Confronting Australian smugness
Confronting Australian smugness
C Duncan Graham, Perth
When fundamentalist terrorists started their bombing campaign
in Indonesia we all struggled for answers.
How could anyone hate so much that they'd want to kill people
they'd never met?
U.S. President George Bush said it was because they loathed
the West's great lust for freedom and democracy. That may have
resonated with his electorate but for Australians it sounded a
bit overblown.
Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said it was
because the terrorists had a mean and narrow view of the world
derived from their religious education.
The fundamentalists, according to this theory, had been
educated in Islamic pesantren, or boarding schools. Former U.S.
ambassador to Indonesia Paul Wolfowitz said: 'What they're
taught there (in pesantren) is not real learning. It's not the
tools for coping with the modern world. It's the tools that turn
them into terrorists.'
The idea that narrow religious education produced crackpot
bombers offered a handy explanation for fundamentalist violence.
It was all the fault of the loonies' shallow view of the world
and their simplistic, illogical and racist attitudes.
Of course Australians could not fall prey to such tragic
ignorance.
Although up to a third of Australian kids go to religious
schools, these follow secular state-controlled curricula. Most
private schools are Christian presumably promoting love,
tolerance and respect -- as do the government schools.
We train our children in independent thought through rational
processes. They learn about multiculturalism, the rights of
others, the structures of a civilised society and the need to
make it better. These are not optional add-ons, but core values.
From an early age our children learn about logic and reason,
to check the authority of all sources, to ask questions.
As teachers, as communicators, as professionals we should be
able to look Australian society in the eye and say with pride:
You are the best educated, the most learned and informed of all
generations.
But that was before the Corby case ripped down the front
fence, tore off the doors, broke open the windows and showed what
a flimsy, flawed house we'd built and where we lived in such
smugness.
Most Indonesians I know are absolutely bewildered by
Australian reaction to this case.
Their view of Australia as a generous and disciplined society
where reason, logic and fairness rule has been blown apart. A
major reappraisal of their neighbor is underway. The most polite
phrase is that Australians are kekanak-kanakan; childish.
It's obvious that the people who said 'you can see she's
innocent', who spat out hatred, who demanded back their tsunami
donations, who threatened Indonesians must have been educated in
the same pesantren that produced the tunnel vision loonies.
They could not be graduates of Australia's modern,
comprehensive, professional education system. They could not
have passed through our devoted and well-trained hands.
They could not have sat in classes where we taught respect for
culture.
But of course the truth is that they were our students and
that we have not done our job well. Our abilities as teachers
and communicators have been tested and we have failed.
Xenophobia and racism have not been eradicated in Australia.
They thrive in a fertile environment that prefers emotion to
fact, simplistic solutions over reasoned argument. The ethos of
Pauline Hanson's One Nation political party didn't disappear --
it just hibernated. Australians are still a Northern Hemisphere
people uncomfortable in the south and anxious about our
neighbors.
We have not confronted and defeated our primitive fears about
Asians and the Threat from the North. We have not proved our
theses of civilisation to our students. When migrant families
are excluded we are still a monolingual nation.
So do not ask for whom the bells toll.
They toll for the bright hopes we once all held for a better
world built on education and our ability to effect real change.
But they also toll another message.
We have to challenge ignorance at every step. We have to be
outspoken every time the voices of hate break out. We cannot
appease or be silent. We have to continuously argue that there
are many ways of looking at the world which deserve
consideration.
To understand cultures we have to master other languages as
all Europeans and Singaporeans must.
For this we need a national commitment to make Australia not
just a clever country but also a literate land where every
graduate is bi-lingual.
More than a year ago the Australian Parliament published a
long report urging more people-to-people contact with
Indonesians. Instead our government has issued more and more
travel warnings.
Led by politicians proclaiming that Australians are just so
much better that almost everyone else from sport to warmongering,
lawmaking, medical research and managing the economy, we've
failed to notice the hidden message.
We continuously tell ourselves we are the best; but the flip
side to this coin of triumph is that everyone else must be stupid
and wrong.
Such unfit people, failed nations and weird social systems
must therefore be treated with contempt and suspicion.
When they question our beliefs they have to be challenged --
violently if necessary.
But isn't that just how the pesantren-trained fundamentalist
behave?
Overturning this awful, ugly, doom-laden view of human society
demands that we review the way we teach other languages and
cultures.
We can do this by presenting Indonesian history, language and
society not as them versus us, but as a separate, valid ways of
looking at the mysteries of life.
Personal enrichment is the great and lasting reward for those
who approach the world with an open mind. What better gift can
we give the generations to come?
This is an edited version of a paper delivered to the biennial
conference of the Australian Society of Indonesian Language
Educators held in Perth early this month. Duncan Graham
(wordstars@hotmail.com) is an author and journalist.