Grief is good in Australia

Sydney

I live near the main road here, running down to Coogee Beach. Sun-lovers slouch down it all weekend: Australian families, British backpackers, Swedish grannies, American students. Last week they came as usual, in their shorts and their sleeveless tops, their hats and their flip-flops and their suncream. But there was something wrong on Sunday: few carried towels.

They were on their way to the local Oval for a memorial service for 12 October. Our rugby team, the Dolphins, lost six members in Bali, and members of other teams from nearby suburbs were also among the murdered. This was Australia’s day of mourning, and people came in their thousands.

The first words of the ceremony were those of John Lennon. We were asked to imagine all the pee-pull with no countries or religions to die for. It is a profoundly Western desire, this vision of total, secular globalisation. It is also a vision that has been largely achieved in Australia, as this ceremony indicated.

The poet Les Murray has suggested that Australians long ago achieved a ‘vernacular republic’ but forgot to tell the political class and the rest of the establishment, which continued to believe in a set of state and religious beliefs no longer relevant to most of us. To put it more crudely: ‘Neighbours’ is Australia. This might help to explain why the ceremony at Coogee Oval contained almost no manifestations of nationalism or religion. In this it reflected the public response of most Australians to the Bali massacre, so different from – so much more suburban than – America’s response to 11 September.

I have not heard our Prime Minister, John Howard, say anything about God in the past week. It was left to George Bush to bring God into it, in a sympathy broadcast to Australia.