On the Behaviour of a Provincial 'Elite'

Paul Sheehan, ‘Cultural whinge gets the gallery director’s Irish up’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 03.06.99

“This is about envy and revenge, nothing more.”

With these words, the young Irishman who holds the most important position in Australian art, Dr Brian Kennedy, director of the National Gallery of Australia, entered an ideological war that has been building ever since his appointment two years ago.

The catalyst for his anger is an attempt by a group of art scholars, dealers and artists to prevent the appointment of the former art critic of The Sydney Morning Herald, John McDonald, to the powerful position of head of Australian Art at the gallery.

The group is writing to the chairman of the gallery’s council of trustees, the media magnate Kerry Stokes, urging the overturning of the appointment.

“This is a spontaneous protest by a broad group of the art community,” the spokesman for the group, Brad Buckley, Associate Professor at the Sydney College of the Arts, said yesterday. “We ask if it is possible for him to be in a leadership position in a culture where he has been so divisive...

“He [McDonald] looks back into the nineteenth century, he’s looking backwards. He has a very Anglophied view of how art should be valued...

“He didn’t fulfil most of the gallery’s own criteria for the position, that he have a higher degree in the field and extensive curatorial experience...this [protest] is also linked to a broader cultural malaise in Australia. We are importing all these people to be heads of our cultural institutions.”

Dr Kennedy described these arguments as “an unfortunate outburst of provincialism”.

“The first exhibition John does, this group is going to murder him, while the public will love it. Wait and see. It’s as predictable as that.

“It’s terribly disappointing that some people feel it necessary to raise the bar even higher for him before he even has put his feet under the desk.”

There is no chance that the appointment will be overturned.

“Dr Kennedy has the very strong confidence of the minister,” Mr Terry O’Connor, spokesman for the Minister for Communications, Senator Alston, said yesterday. “He has demonstrated an enormous amount of ability. He has made the gallery more vibrant, lively and relevant.”

Dr Kennedy also has the support of Mr Stokes and a famous former chairman, Mr Gough Whitlam.

The leaders of the dissenting group, which is said to number about 200, include Rex Butler of the University of Queensland, the former director of the Museum of Contemporary Art (and frequent McDonald target) Bernice Murphy, Robert Owen of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, and gallery owners Anna Schwartz and Nick Tsoutos.

Leading gallery owners contacted by the Herald backed the McDonald appointment. Frank Watters: “It’s a blast of fresh air. There seems to be a creeping control of art by careerists and ideologues. This is a challenge to their power.”

Stuart Purves: “I’m 100 per cent behind his appointment. He knows Australian art very well. He brings a freshness and a broad point of view, and you can have a discourse with him.”

Rex Irwin: “Museums have been buying too much contemporary crap and if this appointment puts a break on that cycle it will be a good thing ... Brian Kennedy has been surprisingly forthright and done incredibly sensible things ... his appointment of John McDonald is slightly out of left field.”

The Kennedy-McDonald team signals the creation of the most outspoken lightning rod in Australian art in generations. Both are 38 and unafraid of controversy and fiercely lucid.

McDonald was appointed the Herald’s chief art critic in 1986, aged 25, and became the pre-eminent art critic in the country.

Dr Kennedy was deputy director of the National Gallery of Ireland when appointed two years ago. His arrival has prompted the departure of some 40 staff, some by natural attrition and others who have been encouraged out the door by Dr Kennedy.

The Shame of Australians and its Variants

‘The Cringe - new variants of the virus’ The Sydney Morning Herald, 28.09.95

This is the edited text of a speech Frank Moorhouse gave at a Herald-Dymocks Literary Lunch, which he abandoned after interjections from the floor.

As most of you know, until recently, I lived in France for four years and my new book, Loose Living, is a humorous expression of that experience. Fun and games with the French and the Australian identity.

Until my period in France, I spent most of my life living in Australia and I live here now.

It was then something of a perplexing shock that my last book, Grand Days, was rejected from the most Australian of prizes, the Miles Franklin Prize last year.

The poor old Miles Franklin Prize has been having a rough time of it, with the Demidenko affair and all.

But I believe that the actions of the judges have exposed a sad turmoil in Australian thinking in the wider population. Because the judges will not enter into public discourse about their decisions, we can only surmise and speculate about the nature of their reasoning.

This is what I surmise from their actions.

In rejecting Grand Days and the other two books last year, the judges were struggling with a mutation of the cultural cringe.

I wish to discuss this mutation later in this talk. But it is a desire to promote a narrow form of Australianness and to spurn anything which has the whiff of cosmopolitanism which is seen as an author turning his or her back on [his or] her native country.

With Grand Days we have a character, Edith Campbell Berry, who goes to Geneva to join the League of Nations in the 1920s and is consciously trying to be an “internationalist” in both the political and cultural sense.

She is self-consciously striving to be cosmopolitan. She is an Australian refashioning herself in many ways.

But Edith also represented Australia and its attempts to come to terms diplomatically with being a nation state.

The deeper irony is that the book is also about borders and the crossing of borders and the meaning of borders, national and other, and identity.

The judges of the Miles Franklin recoiled from this and disqualified the book.

Again I think the authorial context influenced them in my case, as it did with the Demidenko affair.

When the book was published I was still living in France, preparing to return to Australia and I was widely reported as living there at the time of publication of the book.

The most common question I had from people when I did come back was “are you going to live here or go back to France?”

Naturally, the Miles Franklin judges had this picture of me living in a chateau and eating my way through fine dinners, enjoying the finer things of life.

Not only was the book to be damned for its unAustralianness but the author was suspected of cultural treason as well.

The judges, I speculate, decided that this was not only a book about cosmopolitanism and not about Australia, but that the author was committing cultural treason.

The judges this year had learned something of a lesson from this media debate about what it meant, now, to be an Australian writer. Times had changed.

This year they must have decided that they had learned their lesson and that Australia was a multicultural and sophisticated nation and that they would show their own cosmopolitan tastes in selecting Helen Demidenko’s book, The Hand that Signed the Paper, because it was written from the viewpoint of a Ukrainian family living in Australia.

It was about this family’s history before them came to Australia in the Ukraine during World War II. 

Only one judge has spoken out and she praised the book for its “authenticity” among other things.

Then of course, it turns out not to be by someone of Ukrainian descent but, in fact, a literary hoax.

The judges of the Miles Franklin were in even deeper trouble. With Grand Days they were tripped up by a variant of the cultural cringe that is the urge to spurn the cosmopolitan.

With the Demidenko affair they went in the opposite direction and were caught by what I would call multicultural cringe - they were transfixed by the exotic and foreign, held like rabbits in the headlights of a car; their aesthetics and their perception were blinded.

Some commentators raise the question of the possibility that multicultural art had become something of a fashion preferred above that of the older mainstream Anglo culture.

Whatever else was illustrated by this double disaster for the judges of Miles Franklin, it certainly showed that their judgement was seriously limited in the first case, then destabilised and erratic in the following year.

But the double controversy might tell us something about ourselves at present.

Since returning to Australia, I have come across an intellectual virus hitherto thought to have been eradicated in all but the most remote parts of Australia.

I have come across an unacknowledged resentment and suspicion of what might be described as cultural “treason” by Australians in the arts who leave Australia for significant periods and who write about matters technically outside the national border or who write about unacceptable themes.

As I have said, what we are witnessing is the reappearance of the dreaded cultural cringe, a virus thought to have been eradicated from the anatomy of the nation, together with the multicultural cringe.

The examples I have found are gruesome mutations of the original virus.

For those too young to have heard the term “cultural cringe”, it is attributed to critic A.A. Phillips, who said in 1950 that, “Above our writers - and other artists - looms the intimidating mass of Anglo-Saxon culture. Such a situation almost inevitably produces the characteristic Australian Cultural Cringe”.

We no longer admit to being awed into silence by the greater cultures and our English language heritage but there are other mutations of the same parent virus.

I have been approached by some writers of the younger generation asking whether the virus still existed, and what should they do with their lives if they think they have it.

A significant group of young Australian writers and thinkers now live in the US. People such as Joanna Murray Smith, writer Catherine Lumby, Fiona Giles, Susan Johnston, Peter Carey, and Lily Brett.

As some of these have expressed it to me, there is still an uneasiness which lies within those Australians who have global aspirations.

I have identified it as Virus Variant A,  Agitated Expatriate.

The symptoms are as follows: the person who is contemplating living and working elsewhere (especially in the arts) experiences an immobilising dizziness accompanied by the recurring incertitude, What-dreadful-things-will-happen-to-me-if-I-don’t-come-back-to-Australia?

Will my creative well dry up if I stay away? Or will it, conversely, dry up if I don’t stay away? Or will it be contaminated? 

This is not the pure cultural cringe but a new variant of it. 

Phillips himself pronounced the term cultural cringe dead in 1983. “It is time,” he said, “to accord the phrase decent burial before the smell of the corpse gets too high...”

This new variant does not say we are not good enough. It says Australia may not be right for me (or not good enough for me) and if I say this, or even think it, I will be severely punished.

That Phillips should be alive today, to smell the corpse now as we stand in the graveyard of ideas, in the light rain, while gumbooted cemetery workers dig in the clay to exhume the stinking, twitching body, prematurely buried, still alive and thumping in its coffin, fuelled by rancid nutrients of a unidentifiable foul kind.

It is tissue taken from a recent study of Peter Goldsworthy by Andrew Riemer.

“The sense is inescapable,” says Andrew, “...that they (Australian writers) are dissatisfied by the limited scope the society (Australia) which they must reflect in their writings offers for the contemplation of the larger questions of existence and of the manifestations of good and evil...”

That is, Australian society is deficient in its capacity to supply good and evil in sufficient quality. Existentially lacking.

I am saddened to say that, on the surface, this is an example of the cultural cringe of the older parent strain identified by Phillips in 1950.

But, on further examination, it may be trickier than that and I will come back to it later.

Another recent specimen was from The Sydney Morning Herald where a columnist commented on the absence of David Malouf from a literary award presentation.

She says, “...the author is currently sojourning at his Tuscan home.”

The use of the words “currently” and “sojourning” are wink words used to suggest a leisurely occupation in foreign parts free of any considerations about what might be happening back here in Australia.

The use of the words “Tuscan home” also implicates David. The word Tuscan is redolent with exotic superiority. And isn’t “Australia” the only “home” an Australian can have?

The next specimen was from The Australian in a review of the book of Contemporary South Pacific Stories edited by C.K. Stead.

One Pacific writer, Ihimaera, had evidently withdrawn from the book, complaining about the integrity or whatever of the selection for the book.

In turn, Stead, the editor of the book, attacked Ihimaera for creating the “spectacle of...protecting Pacific values by fax from the south of France”.

Elizabeth Webby, in reviewing this book, comments that the implication is that Ihimaera is “an expatriate enjoying the good life in France”.

However, Elizabeth goes on to “excuse” Ihimaera from this charge with the defence that he is, in fact, in Menton as the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellow, living that is, holed up in a little piece of New Zealand in France, so to speak.

Another specimen from Daniel Dasey in The Sydney Morning Herald. “Artist Arthur Boyd says while he may spend much of his time overseas, there should be no doubting where his heart lies. The Australian of the Year defended (sic) his long stays in Britain... ‘I do live here, I just like to go away from time to time,’ he said.”

The headline of the piece says “Boyd’s art is in the right place”. 

This and the Ihimaera and Malouf specimens were identified by our laboratory as Virus Variant B, The Unhappy Ones Who Are Stuck Here.

The symptoms of this virus are as follows. The sufferer experiences a profound sense of disease on reading about expatriate fellow nationals.

Are they having a better life? Are they meeting famous and wonderful people who will advance their career and enrich their life while I am back here working away in the blazing Australian sun?

Further, the sufferer is then gripped by an uncontrollable rage that the absent fellow national, by living in a desirable foreign environment, is committing a cultural treason; the expatriate has escaped from the limitations of Australian life; that the fellow national, that is, is not back here putting up with the hell of it all on the frontier, is not helping to Build the Culture.

This rage I think shows up in my next specimen: an advertisement for the Australia Council’s Creative Arts Fellowships which has been changed to specify that the recipient “must spend most of their time in Australia”.

So now if you’re going to get any funding, there’s no way you’re going to go over and have the good life in France - so forget it.

Audience member: Excuse me Frank. I know this is a bit rude...I shared your disappointment of the Grand Days [being disqualified from the 1994 Miles Franklin Award]. I came to your last luncheon, I bought your book. I suffered as you did when you didn’t win [the Miles Franklin]. But I feel we don’t want to hear what’s going on. If you’re not happy to be in Australia...

(Applause from some members of the audience.)

Moorhouse:

Well, I think I would read this as touching a nerve...first of all, I’d like to say I live here and I’ve lived here 50 years; that I have to say this is just ridiculous.

What I was doing was teasing out and analysing some interesting examples of things that are going on in Australian cultural life which reflect in such things as the Miles Franklin.

But I accept the complaints from this table at least, and some of the others, that I have somehow lost your interest.

It’s certainly not a whinge, its a piece of analysis, which, as I think this rough interruption shows, I think has touched a nerve.

At this point, Moorhouse took questions from the audience. That part of his speech which remained undelivered is as follows:

This is Virus Variant C, You will Remain Seated: Do Not Attempt To Leave.

The sufferer experiences these symptoms: the dread that one by one anyone who is any good is leaving the country and that those who are left will be seen as second-rate, poor cousins in the cultural world.

In their head the sufferers hear someone saying, Will-the-last-to-leave-please-turn-off-the-lights.

In the Australia Council and other arts funding bodies there arises the possibility that policies can be developed to stop anyone leaving. “If we have our way, no-one will get out.”

These variants of the virus have created an atmosphere where those Australians who have chosen to live abroad and make their careers there, are, upon returning to Australia on a visit, made to swear loyalty oaths before they are received, applauded or rewarded.

As with the parent virus, all the mutations are spawned by the simple fact of being born in Australia, a country which, on the maps, is Stuck Down Here.

I want to sum up and return to the Riemer Case - that writers in Australia have to look elsewhere because the quality of good and evil is insufficient in Australia.

It could very well be an example of a benign strain. What could be teased out of what Andrew is saying is that Australian culture is historically deficient by being Stuck Down Here but that we can, without resentment or despair, and with objective cultural sophistication, now acknowledge our deficiencies and still get on with living a good enough cultural life.

That the cultivated life lies in the grace, art and entertainment we deploy so as to incorporate our deficiencies into our national personality.

Whether we would have been better if we had lived elsewhere, can never be tested.

This brings us next to the cases of Boyd, Ihimaera and Malouf. In this I see, obliquely, some faint hope of a cure.

More often these days, in interviews and at dinner parties, I hear people remark that ideally they would like to be able to say, “I share my time between my apartment in Manhattan and a humpy in the Flinders Ranges.”

That seems increasingly to be an acceptable sort of thing to say.

I have a warning. It is still not acceptable to say that as soon as I can arrange it I am getting the hell out of here for good.

While the parent virus may not be endemic, an assortment of strains are (many more than identified in this talk!) and that even being frequently conscious of the existence of these matters is a type of infection.

We must give those entering the arts the chance to develop either here or where they feel they need to go. Australia is enriched by their work wherever it is made.

The aim may be to turn the wound to a thing of beauty. But for as long as it is asked, it remains a serious question.

I can only advise that, as a general rule, all those in the arts practise Unsafe Art until further notice.

And remember that all successful expatriates are, in the end, possessively reclaimed by their mother country.

War Crime or War Winner? The Truth about the Bomb

From Murray Sayle, ‘War crime or war winner? The Truth about the Bomb,’ The Sydney Morning Herald, 15.07.95

...the head of the Manhattan Project, Major-General Leslie Groves, a determined military man feeling responsible for spending $2 billion on the bomb and worried that the war might end first, at that point was pushing strenuously for its immediate use. When Leo Szilard, who had drafted Albert Einstein’s letter to President Roosevelt warning of a German bomb six years earlier, drew up a scientists’ petition opposing the use of the atom bomb against Japanese cities, Groves had the petition classified top secret, thus restricting its impact to a tiny circle....Szilard’s petition got as far as Groves’s office, where it stayed. ...

What did the first atom bombs achieve? Well, it will be instantly answered, they ended the war, didn’t they, and so saved many lives - the estimates vary from 50,000 to several million - both American and Japanese, and considering that there was still fighting going on in Borneo and elsewhere, and ill-treated prisoners of war were still dying, probably many Australian lives as well. Anyone around at the time will remember the striking evidence for this conclusion. With the Japanese still full of fight, the first atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, another on Nagasaki on August 9, and the very next day the Japanese Government announced that it would accept the terms of the Potsdam Declaration - that is, unconditional surrender, subject to some guarantee for the future of Japan’s Emperor Hirohito.

At the time (as I remember well myself) this looked like obvious, iron-clad evidence that the bombs had ended the war, thus greatly simplifying the moral question about their use. Unfortunately, 50 years on this is still the only evidence that the bombs did in fact end the war and thus save all those valuable lives. And there is much better evidence, long obscured by the Cold War, that points to quite a different conclusion.

Well, if the atom bombs did not end the war, what did? It has long been known that by mid-1945 Japan was in much worse shape, both economically and militarily, than was generally realised at the time. American submarines had sunk almost the whole Japanese merchant fleet, cutting off food, raw materials, oil and reinforcements for the home islands; American B-29 fire raids had destroyed 40 per cent of Japanese housing, most of its industry, and had burnt out 68 major cities even before Hiroshima and Nagasaki were atom-bombed. As early as June 1946, the economists of the US Strategic Bombing Survey, after visiting the ruined Japanese cities and interviewing most of the surviving Japanese leaders, gave their opinion that:

“Certainly prior to December 31, 1945, and in all probability prior to November 1, 1945 [the planned date of the American invasion of Kyushu, the southernmost home island], Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.”

However, Russia had indeed entered the war - at dawn on August 8, 1945, with 1.6 million men, fighter-bombers, parachute troops and a huge tank army - and although this was little-reported at the time compared with the enormous official publicity lavished on the atom bombs, modern scholarship increasingly sees the Soviet invasion of Manchuria as the real, immediate cause of Japan’s surrender. My own research, conducted over the 20 years I have been in Japan, fully endorses this conclusion.

It came about like this. While publicly declaring that Japan would fight to the end and “killing with silence” (an Oriental way of saying “no comment”) the Allies’ demand for unconditional surrender issued at Potsdam on July 26, 1945, Japan was secretly trying to arrange a negotiated peace, with the Soviet Union, still officially neutral, to act as mediator. This may seem an absurd idea until we recall that the US had mediated the end of the war between Russia and Japan in 1905. These half-hearted “secret” approaches (all the Soviets were asked to do was to receive Prince Fumimaro Konoe, a former prime minister and distant relative of Hirohito) were, however, no secret from the American leaders, who were reading the Japanese diplomatic messages passing between Tokyo and Moscow - the so-called MAGIC intercepts. Only declassified in full as recently as last year, the MAGIC summaries gave tantalising hints that there was a a pro-peace party in Tokyo, centred on the Foreign Ministry, to which Emperor Hirohito apparently belonged, but no indication of whether the peace party was strong enough to overcome the Army leaders who wanted to fight a “decisive battle for the Homeland” (after the expected American invasion) and then, having won it, to negotiate a peace that would guarantee, as a minimum, the continuation of the monarchy with Hirohito as monarch - something less than unconditional surrender.

Matters came to a head in Tokyo on the night of August 8, two days after the atom-bombing of Hiroshima. With all communications with the ruined city knocked out, very little information reached Tokyo, 1,000 km away, about what had happened. What there was came via the Japanese Army which downplayed the damage and insisted (correctly) that no military installations affecting Japan’s ability to continue the war had been damaged. Nevertheless, Hirohito, via his confidential adviser Lord Privy Seal Marquis Kido, summoned a meeting of the Supreme War Council, known as the “Big Six”, for 10am the following morning, August 9, to meet in the air-raid shelter under his burnt-out palace.

We will never know what they might have decided about Hiroshima because overnight news came through that the Soviets had invaded Japanese-occupied Manchuria, scattering the poorly equipped Japanese armies there. This meant that virtually the entire world was now fighting Japan but, more immediately, the plan to ask the Soviets to mediate peace negotiations with the Allies was now in ruins and there was now a real threat that Japan itself might be partitioned and partly communised, as had just happened to Germany.

News of the atom-bombing of Nagasaki came through while the meeting was in progress but had no effect on the deliberations. The “Big Six” were still unable to agree and the same thing happened when the full Cabinet met that afternoon. Finally, late that night, the still-divided Cabinet agreed to ask Hirohito, who had not said a word, what he thought. Asked for his opinion (against all Japanese constitutional practice), Hirohito said the time had come to “endure the unendurable” and accept the Potsdam terms. After a last appeal to continue the fight from the War Minister, General Korechika Anami (“We can still achieve something and get better terms than these,” he claimed), the Emperor helped draft the surrender declaration. It was Anami who, in Hirohito’s name, issued the orders to Japanese units in the field to lay down their arms. His duty to his Emperor done, as he saw it, Anami killed himself.

What part did the atom bomb play in all this? According to the Strategic Bombing Survey, “the atom bombs did not change a single vote on the Supreme War Council, although they did add to the general gloom”. The problem here is that Japan’s surrender was, as historians say, “over-determined”; there was quite enough gloom in Japan already, without the need to add more. The view that the Japanese military was intimidated by either the atom bombs or Truman’s threat of more and more powerful ones (a piece of bluff) into seeking peace is simply an exercise in ill-informed guesswork.

If World War II taught us one lesson, it is that military leaders safe in bunkers can accept enormous civilian casualties without flinching, and no-one asks the bombed civilians whether they are in favour of peace or not (but, even in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the survivors were ready to fight on). What really ended the war was a threat to something the Japanese leaders saw as more important than the deaths of mere civilians (more than half a million had already died in the fire raids) - the political destruction of the Japanese nation itself. A quick surrender before the Soviets arrived seemed the best way out, and history, and the Cold War, have proved that they guessed correctly.

What can be said for atom bombs on their one use in real war? Against an already beaten opponent, who was universally detested, facing starvation, without any allies or means of reprisal - and whose flimsy cities were made of inflammable wood, paper and straw - they might have added something to the imminent and inevitable outcome, but at the cost of resentment and guilt feelings which still fester today half a century on. These preconditions occur very seldom in the real world, not surprisingly, so no-one has found another situation in which the use of nuclear weapons seemed to outweigh their enormous downside of universal revulsion, plus the risk of uncontrolled escalation.

Against a non-nuclear opponent, their use discredits any cause they are supposed to be upholding, particularly if the cause is the democratic one of personal justice and individual, rather than group, racial or national responsibility. Against a nuclear opponent, they promise universal, mutually assured destruction, known by the appropriate acronym MAD. Atom bombs are not, in short, practicable weapons of war, except for the purposes of terror, or terrorists, their likeliest next users. Robert Oppenheimer once said that unless nuclear weapons were controlled, or better still eliminated, men would one day curse the name of Los Alamos. All too probably, he may yet be proved right.

The Lucky Country: Part 8 - A Laid-Back, Happy People Help their Friends

Tom Allard, ‘East Timor to take Australia to International Court of Justice’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 20.12.13

http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/east-timor-to-take-australia-to-international-court-of-justice-20131219-2zo19.html

Attorney-General George Brandis is refusing to return ''highly sensitive'' legal advice to the East Timor government from an eminent international law expert seized during ASIO raids this month, prompting the fledgling nation to launch action in the International Court of Justice.

East Timor and Australia are in the midst of a dispute, currently before arbitration in The Hague, over a treaty governing oil and gas deposits in the Timor Sea worth about $40 billion and the advice from British QC Vaughan Lowe outlines the strengths and weaknesses of East Timor's case.

Stephen Webb, head of energy at global law firm DLA Piper and its lead partner advising the East Timor government, said the advice from Mr Lowe on the ''prospects'' of the case was vital.

''Such internal advice documents would never be shown to the other side, in this case the Australian government, during legal proceedings,'' he said.

As it launched the proceedings for the return of the documents, East Timor also asked the ICJ to secure an undertaking from Australia not to intercept communications between the tiny country and its advisers, and apologise.

East Timor's case relies on allegations that Australian spies bugged its cabinet offices during negotiations over the treaty on the instruction of former foreign minister Alexander Downer.

The star witness for East Timor is a former Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) officer who allegedly led the eavesdropping operation. Knowing East Timor would request assurances that the former spy and other witnesses not be arrested or prevented from testifying, Senator Brandis approved ASIO agents raiding the man's property and the seizure of his passport on December 3, just days before the arbitral tribunal was due to hear argument.

Also raided was the office of lawyer Bernard Collaery, who is representing East Timor and from whose office Mr Lowe's legal advice was taken.

Senator Brandis told Parliament the raids were due to national security concerns around the alleged leak of classified intelligence information, and not related to the arbitration in The Hague.

He said any material obtained would not be passed on to the Solicitor-General and other lawyers running Australia's case in the The Hague. But the Australian government had known about the allegations of espionage against East Timor for at least a year before the raids, suggesting it was linked to the arbitration.

East Timor will argue the seizure by Australia of the documents and data is a violation of its sovereignty, property and other rights under international law.

Its lawyers wrote to Senator Brandis on December 10 requesting a list of the documents seized in the raids, the return of the documents, and the destruction of any copies, including any passed on to third parties and other nations. They also want a copy of the search warrant ASIO used for the raids.

Mr Webb pointed out that what the Timorese hope for is a ''sensible discussion'' on finding a permanent solution over the dispute over the Timor Sea oil and gas reserves. Senator Brandis declined to comment.

Part Eight/To be continued…

Do as I Say, Not as I Do

Pilita Clark, ‘US confesses secret N-tests near Australia’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 09.12.93

The United States secretly tested 48 nuclear bombs on Australia’s doorstep in the Pacific Ocean after 1945.

It appears the tests were kept secret to mislead not only Washington’s Cold War foes in the former Soviet Union, but also its formal allies, Australia and New Zealand.

The newly released information reveals the US Government concealed a total of more than 250 nuclear weapons tests since the 1940s, 204 of which were done at its Nevada test site, the rest in the Pacific. Most of the tests were done in the 1960s and 1970s but 17 were done in the 1980s and one in 1990. All were described as being relatively small, that is, less than 20 kilotons.

The Energy Secretary, Ms Hazel O’Leary, who released this information yesterday, also confessed that 18 US citizens had been injected with plutonium during the 1940s without their knowledge or consent - a discovery she said had left her with “an ache in my gut and my heart”. 

The revelations came at a special news conference Ms O’Leary called to release the biggest batch of previously classified nuclear secrets in her department’s history.

“The Cold War is over - we’re coming clean,” she said, adding that there was more information to come and the day’s release was “just a foot in the tub”. 

Ms O’Leary said the department was looking at releasing full details of the Pacific tests, such as precisely when they were done; how big the fallout range was and what size of bomb was tested.

“We have to strike a balance between telling the public what they should know, now that the Cold War is behind us, [and] not making available information to allow nations to build their own bombs,” she said.

Of the previously secret nuclear bomb tests, the department said 36 had accidentally sent small quantities of radioactive gas into the atmosphere but said “there was no lasting environmental impact, even in the immediate areas”.

The New York Times said private analysts were especially intrigued by 18 unannounced tests conducted during the Reagan and Bush Administrations, the last one in 1990, a time when more sensitive seismological instruments could detect all but the smallest tests.

The Times said the Pacific tests were conducted at tiny atolls before atmospheric tests were halted in the late 1950s.

As Ms O’Leary conceded, the number of secret tests was some 50 per cent greater than that estimated by private researchers and academics.

Some 800 tests were conducted on human beings, including 18 people who were injected with highly radioactive plutonium in the 1940s to see how much exposure workers could safely handle.

The 18 are now dead but yesterday some of their relatives, contacted by reporters, expressed profound bitterness at the revelations.

Ms O’Leary’s revelations overshadowed a speech by the Defence Secretary, Mr Les Aspin, who suggested the US was simply unable to stop the proliferation of “loose nukes” in the former Soviet Union and other countries, including those controlled by terrorist regimes.

Announcing a range of new “protective” counter-proliferation measures, Mr Aspin said the US faced a bigger nuclear proliferation threat “than we have ever faced before”.

In Canberra, a spokeswoman for the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Senator Gareth Evans, said it was a “positive development” that the US had finally announced the tests had taken place.

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Tom Post with Douglas Waller, ‘The Dirty Little Secrets of the Atomic Age’, Newsweek, 16.12.93

It was time to “come clean,” Secretary of Energy Hazel O’Leary reckoned last week. What she revealed was a shocking, if incomplete, tale of deceit and lingering peril. Beginning in 1963, just after the two superpowers agreed not to detonate nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, until 1990, the United States conducted 204 underground tests, but never publicly acknowledged them. Beginning in the 1940s, the government subjected some 600 Americans to radiation experiments. More than a dozen received injections of plutonium, most without their consent. And the deadly legacy lives on. Nearly 34 metric tons of bomb-grade plutonium remain warehoused in six states, posing a colossal problem of disposal; almost 6 million pounds of radioactive waste are in rusted, leaky basins.

Why choose this moment to ‘fess up? Loose nukes have the Clinton administration more worried than ever before. Last week Secretary of Defense Les Aspin unveiled a “counter-proliferation initiative” that directs military commanders to draw up battle plans against rogue nations with newly acquired nuclear capability, instead of former Warsaw Pact countries. This week, Newsweek has learned, President Clinton will meet with senior advisers to consider the threat of terrorism and nuclear weapons. And O’Leary, on a visit to Moscow this week, will press the Russians to come clean about their dirty nuclear history, too.

The DOE’s sins of the past continue to haunt the present - perhaps none more ominously than the experiments on human subjects. According to a six-year investigation by The Albuquerque Tribune, 18 people - including house-wives, three African-Americans, teenagers, elderly retirees, even a 4-year-old boy - were part of a nationwide study from 1945 to 1947 to determine how quickly plutonium travelled through the body. One of them was John Mousso, a 45-year-old, blue-collar worker who checked into Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, New York, in 1946, after a diagnosis of Addison’s disease. Doctors told him he’d receive an experimental drug, but actually injected him with plutonium 239 - 46 times the radiation a normal person receives in a lifetime, the Tribune reported. Mousso lived until 1984, plagued by skin diseases, digestive ailments and lethargy. His family went on welfare because he couldn’t work. The DOE never let on. “I equate it with some of the things the Nazis were tried and executed for in World War II,” Gerald Mousso, his nephew, told Newsweek.

With a huge and costly cleanup on its hands, the DOE must do more than atone. Its own survey of spent fuel at nuclear-weapons sites found appalling conditions at three facilities. Many storage tanks, built mostly in the 1940s, are severely corroded and leaking radioactive water. The debris from rusting parts could trigger a nuclear reaction. More horror stories will undoubtedly emerge as the DOE releases more of the 32 million pages of still-classified documents. By the time its all over, O’Leary may end up letting loose as many demons as she exorcises.