Another voice

Lilla’s greatest feat is to make us imagine the unimaginable

31 March 2007

Scampering so fast through a century of alliances and wars may suggest a world where confusion reigned as to friend and foe. It will not necessarily have seemed so to Lilla. The decades passed slowly. The shape of the world will often have felt quite permanent. Chefoo seemed to go on forever.

Sit by the old gun emplacements at South Head on Sydney Harbour; read the explanatory plaque; and you will gain a similar sense of how deceptively flimsy are our forevers.

Australia’s world view was umbilically linked to Britain’s and it was fear of invasion by the French during the Napoleonic wars that began these fortifications in 1801. But in 1839 Sydney was shocked by the unannounced arrival of American warships: the growing muscle of the United States was the new nightmare. Defences against the Americans were built. In the Crimean war the French were allies and it was now towards the Russian fleet that the cannons were pointed.

Half a century later, defending Britain’s imperial interests against European rivals was still dominating Sydney’s thoughts. Then in 1941 Japan entered the war. New gun emplacements were set up along the coast. But the threat passed; and as memories faded Japan has been forgotten as an enemy. For the first half of my life (and the last part of Lilla’s) it has seemed that communism was the threat. Some of the tunnels dug as part of the Sydney Harbour fortifications were used to train Australia’s troops for Vietnam.

And slowly the view from Sydney Harbour has diverged from our view from Beachy Head. The automatic identification of Australia’s defence interests with those of the Old Country has gone. The new country asks itself whence, as a resource-rich and thinly populated continent in a burgeoning and overpopulated hemisphere, the next threat will come; and receives, I suppose, no very clear answer — except that from Europe neither the threat nor protection from the threat is likely to come. Were I in Australian politics, I should be attracted by the case for an independent nuclear weapon; otherwise Australia must throw in its lot full-heartedly with the United States. Canberra’s support for Washington over Iraq is easier to defend in terms of realpolitik than Britain’s.

And the view from England’s Beachy Head? Near the end of Lilla’s story, victorious American forces advance as she waits in the Japanese concentration camp among hundreds of Allied prisoners of many nationalities on starvation rations. A massive shipment of food parcels from the American Red Cross arrives. Jubilation is cut short as a contingent from the American prisoners demands of the bemused Japanese camp commandant that these parcels should only be given to US nationals. There was more than enough for everyone. The unexpected and brutal assertion of national muscle surprises and jars.

America, the next threat? I just wonder. ‘Unimaginable,’ you say. Yes, but many of the subterranean shifts in international relations which shook Lilla’s long life will not at first have seemed imaginable. Nor were imperial strategists ever once right about which country Australia was to be fortified against. Learning from them, and from Lilla, we should at least permit ourselves to wonder.