The Hounds of God

*



Mural, Redfern.

The Stockman

The sun was in the summer grass,
the Coolibahs* were twisted steel;
the stockman paused beneath their shade
and sat upon his heel,
and with the reins looped through his arm
he rolled tobacco in his palm.

His horse stood still, His cattle-dog
tongued in the shadow of the tree,
and for a moment on the plain
Time waited for the three,
and then the stockman licked his fag
and Time took up his solar swag.

I saw the stockman mount and ride,
across the mirage on the plain;
and still that timeless moment brought
fresh ripples to my brain;
it seemed in that distorting air
I saw his grandson sitting there.
David Campbell

Praying only for knowledge of your will for us, they say, and the spirit pours forth from the television, from open mouths, the man in the cafe, wherever he turned. Cardinal Pell shook holy water at him and wherever he went, people burbled about their "higher power". It's the hounds of God, the man in the cafe said, when he shared an intimacy, he's looking for you. He looked up startled. That made perfect sense. He had been caught in the material fabric, growing increasingly depressed, convinced there was no way out.

And messages from an alternative universe kept bounding at him, they blathered on and on about their spirit, about being saved, the compassion, the tears, streaming from the television set. The atmosphere had turned to glue. His own lost heart had plunged below zero. He tried and tried not to believe; it didn't make sense, he was too intelligent for mumbo jumbo, there was no God, Richard Dawkins had declared it so. The smell of incense permeated the house; far off the monks were praying; he himself was haunted.

The resignation in his quiet despair was so cliched that when he shared his inner-most feelings people laughed; and he laughed with them. Popcorn made of plastic and drinks made of sugar and chemicals, his position was clear. The modern world had stolen his soul. When things were absent, when he no longer believed, when he faced the priests as a young man, told them truthfully, angrily, of his crisis in faith, cried from the ceaseless harassment and bullying of his masters, shouted out there was no way out, clenched his fist and shouted: There Is No God.

If only he believed it to be true, he and Dawkins and the great intellectual superiority of the atheist, the agnostic, the chanted incense, the curling smoke, the shafts of light through the stained glass windows, the soaring voices of the choir, the convictions of the priests, the servants of God, if only they had removed this bit when they put in the implants, it would have made everything so much easier. Often in life he had felt like the only atheist in a packed church, the only animal of independent thought in a cage full of pack rats, his voice shouting over the top of the suppressed, look up, take a bite, enter the real world, become material.

The phrases, the doubts, kept swirling. You can tell uncle Steve, the man in the cafe said. I believe. I'm not ashamed of it. I just think God is in our lives, he's here, he talks through people, he works through coincidence, he is always in the gaps. He could feel the tears welling up in his eyes. Was this man a spy? Could he have been sent to determine whether the implants were working, whether he had totally surrendered.

He looked across the wreckage of the building, almost filtering out the increasingly familiar sound of the sirens. This time the police cordon was much further back. This time policemen were amongst the injured, and the number of people, the raw power of the state, had trebled. He clutched his reporter's pad but could get nowhere in the crushing, hysterical crowd. Only a few hundred yards back from here was St Mary's, and across the city other deserted churches, St Andrew's cathedral, the Anglicans, Saint Tropez, the mnistry at Kings Cross. The sirens screamed. The crowd took on a life of its own. He, too, found himself shouting, although he did not know why.

This time even the sign, the innocuous Social Policy Centre, had been damaged, the letters, relatively new, imposed over the building's previous functions. All in a heart beat. Heartbreak. There were people around him crying, clearly they had lost loved ones. He knew he should try and talk to them, take their names, do his job, report their distress. Instead all he could do was gaze in astonishment at the chaotic scene in front of him. Fire engines and ambulances were making their way through the packed crowd.

Was it a suicide bomber? someone near him asked, and he turned and shook his head. No, I don't think so. Then he stopped himself. How did he know that? He shouldn't know that. Perhaps it would cast him under suspicion, and indeed already he could see the military police, their German shepherd dogs straining at their leashes, their relentless eyes surveying the crowd. He knew they would spot him soon enough; and he would crumble at the first accusation. He always felt guilty. His observer role as a newspaper reporter could not be sustained forever. The guilt that coated his interior would blow out; and they would be able to see for themselves, read his thoughts, know that he had seen the perpetrator; that he could play the incident back through his mind as good as any documentary film.

He could see them shouting above the noise of the crowd into their walkie talkies. Listening for instructions. Searching the crowd. Each instruction getting closer. He didn't know how to turn his head off; never had; and now it was about to bring him entirely undone. There must be an empath here, tracking him, or the implant had betrayed him, his thoughts setting off alarms in some far-off monitoring station. He turned to make his way out the back of the crowd, away from the chaotic scene. He could see other reporters he knew arriving; television, radio, new media, the web. They were all acting quickly, professionally; as he tried to force his way through the constantly growing crowd. This was mayhem. And he was about to be caught.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/04/07/2209467.htm

The Northern Territory has known for more than a decade that Indigenous students are completing its Aboriginal schools (Learning Centres and Community Education Centres) with the numeracy and literacy skills of five-year-olds. Ten thousand illiterate, nonnumerate teenagers and young men and women in their 20s are unemployable because of the educational failures of the last decade.

The causes of failing education - inequitable school facilities, inappropriate curriculums, and inadequate teaching - in Aboriginal schools are also known. Unfortunately, these causes have not been addressed in the Rudd Government's recent appropriation of $98 million to add 200 teachers to the Northern Territory by 2011. This initiative falls far short of the measures necessary to bring Northern Territory Indigenous education to mainstream standards.

Many Aboriginal schools do not have standard facilities such as electricity, ablution blocks, and teaching equipment. But the principal causes of the absence of literacy and numeracy are not physical shortcomings but separate Aboriginal curriculums and substandard teaching. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children that live in the open Australian society and attend mainstream schools perform as well as their peers.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23494249-7583,00.html

THE Northern Territory Department of Education reported in 2006-07 that reading and numeracy Year 3, 5 and 7 benchmark passes for remote indigenous students averaged less than half those for non-indigenous students.

For 2004-05, the last year that figures for remote indigenous children were published, the average passes for remote indigenous children were 20 per cent compared with 90per cent for non-indigenous children. These figures were overly optimistic for indigenous children because if teachers thought homeland children would not pass, they did not permit them to sit the benchmark tests. Many homeland children have thus never been tested.

Where indigenous children in remote learning centres have been independently tested by qualified teachers, the results showed most indigenous children were leaving primary school with the numeracy and literacy of five and six-year-old mainstream children.

Next month all Australian children will be tested at Years 3, 5, 7 and 9 for literacy and numeracy. Kevin Rudd has promised progress on closing the gap on literacy and numeracy outcomes between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians will be reported on the first day of federal parliament each year.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,24897,23487296-601,00.html

NDIGENOUS children in remote communities in the Northern Territory are being condemned to failure by a system of educational apartheid that offers a second-rate curriculum in make-believe schools.

In a paper to be released next week by the Centre for Independent Studies, Helen Hughes, professor emeritus at the Australian National University and senior fellow at the CIS, says indigenous schooling in the Territory has "in effect not been extended to secondary education".

"Because most indigenous primary school leavers, particularly in remote areas, are at Year 1 level, so-called secondary classes mostly teach elementary English, numeracy and literacy," she says.

Teachers are flown in to remote schools, sometimes for as little as a few hours one day a week, and many schools are not open five days a week.

Students are not taught history, geography nor science, Professor Hughes says, and she cites examples of teenagers thinking there are 100 minutes in an hour and not knowing how to divide a piece of material into two, nor how to find Canberra on a map nor what "capital of Australia" means.



Mural, Redfern.