A Search For Identity

The Age

Friday January 26, 2007

FARAH FAROUQUE, CAROLYN WEBB, CHLOE SALTAU, KENNETH NGUYEN, ADAM MORTON, DEWI COOKE

TODAY, Australia Day, about 10,000 people are expected to enter Victoria's Government House. It's an open day, a January ritual, and the dress code is casual. Top hats and tails will be confined to the handsome portraits on the walls.

After inspecting the mansion, a T-shirted crowd will line up for all the pomp of a sausage sizzle on the lawn. They will, no doubt, be beguiled by lavish helpings of tomato sauce.

This flavour of Australia Day - reflected in modest events such as sausage sizzles, backyard barbecues and picnics - reflects some of the key traits of the nation itself. Despite the best efforts of the wiliest politicians, Australians still do not subscribe to the hand-on-the-heart nationalism that is the fashion elsewhere.

The political talk might have become shriller, about burquas, the parched earth and what divides us, but there remains a casualness in the deportment of Australia's people. You can see it as much in Sydney Road, Coburg, as in High Street, Armadale. Citizens tacitly acknowledge when they cannot summon the second stanza of the national anthem, and no one much minds.

A "typical" Australian resident is hard to define in the great demographic spread. Corked hats, Vegemite jars, aspiring to a quarter-acre block, they are all ritually served up as markers of a distinctive sort of Australian-ness. But James Jupp, academic and editor of the compendium The Australian People, is more circumspect in his evaluation.

"Australians are people who live in Australia," he says. "An attempt to say they are the same and have the same values denies the reality."

The very prosaic reality of the sentiment may offer another clue to how Australians really are.

The grandiloquent statements, the conquering heroes, the great conquests - they are other people's histories. When we have fought wars, they have been other nations' battles. Our greatest military hero, Weary Dunlop, was a doctor, not an avenger, who helped prisoners of war on the Burma Railway. The nation's greatest myth lies at Gallipoli, the scene of an unmitigated military defeat.

In a week when the word multiculturalism has been eliminated from the official lexicon, the truth may be that it is diversity that defines Australia's indefinable population.

The last census listed over 160 ancestries. One in four residents are born overseas. Yet, the mainstream culture - from the political structures to the common language spoken - still owes much to the Anglo-Celtic traditions of the first wave of settlers.

Says Jupp: "About 70 per cent of Australians are still of English, Scottish or Irish origins. The rest are mixed, fragmented. There are about 100 different major countries represented here, speaking 100 major languages."

Jupp again goes to the demographic heart of the nation: "People in Europe can trace their ancestry back at least 1000 years, people in Asia go back 2000 or 3000 years. Even in North American they can go back to the 1600s. Here, 99 per cent of the population arrived in the last 200 years."

To understand Australia, then, one must understand what ferments this newness, "the multiplicity of cultural and historical inheritances", as Jupp says.

It's a continuum beginning with the world's oldest surviving culture, that of the Aboriginal people, and ends (only for the moment) with the contemporary story of African refugees, transplanted from conflicts in places such as Somalia and Sudan.

Jeff Stephens, teaches Australian history at Gilmore College for Girls, a state school in Footscray, with "dozens" of different nationalities. Some of his students struggle with the new culture they find, he acknowledges. Even the notion of doing homework can seem alien. But without getting too romantic about it, he also senses a hunger for learning.

"Most students are overwhelmingly positive about Australia and Australian society," he says. "They say they like the standard of living, many come from societies where there is no freedom, but young people are very much open to experiencing this new culture and way of living."

At 1.15pm yesterday, Australia's population was clocked at 20,742,715.

At the last census, the overseas-born population came in greatest numbers from the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Italy and Vietnam. Contrast this with the position at the time of Federation, when there was predominantly a monocultural society of 4 million, or even the 7 million who populated the country in 1942, when it is said fear of the Japanese threat was at its highest. So fear, too, has be a familiar theme in the national story. It is now manifesting itself in some places against Muslims and Arabs. But there were others, including Europeans, who we were afraid of. In the 1800s, French, Russians and Germans were in the whites of our eyes.

Then came the Chinese and Japanese, the "yellow peril" who were the impetus for the White Australia policy.

But rather than reflecting on the past, it might be wiser to focus on the future.

Historian Michael Cathcart suggests the better and more relevant question for Australia Day is not who we are, but who we are becoming.

"Our future is not determined by our past," says Cathcart, of the Australian Centre at the University of Melbourne. "It is a question of choice."

When asked to define what he considers Australian-ness, he responds with a conundrum. "Australia, like all vigorous democracies, is a country of debates, conversations and contradictions - and anyone who insists that we all confirm to one set of national characteristics is selling our democracy short.

"There are many Australias. There is an Australia which already revels in its own diversity - a big-hearted Australia with an enormous capacity for healing conflict. Multicultural Melbourne is the capital of that Australia.

"And there is an Australia of fear, mistrust and racial tension - an Australia of rival and mistrustful tribes. Cronulla Beach has become the symbol of that Australia."

But it's easy to overstate the meaning of that moment on a Sydney beach in 2005. Despite the acknowledged failures of indigenous policy by international standards, this has been a country free of the race riots that have flared up in United States, Britain and France.

Demographer Bob Birrell speaks of the distinctive patterns of living that can be discerned in Australia today. The way we speak English, the value we place on leisure and space, even the code of football that has evolved.

Equality of outcomes remain elusive, but the egalitarian myth, a certain free-spirited larrikin ethic, is still part of the Australian character.

"There's no doffing of hats, or saluting," says Birrell. "The top-hat would be anathema. It's just not part of how Australians see themselves."

Dr BARRY JAMES MARSHALL AC

Dr JOHN ROBIN WARREN AC

DR MARSHALL, who with Dr Warren won the 2005 Nobel prize for physiology or medicine, says being awarded the AC is akin to being dubbed "one of the leaders of Australia".

The benefits are that more young people might look to science as a career, and that Australian governments were realising it was crucial to invest resources "to make sure people who are talented in the right way can find opportunities in science".

The Perth-based scientists' achievements mean peptic ulcer disease is no longer chronic and can be treated by antibiotics and acid secretion inhibitors.

Dr Marshall, who is clinical professor of microbiology and medicine at the University of Western Australia, has turned his mind to answering why the Helicobacter pylori bacterium can stay in many people's bodies without causing symptoms. He says this could help us one day control the body's immune system. The bacterium's resilience in the stomach might mean it could piggyback vaccines into the stomach - future vaccines could be swallowed.

Dr Warren, who is retired, says the Nobel Prize might have brought worldwide recognition, but the AC was nothing to sneeze at. "The Order of Australia, of course, is just an Australian thing," he says. "But I'm Australian, you see, so I think it's wonderful."

The manic pace of conventions, plaudits and interviews promises to accelerate, but Dr Warren is adamant this won't go to his head.

"I think we are fairly accessible," he says. "We're just ordinary people." -- CAROLYN WEBB

The Reverend MARGARET COURT AO

THE tennis legend who won 62 Grand Slam titles in the 1960s and '70s has devoted the past 30 years to good works.

Margaret Court, 64, is pastor of the Victory Life Centre, a Christian church in Perth that has a flock of 2000, hands out four tonnes of food a week to the poor and finds people jobs and homes. "We work with people who have been abused and people on drugs," she says.

"I love helping people and to see a young woman come in who is on drugs and a single mum, then three years later you see her graduating from the police force, to me, that's wonderful fulfilment, more so than winning Wimbledon.

"You're seeing somebody's life that was nothing then becoming something."

Mrs Court travelled to Sri Lanka after the tsunami, where she established a foundation to build an orphanage. She took eight Sri Lankan junior tennis players to Perth for training and is still heavily in demand as a tennis mentor and public speaker. She is also president of the Federation Cup Tennis Foundation.

She has no plans to retire. "I don't even think about that word and I still have a hit (of tennis) a couple of times a week to keep myself fit.

"I've got four little grandchildren under four, so life is busy and it's very exciting and the variety of different things, you don't ever get bored with it."

Already an MBE, Mrs Court says she is "very pleased" with the AO. "It's something I wasn't expecting so it was a great honour to receive it."

BOB SIMPSON AO

BOB Simpson turns 71 next month, and still devotes himself to the summer game, if in less public ways than he has done over the previous four decades.

The Age found him deep in thought about the health of club cricket, which he has discovered in his role as a consultant to Cricket NSW is not in the shape one might expect of a country whose national team has just spanked England 5-0 to win back the Ashes.

Of course, Australia's successful era has much to do with Simpson, who earns Australia Day honours for his huge contribution as a batsman, captain, coach and mentor. He was made Australia's first full-time coach in the mid-1980s and, with Allan Border, led the country out of the darkness. Under his disciplinarian regime, Australia won its first world cup, regained the Ashes and, in 1995, the Frank Worrell Trophy. It is regarded as the moment Australia started to dominate.

He gained most satisfaction from helping cricketers squeeze the utmost out of their ability - Steve Waugh and Shane Warne were two with whom he left an early mark - and more recently he has worked on the technique of players such as Simon Katich. "I got my greatest satisfaction out of someone like Boony, who was in terrible trouble one period in '86," Simpson said when he was inducted into the Australian Cricket Hall of Fame last year. "I was able to work on his weaknesses to save his position and his career."

Simpson famously came out of retirement at 41 to captain Australia after it was ravaged by World Series Cricket because he "didn't believe that an entrepreneur should ever run sport". In that decision, as in life, he was heavily influenced by Sir Donald Bradman.

Simpson nowadays rails against the "sameness" in the modern game and helps nurture a new generation of cricketers. -- CHLOE SALTAU

Justice FRANK VINCENT AO

JUSTICE Frank Vincent has seen a lot of life. In 25 years as a barrister, he appeared in almost 200 murder trials. As chairman of the Adult Parole Board between 1987 and 2001, he interviewed thousands of criminals: Justice Vincent himself puts the figure at more than 10,000.

And as a judge, he has confronted unspeakable evil, manifested in such men as serial killer Paul Charles Denyer.

Despite this, Justice Vincent - a judge on the Court of Appeal - maintains a keen faith in humanity. "I have become extremely accustomed and experienced to observing people (who have done) the most awful things to each other, and yet I don't have the slightest doubt that most people simply don't fit within that category," he says.

Justice Vincent's own record does much to boost one's faith in humanity. Among other achievements, he helped set up the Aboriginal Legal Aid Service in Alice Springs in the mid-1970s. He became known as a barrister who took on many cases without charge or at minimal rates. Since 2001, he has served as chancellor of Victoria University: among other things, his award recognises his efforts as chancellor to increase educational opportunities for disadvantaged youth.

"It's very flattering to get an award such as this," says Justice Vincent. "Whether or not it is merited is an entirely different question."

Few in the legal community would share his doubts. -- KENNETH NGUYEN

Dr NEIL GEOFFREY ARMFIELD AO

ONE of the founders of Sydney's Company B Belvoir Theatre, Dr Neil Geoffrey Armfield has enjoyed 28 successful years in the arts.

The past year has been golden, with Armfield winning a 2006 Australian Film Institute Award for an adapted screenplay for the film Candy; his critically praised musical adaptation of the Snugglepot and Cuddlepie books now playing at Sydney's Theatre Royal; and his hit reworking of the musical Keating! selling out in Sydney.

Speaking from the Mornington Peninsula, where he is rehearsing with actor Geoffrey Rush the play Exit the King (to open at the Malthouse Theatre in April), Armfield said the AO was a way of putting in perspective his achievements, which have included world and Australian tours directing Tim Winton's play Cloudstreet, and championing indigenous theatre, such as the musical The Sapphires, starring Deborah Mailman, and Black Medea, an adaptation of Euripides' play.

Armfield says he learned from Rush and from a mentor, writer Patrick White, to "just try to take every opportunity and make it as good as you can".

"And you always try to move your work into new areas and kind of dig deeper." -- CAROLYN WEBB

Professor MARGARET GARDNER AO

MARGARET Gardner has devoted large chunks of her working life to improving opportunities for those who once might have battled to find a place in post-school education.

Professor Gardner, an economist with a doctorate in industrial relations, vaulted through the ranks of Queensland's universities in the early 1990s.

As her own career surged ahead, she used her influence to help start the national colloquium of women senior executives in higher education - designed to promote gender equity at universities - and headed a panel looking at ways to keep school leavers in further training.

Along with years of service with the Queensland Industrial Relations Commission, her record paints a picture of a woman devoted to helping people from all backgrounds to have what she calls a "balanced and dignified working life".

"I think we underestimate how important it is to have a flexible education system that allows people to take advantage of education and the opportunities it provides at different times in their lives," she says.

In 2005, Professor Gardner was appointed vice-chancellor at RMIT University, charged with restoring financial credibility when it faced a $24 million budget deficit. Less than two years on, its budget is in the black.

Professor Gardner is the second member of her household to be honoured on Australia Day. Her husband, Melbourne University vice-chancellor Glyn Davis, is an AC. The couple will celebrate with their children, Caitrin, 19, and Rhys, 17. -- ADAM MORTON

SALAH SALMAN AM

THE eyes of the world have been fixed on the Muslim community since that fatal day in September 2001, and it's a gaze that discomforts some.

But Salah Salman, cross-cultural educator and principal at the Australian International Academy of Education in Coburg, the country's oldest Islamic school, has been working to bridge the fear and suspicion that exist on both sides of the divide. It's for this that he has been awarded an AM.

"In the 21st century it is a requirement that people live together in harmony as one humanity," he says. "If you really, really look at the values, you find the Muslim values are identical to the Australian values, except you have to accept and acknowledge the oneness of God and that's the only difference."

Mr Salman, who came to Australia from Egypt in the late 1960s, finds it easier than even some politicians to pinpoint these values.

"Equality and concern for others, the ability to give to people in need," he says. "The 'fair go' is the greatest human value."

The father of three had been applying to come to Australia since 1954 but was prevented from leaving under Egypt's controlling Nasser regime. He eventually arrived in Sydney in the 1960s and settled in Melbourne a few years later.

Australia, he says, is home now.

He condemns the comments recently made about Australia by some Muslims - "there is no clergy in Islam" - but he worries that to silence voices of dissent will fuel greater tension.

"This sort of suppression, banning you from expressing your opinion, creates secretive ideas and these secretive ideas develop into dangerous and serious philosophies," he says. "Openness and democracy and expression of ideas - with guidance - is the only way to counter-effect it. Religion and philosophy and this sort of thing does not die by force." -- DEWI COOKE

Dr JUNE KANE AM

SOME of the people she has encountered have moved her to tears, and that's not including the emotional highs and lows inflicted by her beloved Bombers.

Dr June Kane's work on child labour and exploitation has brought her to contrasting places - from the narrow streets of Morocco's medinas to the austere surrounds of the United Nations.

An adviser to the UN Secretary-General's 2006 study on violence against children, Dr Kane has just finished the final draft of a tool kit on child labour for the International Labor Organisation.

Today she is recognised with an AM for her efforts.

After years as a journalist and aid worker, Dr Kane shifted her focus to child labour issues in 1996. Born in England, she speaks seven languages.

The resilience of the children she encounters in dire situations continues to amaze her and she chokes up as she describes a meeting with a five-year-old Filipina sex slave. "She'd been rescued from a brothel where she'd been put and been servicing customers," she says. "When I asked her what she wanted to do when she was grown up, she said she wanted to be a doctor in a hospital. It just broke my heart because she never will be, but she has the will. It makes you want to start work every morning."

Melbourne is home for most of the year, although Dr Kane's feet itch with the thought of more travel. But no matter where she is, her heart is never far from Windy Hill. Not even when she is on the Gaza Strip.

"There were three of us, we all worked for the UN there. There were two Collingwood supporters and me and we used to sit in Jerusalem at the weekends and watch tapes of games the embassy lent us. It's a bit sad." -- DEWI COOKE

LAURIE CAREW OAM

THE days of elegant ladies wearing pill-box hats and white lace gloves are a distant memory for most, but such images have been a constant in Laurie Carew's life.

As chief window-dresser at the landmark Melbourne department store Georges, the 80-year-old's every day was surrounded by things of luxury and beauty.

"We would pinpoint certain areas around so that we could really show something, the latest thing or the newest colour. The same as the way the windows highlighted exactly what was new, the hems, everything," he says.

Mr Carew laments the demise of the style-driven window or counter display in lieu of department stores "stuffed with stock".

It was for these years of commitment to visual design - from an apprenticeship, of sorts, that began at David Jones and culminated after 30 years at Georges - that he has been honoured with an OAM.

"Never, never never!" he says, would he have expected to have led such a life when as a teenager he left his Deniliquin home for a start in the city.

"As a young, very shy Deni boy, to be reaching . . . it's such an honour and I'm really quite thrilled that any of this would be taken any notice of."

Mr Carew lost a leg to cancer in 1985 but this has not slowed him. Since his retirement, he has penned a book on his life and is involved in projects with the National Trust.

The knack for colour and display has also never left.

"My poor flat suffers. I suddenly get an urge to do something and something moves around," he says. "But I'm doing it exactly the same as I've always done . . . it's just a natural instinct." -- DEWI COOKE

BRIAN GROGAN OAM

BRIAN Grogan marvels when he thinks of the change that's occurred throughout the Murray-Darling Basin in the decades he has lived there.

The 70-year-old has seen the advent of commercial farming of almonds and cotton and witnessed more wineries than you could poke a stick at. In recent years he's also watched the impact of drought and water-trading schemes that have left some fields verdant while others have dried and suffered.

But he doesn't buy into the fears of naysayers when he looks out at the Murray River from Mildura.

"It is the artery and the life blood of the Murray-Darling Basin and while I am appreciative of climate change and trends over time . . . there have always been times of great floods and then extended dry periods, so the ebbing and flowing has always occurred in the past, now and into the future," he says.

It's a pragmatism that he has applied throughout his years in water management and it is his work in the sector that inspired someone - "I've got an idea of who" - to nominate him for an OAM.

Twenty-five years ago he joined the Murray-Darling Association, which represents 100 local governments throughout the basin, eventually rising to national president, although recently taking a step back from his role. "People either take a view that you wear out or rust out and I would rather wear out," he says.

Mr Grogan is cautiously approving of the Prime Minister's bid to put the Commonwealth in control of the Murray-Darling river system, but he believes any progress should be incremental and considered.

In his time, Mr Grogan spearheaded the establishment of the Lower Basin Laboratory for Murray-Darling research and has served on the boards of local universities and TAFEs. One even named a building after him.

"I never thought there was a greater honour than that," he laughs. -- DEWI COOKE

JUDY JOHNSON OAM

IT IS the women whom Judy Johnson misses the most.

"They were just a wonderful group of women that I worked with, they were fabulous," she says.

Three years ago, in an attempt to retire, she took a back seat in her work with the Eastern Domestic Violence Service, which she had helped establish in 1994.

Now nearing 70, she had come to the service after 16 years working with women's refuges and a stint elsewhere in outreach, a world in stark contrast to her own happily married family life.

But within the domestic violence sector she found inspiration in her dedicated co-workers: "women who have been committed for years, you know, just like me and getting on 70 or more and who obviously find, like me, that it's very difficult to let it go."

Her OAM is an honour, she says, but also an important recognition of the blight of domestic violence.

She was not surprised that a recent report on community attitudes towards violence against women found that while most people understood it was wrong, many could still excuse certain forms of violence. But advancements, such as court-imposed intervention orders, which remove the aggressor from the family home rather than the victim, are reason to be positive. "There's a shift in the power . . . I think it's wonderful," she says.

She was also instrumental in establishing the Pets in Peril program, which recognises that family pets are often the reason women are reluctant to leave violent environments.

While Ms Johnson knows it's time to start "painting flowers", she finds it hard to relinquish the life.

"It's been such a passion," she says, "I find it impossible to drop domestic violence." -- DEWI COOKE

Captain TERRY HEDT AFSM

THE current fire season will be notched up as one of many long, dry summers for Captain Terry Hedt.

Recruited to Little River's Country Fire Authority brigade by a rusted-on local in 1966, Captain Hedt is the longest-serving living member of the tiny town's 18-man fire crew.

His 40 years as a volunteer with the CFA have taken him all over the country, most recently to fight the fires that wiped out homes in Steiglitz, west of Melbourne last week.

At 65, the farmer and agricultural engineer has fought his share of blazes and endured his share of burns - in 1977 a fast-moving grass fire roared over him and his crew, burning his hands and face. "There was just no oxygen; it was the scariest thing. It's the nearest I've ever come to dying," he said. But actions such as these, which have won him an Australian Fire Service Medal, are not heroics. Captain Hedt reckons the real heroes are the paramedics he meets when the CFA is called to road accidents along the Princes Freeway.

"I personally would much prefer to go to a fire in the bush or the grass any day than to go out on to that freeway and to see people mangled to death and ended up in wrecks. These pilots that fly those helicopters, they're the paramedics as well as the pilots, God, I admire them. They're the heroes."

His mentor, Raleigh Chirnside, the man who introduced him to the CFA all those years ago, always shunned awards and Captain Hedt is "not a fan of medals".

"But you've got to think of your family and the generations on. The family will be proud, yeah." -- DEWI COOKE

© 2007 The Age

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