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.