Inspired by The History Channel's The People Speak. I’ve decided to make a regular weekly selection of quotations. This series was inspired by the production of The American The People Speak. Quotes are the primary sources of history. They are the flesh and blood of history. The selection below are from my own research. My quotes are not just on Australia but are from all over the world.
John Tognolini 6-1-2013
"We swear by the
Southern Cross to stand truly by each other, and fight to defend our rights and
liberties"
– Oath taken by 500 miners
on the Eureka goldfield, November 30, 1854
"The source of
pauperism will be settled in Victoria by any quill-driver, who has the pluck to
write the history of public-houses in town, and sly-grog shops sellers on the
gold-fields."
"‘Your licence, mate,’
was the peremptory question from a six foot fellow in blue shirt, thick boots,
the face of a ruffian armed with a carbine and a fixed bayonet. The old ‘all
right’ being exchanged, I lost sight of that specimen of brutedom and his
similars, called as I learned, ‘traps’ and ‘troopers’.
Inveterate murderers,
audacious burglars, bloodthirsty bushrangers, were the ruling triumvirate, the
scour of old Europe, called vandemonians, in this bullock-drivers’ land."
Raffaello Carboni 1820-1875
The Eureka Stockade
Melbourne 1963
"At Melbourne, in a
long veranda giving on a grass plot, where laughing jack-asses laugh very
horribly, sit wool kings, premiers and breeders of horses after their
kin"d. The older men talk of the Eureka Stockade, and the younger men talk
of the ‘shearing wars’ in North Queensland, while the traveller moves timidly
among them wondering what under the world every third word means."
Rudyard Kipling 1865-1936,
On the Melbourne Club, Letters of Travel (1892-1913) Kipling
stayed at Melbourne Club in November 1891.
"By and by there was a
result; and I think it may be called the finest thing in Australian history. It
was a revolution-small in size,but great politically; it was a strike for
liberty, a struggle for a principle, a stand against injustice and oppression.
It was the Barons and John over again; it was Hampeden and Ship-Money; it was
Concord and Lexington; small beginnings, all of them, but all of them great
results, all of them epoch making.
It was another instance of
a victory by a lost battle. It adds an honourable page to history; the people
know it and proud of it. They keep green the memory of the men who fell at
Eureka Stockade, and Peter Lalor and his monument."
Mark Twain [Samuel
Langhorne Clemens] 1835-1910 Following the Equator 1897
"Lalor used to say
that however rash and foolhardy his had been, it was one of which any
honourable man might be proud. The mass-vote of later generations has been in
overwhelming agreement."
Alan Geoffrey Serle 1922-
The Golden Age 1963
[In November 1938 Port
Kembla wharfies/dockers declined loading up 23,000 tons of pig-iron for Japan.
There action was in solidarity with the Chinese who had been invaded and
occupied by Japan. but were forced to by legislation drafted by the
commonwealth/federal attorney general Robert Gordon Menzies. Darwin was bombed
by Japan in 1942 and Menzies was nick named Pig Iron Bob.]
"I believe that the
mount Kembla with the sturdy but peaceful and altogether disinterested attitude
of the men concerned, will find a place in our history alongside the Eureka
Stockade, with its more violent resistance of a less settled time, as a noble
stand against executive Dictarship and against an attack on Australian
Democracy."
Sir Isaac Issacs 1855-1948,
first Australian to become governor-general, Australian Democracy and Our
Colonial System 1939
On Law
The law doth punish man or
woman
That steals the goose from
off the common,
But lets the greater felon
loose,
That steals the common from
the goose.
Anonymous
What are laws but the
expression of some class which has power over the rest of the community?
Thomas Babington Macauly,
Baron Macaulay, 1830
The love of justice in most
men is nothing more than the fear of suffering injustice.
Francois, Due de La
Rochefoucauld, Maxims, (1665)
Justice is like a train
that's nearly always late.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko, A
Precious Autobiography (1963)
The only way to make the
mass of mankind see the beauty of justice is by showing them in pretty plain
terms the consequence of injustice.
Sydney Smith, quoted in
Roads to Ruin, by E.S.Turner, (1950)
In any civilised society, a
police force is a necessary evil, but some members of it are more evil than
necessary.
Ken Buckley, President,
Council of Civil Liberties, Sydney Morning Herald, 8 March 1969.
"I would like to know
what business an honest man would have in the Police as it is an old saying it
takes a rogue to catch a rogue..."
Ned Kelly, 'Jerilderie
Letter', 1879, in Overland, No 84, 1981
"The law, in all its
majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges."
Anatole France, The Red
Lily, (1894)
"I have never seen a
situation so dismal that a policeman couldn’t make it worse."
Brendan Behan
"To the right wing
“law and order” is often just a code phrase, meaning “get the niggers”.To the
left wing it often means political oppression."
Gore Vidal 1925-2012
"The law isn’t
justice. It’s a very imperfect mechanism. If you press exactly the right buttons
and are also lucky, justice may also turn up in the answer."
Raymond Chandler 1888-1959, The Long Goodbye, (1953)
The Media
“Early in life I had
noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.”
George Orwell
On World War Two
“The enemy is anybody who's
going to get you killed, no matter which side he's on.”
“Sure there's a catch," Doc Daneeka replied. "Catch-22. Anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn't really crazy."
There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.
"That's some catch, that Catch-22," he observed.”
Joseph Heller 1923-1999, Catch 22
They who are in folly or
mere greed.
Enslaved by religion,
market, laws.
Borrow our language now
and bid.
Us to speak in freedom’s
cause.
It is the logic of our
times.
No subject for immortal
verse-
That we who live by
honest dreams
Defend the bad against
the worse
C.Day
Lewis 1904-1972 Where Are The War Poets?
"World War II is not simply and purely a 'good war.' It was accompanied by too many atrocities on our side – too many bombings of civilian populations. There were too many betrayals of the principles for which the war was supposed to have been fought.
"Yes, World War II had a strong moral aspect to it – the defeat of fascism. But I deeply resent the way the so-called good war has been used to cast its glow over all the immoral wars we have fought in the past fifty years: in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Afghanistan. I certainly don't want our government to use the triumphal excitement surrounding World War II to cover up the horrors now taking place in Iraq.
"I don't want to honor military heroism – that conceals too much death and suffering. I want to honor those who all these years have opposed the horror of war."
Howard Zinn 1922-2010 Dissent at the War Memorial By Howard ZinnThe War On Terror
"Well, I think Australia should
now grow up and stop being a junior ally, either to Britain - for years it was
a junior ally to Britain. Australian Prime Ministers just mimicked the British.
Now, they're doing the same as far as the United States is concerned and this
is a country now which has lots and lots of young people from many different
cultures and nationalities and it should just realise which part of the world
it's in and settle down to it. Now, as far as the United States is concerned, you
know, it's tempting to agree with you and say there are all these disasters
happening. The American economy is on the decline. The war in Iraq has gone
bad, the war in Afghanistan is getting even worse, and this is the end of
America. It's not as simple as that. It isn't the end of America and it isn't
the end of the American military industrial complex and America remains the
world's most powerful militarised state, with a military budget that is 10
times more than the six countries after it put together and one just has to be
aware of that. It's been written off before and it's also a world hegemony now
with no rivals. You know, the notion that China is a serious military,
political rival to the states is nonsense. It's an economic rival. That's absolutely
true. The European Union isn't a rival so where is the treat to American
hegemony coming from? I think it's overrated, this threat, and what will change
the United States is not going to be defeats abroad, but what will change the
United States is if there are movements of its own people within that country.
That is what will bring about organic change so I hate to disappoint you. I
wish I could agree with you but I can't."
On History
The importance of
history to me was reinforced by the answer given from veteran journalist and
film maker, John Pilger, to a question I asked him, on Friday March 7 2008. At
a public meeting in Katoomba, in the Blue Mountains West of Sydney, at
Australian acting icon, Jack Thompson’s when he owned the Gearin’s Hotel. John Tognolini
I asked him, “John you
mentioned with Rudd, going through our Blair period, we are now. I remember in
your book New Rulers of The World, how
Blair modelled himself on Keating. I also remember at the Sydney Writers
Festival, when Blair was elected a number of years ago now, you saying we were
going through our Hawke/Keating period in Britain. It seems to recycle. I’m
saying this as a history teacher and I’ve used your work on East Timor and many
other things including Vietnam. A lot of [other] history teachers have as well.
How important is that
struggle of memory? That you’ve really put forward.
Just seeing your film The War on Democracy, it took me back as
someone who did solidarity with people of Chile, the people of El Salvador and
of Nicaragua, and seeing people from Chile, who were in tears, who lived
through it.
The whole thing to me,
I’m looking at now, is let’s get rid of that history. It’s like journalism. The
point you’ve made is that you can’t work as a journalist in Australia because
Murdoch controls so much of the media here. He controls twenty five per cent of
the world’s media. You talk about grass roots. How important do you see that
struggle of history and memory? Because to me that’s what history is memory.
John’s answer was, “ Absolutely, for those people at the
back, the gentleman who asked is a history teacher and boiling it down, he
asked how important is memory in our understanding of events and acting on
them.
Well it’s absolutely
critical. Today it is more important than ever because as Time magazine once said, “We live in a time of eternal present.”
Well they’d like to think we live in a time of eternal present. We don’t off
course and all of us have memories, individual, collective but it is our
political, even cultural memory, intellectual memory if you like, that is
assaulted constantly.
We are asked to support
wars abroad while the memory of the previous war that Australia has been
involved in, time after time of any nation of its age in its modern era. We are
asked to support these wars without understanding how the previous wars were
begun. The idea of understanding Vietnam. How we got into Vietnam. How we were
conned into Vietnam. How when we got into Vietnam it was a rather ignominious
sacrifice of our own troops as well as of course the Vietnamese, because
unknown to the Australian public, we
were doing some very, very dirty work for the Americans in Black Teams
working for the CIA and so on and so forth. I mentioned earlier Australians
being left by Rudd in the Green Zone, the Australian SAS. The same thing.
The Australian SAS was
actually in Iraq. That’s been pretty well established if you read some of Tony
Kevans’s work on this before the March invasion in 2003. Now that’s the
extinguishing of memory. Because, if we understood, what a monstrous time
Vietnam was. If we decode it, we strip away its clichés. If we take away the
language of power, then we restore our own memory.
So it’s the old
Orwellian thing. If we don’t understand the past, we will never understand the
present and the future paraphrasing basically it was common sense. So much of
the media is geared to preventing us understanding the past and drawing lessons
from it.
On the positive side, I
have to say that I’ve never known a time when public awareness about something
going on. About insecurity, about wrongs happening in the world. I don’t think
it has ever been as high as it has been today. So we mustn’t and I’m speaking
for myself become obsessed with the media being this impenetrable obstacle to
us finding out. It isn’t.
We’ve got a meeting
like this tonight in Katoomba. There are plenty of books in the bookshop. The
internet is full of some interesting journalism. We have people like yourself
teaching and others but its drawing all this together. It’s never acting alone.
It’s always acting together and sharing this information and that’s how you
reclaim memory in my experience. It’s drawing in people with the experience of
the past and describing the lessons we might draw then for the present and the
future. All this is in a way all about intellectual and political direct action and that is where
politics in my view should be. It is about direct action.
That direct action can happen against ALP just as it happens against the
Coalition. It can be direct action against the media. Why should the media not
be a target for direct action? ....
