Is Journalism Worth Dying For__ Final Dispatches - Anna Politkovskaya [185]
Otherwise, the chapel is simple, like a plainly constructed hut. In addition to the rear wall, the façade is glass, and if you spin around you feel that both you and this cliff jutting out into the ocean are floating in the sky. The chapel is furnished with benches, their cushions embroidered with naval insignia, and on the walls are lists of those who did not return, and a cross. I was going to ask the officer at the checkpoint about the denomination but thought better of it. What do the specifics of faith matter?
The cheery sentinel waved us goodbye, and our incursion on to the territory of a military site was over. I am no uncritical admirer of the West who imagines that everything is better and purer there than in Russia, but I have to admit that it is far more common there to encounter something warm and human.
Sydney is a mixture of a city, which makes it seem strange by comparison with anywhere else. The center appears on the one hand to be pure London, but on the other pure New York. With that wonder of the modern world, the Sydney Opera House, looking out towards the harbour like the open lid of a shell, the central area resembles New York; with the exception of the Opera it is a concrete jungle of skyscrapers with narrow avenues between them. Fairly comfortless, highly urban, as linear as anyone could wish.
But it is only superficially New York. When you start reading the street names you are amazed: everything is just like in London: Hyde Park, King’s Cross, the station and the adjacent district. There is a Paddington, and even an Oxford Street, and it too is very long. The names of London streets and places have been transplanted, with only a light admixture of local exoticism. King’s Cross Station in Sydney, for example, is located in Woolloomooloo, an Aboriginal name Londoners could not imagine in their worst nightmares.
The Aborigines, admittedly, are in short supply. Woolloomooloo there may be, but Aborigines, the indigenous inhabitants of Australia, there are not. Search as you may, you will find none in the streets of Sydney.
Australia was born in tears and did not hold out the prospect of an easy life. In the late eighteenth century there was a crime wave in London, and England, running short of prisons, hit on the idea of finding an island on the other side of the earth where it could dump its criminal elements, with the Exchequer bearing only transportation costs. Once the criminals were there they could be left to survive as best they could, a way of thinking similar to the Tsarist regime’s view of the island of Sakhalin.
Captain Cook was given the commission by his government and duly performed it. Soon convict ships were sailing to the distant land he had discovered, the convicts were disembarked, and their survival was then very much up to them. There were already people on the island who bore little resemblance to Captain Cook, strange, dark-skinned people talking mumbo-jumbo. They named them Aborigines and set about brutally exterminating them, regarding them as little better than animals. Later they began sending the younger sons of lords to the British island, allotting them enormous territories in Australia to cultivate for next to nothing. Some Aborigines considered that these territories belonged to them, by the grace of Mother Nature and not of the minor aristocracy.
The offspring of the British upper classes accordingly took to destroying anybody who tried to defend his lands. There were occasional truces which held for a time, and Aboriginal women had babies by the younger sons and the British staff who served them. It was accepted that half-castes were taken from the Aboriginal women and brought up as British.
Those times are, of course, long gone, and today’s Australians try their utmost to