Nows and Thens

November 11, 2001-Memories

Today was Remembrance Day here & Veteran’s Day in the U.S. David did a memorial service at 11A.M., on the 11th day of the 11th month. I remember being in school & having a moment of silence at that hour. Here we had a short service held at the Jewish section of a cemetery. Jewish ex-servicemen & women of the area attended. The first difference I detected was they sang Advance Australia Fair, the Australian national anthem. I really didn’t understand all the words, but I agree with David when he said they should have stayed with God Save the Queen. The name of the song alone sounds like a move in a board game. There’s also a shopping mall named Australia Fair. Another difference was they played a recording of a bugler. It wasn’t Taps, but it was called Last Post & Reveille, & it was unfamiliar. I guess each nation’s military has different tunes. They also placed a wreath on a stone marker that looked like a tombstone. I found that unusual since, as a rule, Jewish funerals don’t use wreaths or flowers. They presented David with a book written by Jack Epstein, a member of the congregation who recently died. It’s called Australian Jewry’s Book of Honour: World War II. It’s a history of the role of Jewish Australians during that war. Unfortunately, given the world situation, David had plenty of material for his talk.

History

We had lunch with some people from the congregation. There was a discussion of the election. John Howard, the incumbent prime minister, won. I know that the New York Times has run articles about the situation with the Muslim boat people from Afghanistan, but the controversy has been raging since we got here. Even before 9/11, most people agreed with Howard. There’s a sense of fair play that runs deep & Australians don’t like the idea of anyone “jumping the queue.”
As all countries do, they have legal means for immigration. There must be loopholes for asylum seekers, but not when they come by the boatload. I remarked that we have it easier with Mexicans. We just ship them back across the border & don’t have to worry about them drowning in the Rio Grande. Of course, they do die in the desert. Cubans were a different story, but most of then came a long time ago & there wasn’t a fear of terrorists being among them, just communists. We’ve shipped Haitians back to Haiti. And in the back of all of our minds was the boatload of Jews who were sent back to die in Germany during WWII.

That brought us to a piece of Australian history that was new to me. The discussion began when one of the men recounted his arrival in New Zealand. He was single, but his brother, who later tried to join him, was married to a Jewish woman from Bombay. She definitely looked Indian. New Zealand had an all white immigration policy as did Australia until the late 60’s or early 70’s. This was not written law, but was unspoken policy. They decided to try to get into Australia & figured that they were successful because the Indian woman was counted as Jewish. There was no list of desirable or undesirable groups & all were processed. The catch was that there was a language test that was required for entry. You would think the immigrants would need a working knowledge of English & that was true….for some. Others were given tests in Chinese, unless they were Chinese. Then they were given a test in French. If you spoke English, but were too dark, your test could be in Russian. It reminds me of the voter registration tests in the South. Now Australians profess to be the most open & accepting nation in the world & have a growing non-white population. That’s why the policy on the boat people is such an embarrassment. But we have heard many negative comments about the Japanese taking over the Gold Coast, & the large Muslim presence isn’t only resented, it’s now feared.

After lunch we went home to collapse. A storm was brewing & I felt as if I was in a travel commercial for the tropics. The drapes were blowing in through open windows & was a froth whipping up on the pool. Lightening lit up the sky as thunder rolled down from the mountains. It wasn’t like any thunder I’ve ever heard. It didn’t rumble, it boomed. There weren’t long, reverberating claps that went on forever. It sounded like individual cannon shots. They were short, deep, & resonant.

Lessons Learned

I’m reading a novel about India. One of the characters is an American woman who has lived there a long time & married an Indian. In one scene, she has just gotten into a taxi in Bombay & thinks, "The fastest way to appreciate the concept of karma was to take any form of public transportation in India. If you survived, your karma was good. If you did not, your karma was bad. This daily demonstration of karmic logic had convinced her that Hinduism was far in advance of anything the West had yet devised. American scientists had only just discovered the theory of chaos as the prevailing logic of the universe. Hindus had been living it for five thousand years." In light of 9/11, there must be more believers in this. In Yiddish, we say, "It's b'shert."
Our pictures came back from our trip to Cairns & the Center. There’s a great one of me sleeping on the boat train on the Daintree River. I didn’t even know that David took it. The photo I took of the giant moth in our apartment was also in the pack. I really didn’t need the photo since this morning it or its close relative returned. I woke up to a note from David saying there was a moth in the closet & he didn’t want to try to catch it for fear of waking me. No worries. I scooped up moth-friend in the old reliable container & sent it on its way.

I was in a card shop looking at the Xmas cards & almost laughed aloud. They have such cute ones that are typically Australian. My favorite said, “ On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me,” then you open it & it says, “A koala in a gum tree.” Finding Chanukah cards was more difficult. We finally located them at one store in a mall that must have at least 15 stores selling greeting cards. When we went to the Post to buy stamps, I found out that Xmas cards cost 20 cents less to send to the U.S. than any other card including Chanukah cards.

Toby