Advance 100

This is a photograph by Bob Finn.

I'm trying to get a few words out of former Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, now in his 80s and an heroic figure for my entire generation.

It was one of those rare nights in Sydney, when all the various strands of life seem to come together and we are at the heart of where we're meant to be.

The event was called Advance 100, which aimed to bring together 100 of the most successful Australian expatriates, bring them back to Australia. There was no shortage of money behind the project. One of the wines for the evening, held at the NSW Art Gallery, was a Grange, which sells at $475 a bottle.

The aims were not entirely clear; basically to bring together a whole lot of talent and see if the synergy of it all could produce beneficial outcomes for the country as a whole.

There truly were some incredible people there.

Even in the picture above, there's not just Gough, who these days is regarded as a living national treasure, but behind him a doctor who got a Nobel prize in medicine for genetic related work, and a Dame with 24 honorary degrees; provost of this, Chancellor of that; a high flyer in some of the most esteemed academic corridors of England. You must be very bright, I said, when told of a sampling of her many achievements. So they tell me, she said, smiling in a completely ordinary way, as if I had complimented her on her scone making rather than her astonishing record of academic triumphs.

Gough, once a media tart par excellence, is harder to get words out of these days. He's 80 after all. But he is still a fixture of Sydney life. The great man is wheeled into events in his wheelchair, but at least he gets out and about, which is more than you can say for a lot of his contemporaries.

To those of us who became politically aware in the 1970s, he truly was a hero of the times; the first progressive prime minister after years of conservative government. Of more immediate impact on those of us facing being sent to Vietnam, he was the man who abolished conscription.

Before the formal dinner began, there were drinks and fiddly things for the assembled crowd, handsome waiters, male and female, in starched uniforms serving the hundred plus guests and specially assembled; "a veritable who's who" to usej the old cliche.

Caught in conversation, pad in hand, I grabbed quotes off whoever crossed my path, as one does. Doing my bit, I asked one not particularly interesting looking man for his details and a quote. "I outsold JK Rowling last year," he declares amiably, and I look at him in astonishment. "What do you do?" Who could possibly outsell Harry Potter?

As it turned out he wrote textbooks on how to learn English; and had sold something like 35 million copies in a single year. South America was opening up as a market, he declared, I sold a million in Chile alone. The millions add up, he said, smiling; showing, I thought, the self-confidence or personal security that being a millionaire can bring.

I bet the millions add up, I thought. He was very nice; I basically resent the rich, for whatever reason, but he was very likable nonetheless.

After doing my job; it's hard with these sorts of events to get a news thread out of them, you basically just take the first thing that strikes you; the most interesting paper, the most striking combination of people. Having been around so long, if it interets me it probably interests everybody. Much of it is instinctive. In this case it was Gough with some of the country's most successful expats.

After protesting that he couldn't possibly say anything, finally he did. It's very good to see them back, he said, as if they were all part of his personal flock. And in a way, they probably were.

In one of those strange circumstances that befall journalists, all the seats were taken except the one next to the host, Geoffrey Robertson, famous for his Hypothetical television program and a number of other triumphs.

You couldn't have got a better seat if you had spent the last six months conniving.

He bounced up and down, introducing various people, giving small and entertaining speeches.

He was, in that urbane highly sophisticated London way that successful Australians adopt, very easy to talk to; and having had a few of the expensive wines, garrulous.

I knew his wife, Kathy Lette, of Puberty Blues fame, from the old days when we both worked at the Sydney Morning Herald.

She embraced me effusively, glad to see an old face, old, literally, in my case, and I said: "You've done so well, I'm proud of you."

She beamed, it was a nice, generous thing to say; she had gone on to be famous, successful, rich, and I was still just a general news reporter basically on the same old rounds.

The fact that I so clearly knew his wife made Geoffrey relax, and he was happy to chat about newspapers, politics, gossip, the apparent decline of the Howard government.

How's Blair going? I asked.

Dreadful, he declared, offering the distaste of London's intelligentsia.

What about Gordon Brown, I asked, it's hard to get a fix on him here in Australia.

We really are an isolated, sparsely populated country on the fringes of absolutely nowhere; particular now when cheap travel and the Internet have transformed most of the world into a bustling, fascinating theme park; and I remember a BBC film crew following a group of African pygmies through Singapore airport.

Brown is a very impressive, Robertson declared. He was around for dinner last Friday. I think he's a very substantial person.

Only Robertson could say such things and get away with it, and mean it.

The after dinner speaker was Clive James, who went on at such enormous lengths, and with such a volume of verbage, that most people were sighing with exasperation by the end of it all.

But other than that, and my own internal desolation at the end of a very long year; it was a splendid event in spendid surrounds; and Sydney, for once, felt at the heart of the world's intellectual and cultural currents; superb food, superb paintings; superb company. Where else did you want to be?

THE BIGGER STORY

TODAY ONLINE

The baby-faced butcher
International censure as footage of Taliban's child executioner surfaces
ISLAMABAD — The Taliban of Afghanistan is notorious for its brutality. But the terrorist group seems to have taken barbarism to new heights by using a child as an executioner — and releasing a videotape of him beheading an "American spy".
.The video has sparked international criticism, with the United Nations Children's Fund (Unicef) condemning the incident as "a terrible example of how children can be used by adults to commit heinous crimes in times of conflict", reported The Guardian.
.In the videotape, now circulating in Pakistan, the boy (picture), who appears to be no older than 12, is seen standing over a blindfolded man, brandishing a long knife. Wearing a combat jacket, oversized sneakers and a white headband, the boy denounces the man in a high-pitched voice. "He is an American spy. This is his fate."
.The baby-faced executioner then beheads his victim.
.The gory execution was egregious even by the standards of the Taliban, which has killed hundreds of civilians in suicide bombings and regularly executes suspected American collaborators.
.But this is the first time the Taliban, who ruled most of Afghanistan from 1996 before being ousted by United States- led forces in 2001, has used a child executioner. Even in war-torn Iraq, where such executions are common, children have never been used for such tasks.
.In a statement condemning the video, Unicef said: "The use of children under 15 years of age — as is apparent in this case — is a war crime under international law."