaterie on the corner called Dov. He was tiny, and I used to take him out for breakfast every morning.
