Spring in Sydney starts in winter. The native trees flower first. Wattle flowers, dense and yellow. Even the northern hemisphere flowers come out early because our winter is like the northern spring. Bushes of browallia hidden in old style gardens full of roses, azaleas and camellias. The ends of leafy stalks, curving downwards, weighed down by their clusters of orange and brown orange flowers. Rini opens the oven and is hit by the smell of sweetness. She takes out the baked quinces. They look like pieces of burnt wood on the outside but the ambrosial paste leaks caramelized quince jelly from the inside.

Rini looks up from her desk. Through the window, below the white sheet hitched up to let in the winter sun, the endless blue of the Pacific Ocean. Beyond the breakers. It’s the end of the working week and the end of the thesis she has been writing for five years. Beyond, freedom beckons.

On her computer she opens a document for a new project and starts writing notes: Howard is looking for $110 billion for new defence spending. Bush in the White House, a mirror of Howard in the Lodge. The money collected from the GST may cover it and they have created a budget surplus to cover it. To defend ourselves from the illegal immigrants carried in by people smugglers from the north. Refugees fleeing for their lives or aggressors from rogue states. And there’s policing work to be done in the regional hotspots. All those crazy islanders, Indonesia, China.

How to enable Australia’s aggression and abuse of human rights to go unchallenged? Withdraw from the UN Human Rights Treaty, then the UN is powerless to criticise. Now Australia can proceed with the implementation of its new laws for illegal immigrants – incarceration with impunity. While thousands of first world tourists overstay their visas and melt into the population, third world boat people languish in detention centres, run by private American security firms, complete with black shirts and attack dogs.

The IVF debate erupts. Why should the Australian taxpayer fund IVF for lesbian mothers? A new defence shield to protect the Howard government from public knowledge of the purpose of William Cohen’s Australian visit. The US Secretary of Defence here to tee up the joint defence initiatives. The Australian Foreign Minister defending the US proposals:

“The US is entitled to defend itself and its citizens from external threat, from aggression by rogue states.” The Labor Party voted against the National Missile Defence system but they support the increase in defence spending.

It’s not defence as we normally define it, it’s defence against any retaliation there might be after other countries are attacked by the US. They want to attack with impunity. The bloodless attack is one-sided, they only spill the blood of their victims, not their own. Although the US spends $500 billion a year on defence, it’s still only 5% of the GNP, and it provides employment for Americans.

Then she starts on another tack:
The islander instinct to reach out to other people, quickly establishing rapport and trust. Susceptible, quick to react, quick to go their own way again. Letting down the barriers between people temporarily. People without borders. Relating as me and you, entering personal space but keeping the correct distance. Attracting but reserved. Elusive, free, fluid, adventurous, susceptible, wandering. Impossible to assimilate. Not possible as a national identity. No blood on their hands but martyred for their independence. A mentality hard to erase.

Cassies, people from Castellorizo island. The Other, The Turk, for Cassies were also their source of food, trade, everything they needed. The town of Kås, ten minutes away on the Turkish mainland, the key to the islanders’ survival. Castellorizo even today, has no natural water, no agriculture, no industry except a little tourism for the visiting Aussie- Cassies and people sailing around the Mediterranean. But that was not the situation in the old days. Castellorizo was the eye and Kås, the eyebrow. Without Kås, Cassies were starving to death. People completely ruined by the enforcement of the Greek/Turkish border. Castellorizo, the island, cut off from Kås. Forced to leave forever. First to Egypt, then to Australia, setting up the first Greek communities in the country. Now, they are islanders on the big island.

Turkey is making another claim on Castellorizo. The island is so far from Greece and so close to Turkey, subsidised by the Greek Government to maintain its south eastern border. In the age of globalisation, people are fighting over national borders.

What are the ties which bind us. The invisible voluntary bonds. The things we want, we don’t resist. What invisible barriers are stopping us. What is impeding our freedom. The distance, regardless of its magnitude, is hard to bear.

••••

A female colleague walks up behind her and puts her arm around her shoulder. Maybe hugging. An intrusion on personal space which has to be tolerated because an Anglo- Australian may not understand the nature of appropriate physical contact in Greek culture. And the Anglo-Australian is trying to make contact at that level. Rini moves around and takes hold of her colleague’s forearm, trying to right the situation. She moves to the hand and then drops it gently, trying to bow out of the embrace gracefully.

••••

“People are coming to camp here from all over Australia. Walking here. This is the Aboriginal Tent Embassy.”

The cool south westerly is blowing across their backs as they sit around the open campfire in lounge chairs. The park is dark except for small pools of light on the grass around the lamp posts. Major traffic streams past continuously on the highway at the edge of the park but the noise is unnoticeable around the fire just a hundred metres away.

A small red tuk tuk beetles around the park on the grass. As it speeds far away into the park, its coloured lights and headlamps are still visible. The kids get so excited they refuse to exit the tuk tuk so the driver takes them on trip after trip. Then the kids run off chasing each other into the darkness waving a string of plastic stars.

Around the fire are stories of back home in the bush from the visitors. The hard life and the racism. Here the scene is like an echo of the past when people would have sat in this place on the slopes of the wetlands around a fire at night. When the tidal wetlands reached from Blackwattle Bay in the harbour up to the area where the park is today. A fertile fishing ground for all kinds of fish and shellfish. Today you can go and buy fish at the fish market on the bay and walk back to the park to cook it on the open fire. But it’s not the same.

The university security guards walk up. Very friendly, standing around for half an hour chatting. Someone deals with them, explaining the point of the Embassy. The guards go away again. People are quiet around the fire, just looking at the flames, not being able to talk so much to total strangers. Cigarettes get smoked. One man starts talking, giving a kind of public speech about the way Aboriginals are living up north.

“The only people who do radical political oratory these days are Aboriginals. The only people really talking Left in this country, Tan says quietly to Billie as they warm their hands at the fire.”

The smell of wood burning and the smell of burning gum leaves.

“The platform the Olympics gives us is too good to pass up, says a woman on the other side of the campfire. Howard and the other politicians tried to pre-empt our protests with white initiatives like the big march across the bridge and the special ceremonies at the Opera House. But we can’t be silenced that easily.”

••••

Billie and Tan drive north into the rainforest to escape the Olympics. Listening to Triple J on the car radio and their coverage of the opening ceremony for the Olympics. The commentators, sitting in the audience, note the historical references – the British invasion shown as Captain Cook and other Englishmen arriving in the arena on penny farthing bicycles. Like harmless anachronisms. One commentator speculates on which particular historical references will be made about the invaders’ conflicts with the Aboriginals.

“Do you think they’ll show the part where they put arsenic into the Aboriginals’ flour?”

The white painted concrete balusters of the verandah with a background of flowering trees and shrubs. The colonial aesthetic melting into the suburbs and country towns. The same pukka sahib aesthetic repeated on a small scale and in a more dilute form throughout the built social hierarchy. The real slab-walled shed with an old wisteria vine, it’s clusters of indigo flowers dripping off the corner of the corrugated iron roof. The English country garden full of Chinese flowering shrubs. Like walking into a commercial watercolour painting reproducing the image as cliché.

Cathy Freeman wins gold and gets lots of media coverage. Her future as a media personality is discussed. She will have to take action soon, if she wants to develop a viable career before her public profile fades again. Aboriginal performers feature prominently in the opening and closing ceremonies. Aboriginal issues are profiled in the local and international media. But there is no treaty, no apology and no progress on land rights. Only a salve for the white conscience.

More parades take place for the Olympic volunteer workers and then the commercial build-up for Xmas begins.

••••

Billie, Tan and Billie’s Uncle Jim sit together under a beach umbrella on the sand at the protected southern end of the beach, waiting for Alex and his family to join them. They spot them coming down the steps from the esplanade, a small knot of people carrying bags and towels. Most of them are dressed for the beach but Alex, the older brother is wearing normal street clothes with shoes and socks. They all sit down directly on the sand, except for Alex who stands next to them, smoking. Everyone makes fun of Alex, pointing at his shoes and socks.

“It’s un-Australian,” says Tan
“This is our first hot Sydney summer, “explains Alex.
“Where’s Leon?” asks Billie, referring to their middle brother.
“We don’t know where he is,” Alex says. He has taken some job as a mercenary soldier to try and make a lot of money.
“I reckon that’s where Leon has gone, says Peter” holding up a newspaper, to Sierra Leone. See how the UN is employing mercenaries to wipe out the rebels. They say, “Anyone who looks like a civilian but is carrying a gun, must be a rebel, so they are a target.” That makes it okay to shoot civilians.
“I don’t know. Will we be able to tolerate him when he returns? asked Alex. Will he be able to live with himself?”
“Dogs of war, says Jim.”
“Some get paid army wages, they are soldiers. And some get paid by perfectly above- board private security firms, reads Peter.”
“You can buy an AK47 for $5 in some countries, says Billie.”

Alex takes off his shirt to reveal a sunken white chest.
“What happened to the Aboriginal Embassy? asks Ivana. You were involved with it, weren’t you? The site in the park is deserted now. Did they close down when the Olympics finished?”
“They had an agreement with Council to move two weeks after the Olympics finished, says Billie.” Then they moved to Cockatoo Island in the middle of the harbour, declaring the old naval site terra nullius because it’s been standing empty for years. Now they’re fighting a lawsuit for trespassing.
“Terra Nullius! Get it? says Jim. Do you know the history?”
“Is it Latin? asks Ivana.”
“Yes, says Jim. It means empty land, and that’s how the British described Australia when they first came here.” Empty of people, because they didn’t think of the Aboriginal people as people. In an empty land, you don’t have to sign treaties with the locals when you take over their land. So the Embassy is just using the same rationale. And they’re rejecting the Commonwealth’s sovereignty over the island, saying that when Captain Cook claimed Australia, he didn’t specify the islands of Sydney Harbour.

Billie and Rini get together with Ruby over a coffee to discuss the formation of a new group to work against the new national defence strategies and the refugee issues.