Well well, Pell!

Even bigger news here than the summit in Vietnam has been the delayed release of the guilty verdict against Australia’s Cardinal George Pell.  On all that see George Pell has been found guilty of child sex offences. Here’s what you need to know, and a response worth considering from Father Frank Brennan. A summary of events:

The suppression order in relation to Cardinal George Pell has been lifted. In December, a jury of 12 of his fellow citizens found him guilty of five offences of child sexual abuse. No other charges are to proceed. Cardinal Pell has appealed the convictions. The verdict was unanimous. The jury took three days to deliberate after a four-week trial. The trial was in fact a re-run. At the first trial, the jury could not agree. The trial related to two alleged victims, one of whom had died.

I thought of conversations I had via ICQ long ago.

June gone already! And what a time for news!

Posted on June 30, 2017 by Neil

Just as well you aren’t depending on this blog to keep you up-to-date, as there has been a bit of a break here as I nursed my remaining data allowance. And in that time we’ve had so many things happen, most recently the charging of Cardinal George Pell for alleged historic sex offences against children. He will be fronting court in Melbourne next month. I can’t help wondering what an old internet friend, Father Ken Sinclair, who died in 2005, would have had to say. Back in 2001-2 he was foreshadowing some of this stuff in conversations we had on ICQ. See my post Back to very early days–and the strange immortality of the internet.

That earlier post:

Weird. Here I have the earliest still extant Diary-X entry* from my proto-blog back in May 2001:

I really don’t remember what that was about, except obviously I survived!  Atakan was/is a teacher in Turkey. Kenny was Ken Sinclair, 6 Feb 1927 – 19 May 2005,  openly gay man and priest at St. Francis (Melbourne) for many years. The “strange immortality” in my title refers to the fact his website, which is of interest, is still out there!  He was a lovely man and it is hard to believe it’s so long since he passed away.

Here you’ll learn all about me: my life, my interests and hobbies, the people in my family,  and more. I’ve even included a list of my favorite links to other sites.

In surfing the web, I’ve realised that lots of people have their own personal websites, so I thought, why shouldn’t I have one, too.

I am a 76 year old Catholic priest, living in Melbourne, which is the capital city of the state of Victoria, in Australia. I am living in [sort of] retirement, since a stroke I had about seven years ago. “Sort of” retirement means that I no longer carry out any “public” ministry in the church, although I do a lot of indirect ministry in my daily interaction with people generally. Despite the stroke, I am still reasonably mobile, thank God.

When I was born [at home], in 1927, my parents were living with my maternal grandparents in Footscray, a working class suburb of Melbourne, on account of the early stages of what we called The Great Depression. These grandparents were of Cornish and English extraction, whilst my paternal grandparents were of Scots and English extraction. In those years I can recall the UK still being referred to as “home”…

In one of our conversations Ken said he looked forward to the day when George Pell got what he deserved. I wonder what Ken would think now?

You can find an obituary on Ken Sinclair here (pdf). What a fine man he was!

Update

More on those 2001-2004 conversations with Ken Sinclair, which arose after I (not a Catholic) asked him what he thought of George Pell, then newly appointed Archbishop of Sydney.  In his responses Ken alluded more than once to the matter of Gerald Ridsdale, of whom I must say I had never heard at the time.  It is also fair to say there was little common ground ideologically between Ken and Pell, Ken being somewhat a progressive in the Catholic Church.

Drawn back to Jannali 1959

As I wrote in Shire childhood, adolescence and early adulthood 3: 1959 – 1961:

At 17 I did my first practice teaching session at Jannali West Primary, over the line and up the hill from Jannali shops. In Jannali we lived above the shops in a flat that at least gave a good view of closely watched trains; in 60-61 we rented a house in Oyster Bay Road, and very leafy it was too….

I recalled last year:

Is it really a week since I posted this on Facebook’s Sutherland Shire Heritage page?

That’s my sister-in-law Aileen and my niece Christine (Parkes) in front of The Cotton Shop, Box Road Jannali in 1959. My mother owned The Cotton Shop, a very successful dress shop — until she broke her spine falling over a vacuum cleaner in the shop. The business went on under a manager and in the early 1960s moved to Sutherland, but was never the same without my mother running things. In Jannali she had customers coming from all over Sydney, not just The Shire. On Facebook Mark Wright said: “Mum remembers it mate. She knew Mrs Whitfield.” That’s nice.

Couldn’t help reflecting that in 1959 I was in my final year as a student at Sydney Boys High, and that it was also the 8th term of Prime Minister Robert Menzies! He seemed to me then to have been PM forever, though I did dimly recall his predecessor. Menzies continued until 1966. They built them to last in those days!

For some reason a few days ago I had quite an intense nostalgia for that place and that year! 60 years on!

So I visited via Google.  And here on the right of this photo is my 1959 bedroom window:

And here is Mum’s shop/Dad’s office.

Can’t help feeling Mum would have been piqued by the fact it is now Femme Fatale!

Rereading Henry Lawson

I have been rereading, thanks to my eBook collection, many short stories by Henry Lawson, that mighty contributor to our sense of Australian identity. Actually, I have to confess to reading some of the stories for the first time! Not “The Loaded Dog” or “The Drover’s Wife” of course — I have lost count of how many times in the past 60 years or so I would have read them.  Leah Purcell’s reworking of “The Drover’s Wife” for Belvoir Theatre  I missed: I would love to have seen it.

I have been enjoying renewing acquaintance with Lawson, but reminded too that the 1890s is after all a long time ago. Not that Lawson could help being a man of his time, but there are moments — indeed sometimes rather more than moments — that are downright embarrassing now. One such moment is in “The Lost Soul’s Hotel”, albeit that story is clearly tongue-in-cheek.

“And what about woman’s influence?” I asked.

“Oh, I suppose there’d have to be a woman, if only to keep the doctor on the line. I’d get a woman with a past, one that hadn’t been any better than she should have been, they’re generally the most kind-hearted in the end. Say an actress who’d come down in the world, or an old opera-singer who’d lost her voice but could still sing a little. A woman who knows what trouble is. And I’d get a girl to keep her company, a sort of housemaid, with a couple of black gins or half-castes to help her. I’d get hold of some poor girl who’d been deceived and deserted: and a baby or two wouldn’t be an objection—the kids would amuse the chaps and help humanize the place.”

By and large Indigenous Australia is invisible in Lawson’s stories. (Come to think of it Indigenous Australia was pretty much invisible in my first thirty years or so of life in The Shire and Illawarra — invisible to me, that is.)

Recently ABC Central West published, concerning the part of the state Lawson so often celebrated, How the Wiradjuri people of Central West NSW survived first contact with European settlers.  There were some fascinating pictures, including one of Lawson’s famous contemporary Banjo Paterson. As a baby, with his Wiradjuri nanny Fanny Hopkins.

Another photo shows station employees on the Upper Bogan c.1897. You could read many a Lawson story set in that general area and never guess this could have been a regular Sunday sight.

Of interest: The Status of the Aborigine in the Writing of Henry Lawson — A Reconsideration, 1910 The Bulletin Magazine, and Bruce Pascoe — whose literary career actually owes a lot to Lawson. Remember Australian Short Story magazine?

Pascoe said in 2017:

Henry Lawson, who ignored Aboriginal people, wrote the great poem Faces in the Street, and every time I’m in a city part of my journey is in step with the rhythm of that poem, “drifting past, drifting past, to the beat of weary feet”.

But Lawson was thinking of the noble white poor, they were his heroes, whereas he lived in a world where the broken armies of the black resistance were scattered in the streets about him; yet one of the only times he mentioned them was to condemn them as cheats and scoundrels in The Drover’s Wife.

In all the millions of words devoted to that story I have never seen one critic analyse that remark.

“Yesterday she bargained with a stray blackfellow to bring her some wood, and while he was at work she went in search of a missing cow. She was absent an hour or so, and the native black made good use of his time. On her return she was so astonished to see a good heap of wood by the chimney, and she gave him an extra fig of tobacco, and praised him for not being lazy. He thanked her, and left with head erect and chest well out. He was the last of his tribe and a King; but he had built that wood-heap hollow.”

– Excerpt from The Drover’s Wife, by Henry Lawson

Our great laureate had contempt for black and the pages of our literature are still filling with new excuses and conditional regret…

Pascoe rarely understates his case, however.  Another reason I regret missing Leah Purcell’s Indigenous reworking of the classic story — and still a classic, in my view. But a classic we read with different eyes in 2019 — as we should!