>[!INFO]+ Meta >Area:: [[Neverland - The Lost Continent of Australia]] >Date:: 2013 >Tags:: #text #Portugal #Brazil #Australia *God gave the Portuguese a small country as cradle but all the world as their grave.* António Vieira[^155] Modern day tourists seeking to discover Australia have at their disposal nearly twenty thousand kilometres of national highway. While guaranteed familiar comforts across the continent, opportunities for historical pilgrimage can be painfully elusive. The land is too old for crumbling castles and ruined temples. Local authorities attempt to compensate for this lack by breaking the journey with road signs advising the presence of a 'Historic Marker'. Weary drivers have the chance to stretch their legs and study a brass plaque, which commemorates the previous journey of a survey team or a first sheep run. There is rarely an opportunity to wonder at the scene of world history---of fierce battles or noble deeds that heralded the transition between tyranny and freedom. But there is an exception along the west coast of Victoria. It is here that Portuguese caravels were supposedly wrecked in the sixteenth century, lashed by winds that have had no other land mass to temper their ferocity since they left Patagonia. The multitude of markers and sculptures that celebrate this mysterious contact with the pre-modern world increase the tourist appeal of these otherwise modest towns. Beyond the historical romance, Portuguese contact has a critical role to play in the framework of national history. Portugal bookends Australia's history as a colony. Not only do the Portuguese circumscribe Australia's pre-Cook European history, they also determine Australia's future as a coloniser in its own right, beginning with East Timor. #### **First off the mark** Portugal was a hare in the race to colonise the New World. It covered great distances in a brief period, but soon lost momentum as the tortoise nations---the mercantile Dutch and the stoic English---proceeded to build enduring institutions of colonial power. Despite being left behind, the Portuguese story has relevance today as an epic tale depicting in stark relief the romance and tragedy of Europe in the New World. Portugal's brilliant start took place in the first half of the sixteenth century. Though less than half the size of Victoria, Portugal created an empire of prodigious expanse. It girdled central Africa, spanning Mozambique, Morocco, Botswana, Mauritius, Angola and Namibia. The Luso-centric world included key ports in the Indian and Pacific oceans---such as Ceylon, Goa, Malacca and Macau---with missionaries making significant conversions in Japan. And it took control of the eastern rump of South America, a territory one hundred times the size of its home country. For a brief moment, a sliver of land at the end of Europe seemed to rule the world. It was soon to run out of breath. The spiritual belief required to traverse such distances was based on unsustainable expectations. In 1420, Prince Henry the Navigator was made grand master of the Order of Christ, a company established to succeed the crusading order of the Templars. Funds from the order financed his expeditions and the first Portuguese navigators sailed under the Red Cross. Their exploration of Africa's west coast laid the ground for Vasco da Gama's journeys in the late fifteenth century. Following the Order of Christ, the Cult of the Holy Spirit prophesised a 'third age' involving the coronation of a common man as Emperor of the Holy Spirit, a collective wedding bringing rich and poor together, and the freeing of an individual prisoner. The Archbishop of Goa, Dom Fr. Ignacio de Santa Teresa, proclaimed that God had chosen the Portuguese 'with infallible promises for the subjugation of the whole globe, which will be united and reduced to one sole empire, of which Portugal will be the head'.[^156] The key to imperial hopes was a belief in the existence of a Christian civilisation in the orient. The primary figure in this myth of the lost tribe was Prester John, a descendent of the Magi. In 1165, a forged letter from Prester John addressed to Immanuel I, Emperor of Byzantium, painted a glorious picture of the eastern Christian kingdom: 'If indeed you can number the stars of heaven and sands of the sea, then you may calculate the extent of our dominion and power.'[^157] The historical basis of this figure was the defeat of the Moslem Turks by Mongol Khan in Persia, with the assistance of Nestorian Christians. Continuing reports of defeats by Turks at the hands of the Khan were interpreted as victories for a Christian king. The Portuguese, on the other hand, located Prester John in Ethiopia, where the Knights Templar had journeyed to find the lost Ark of the Covenant. Portuguese campaigns in Angola and the Congo were nominally aimed at meeting up with the holy empire of the East. In the early sixteenth century, Alfonso de Albuquerque extended the Portuguese empire to the orient on the assumption that he would meet up with Prester John's armies and as a united force they would invade Mecca and destroy the infidel. During the course of his quest, Albuquerque captured Goa, Ceylon and the Malaccan Straits, forcing the wedge of Western imperial interests onto Australia's doorstep. The miraculous growth of the Portuguese empire may thus be attributed to a leader who, in fact, never existed. As the empire declined, this messianic yearning found an object closer to home. In 1578, King Sebastian invaded Muslim Morocco in order to bring it under Christian rule. Weighed down by artillery, the Portuguese were outnumbered and pushed to the coast where many drowned. The Portuguese lost not only the cream of their army, but also a leader who had not yet produced an heir. As a result, the royal house came under Spanish rule, which led to the inevitable contraction of the Portuguese empire. For many years after that battle, there were various waves of *Sebastianismo*, in which various impostors claimed to be the king. As with modern Elvis Presley sightings, hopes were sustained that the King, and with him Portugal's lost glory, would be restored. #### **The untranslatable Saudade** In popular culture, the melancholic sentiment underlying this yearning for a lost leader has been bundled up into a peculiarly Portuguese phenomenon known as *saudade*, a craving for the way things might have been. *Saudade* takes many forms. Its primary expression is the *cantigas de amigo*, troubadour ballads lamenting parted lovers. A modern outpouring of this emotion is found in *fado* ('fate'), the folk singing that bemoans an unkind fortune. As a form of popular lament, *fado* developed in the early twentieth century, around the same time as *rembetika* in Greece and the blues in the USA. Unlike more universal style of 'blues' singing, *fado* is officially found only in the two hillside precincts of Alfama and Bairro Alto in Lisbon. As the emotional shadow of a brilliant empire, *saudade* has been a dominant theme in Portuguese literature. In the early sixteenth century, Luís de Camões wrote the *Lusiads*, a foundational epic for the Portuguese empire modelled on Virgil's *Aenead*. While depicting the mythic destiny of Vasco da Gama, Camões also established the personal and negative force of *Saudade-Soledade* ('yearning fraught with loneliness'). His 'On a Shipmate, Pero Moniz, Dying At Sea', depicts the heartbreak of the Portuguese colonist: > ... the dank, corrupted air\ > That festers in the marshes around there\ > Has made me food for fish here in the snarling,\ > Fierce seas that dark the Abyssinian shore,\ > Far from the happy homeland I adore. *Saudade* was given added force by the decline of the once unrivalled empire. In the nineteenth century, *saudosismo* poets such as António Nobre and Teixeira de Pascoais created a *Renascença Portuguesa* movement, which saw *saudade* as the key to Portugal's greatness. Nobre's only book *Só* ('Alone') was inspired by nostalgic memories of a childhood spent in the company of peasants and sailors in northern Portugal. The poets subsequently inspired by his work were called the *Sósino* Generation. In modern times, this spirit has been carried by the poet Fernando Pessoa and novelist Jose Saramago. The emotion of *Saudade* seems a potential dead weight on a colonising people. How can the Portuguese embrace new lands when their song and poetry is always pining for their home country? But the history of Brazil shows that the object of this nostalgia can eventually migrate across the seas and become a force of positive change. In the seventeenth century, the Jesuit priest António Vieira prophesised that Portugal was the fifth empire and would eventually convert the entire world to Christianity. Rather than demonise the Jews, he saw Portugal as continuous with the Judaic kingdom of the Bible. The Portuguese played the role of the Magi, bringing treasures of the East to the holy land. Vieira saw the riches of the New World as devices planted by God to lure the Portuguese across the Atlantic, so they could convert the millions of natives awaiting salvation. While in charge of the Jesuit mission in the Brazilian province of Maranhão, Vieira sought to temper the settlers' violence toward the local Indian population. He was expelled and subsequently interrogated by the Inquisition back in Lisbon. In his defence to the Inquisition, Vieira referred to the Jewish Cabbalist cobbler Bandarra, who in the sixteenth century prophesised the return of King Sebastian, known as *O Encoberto* (The Hidden One). His anger towards the settlers was expressed through a direct enunciation of the Gospels: > It is not I who shall comment on the Text, but the Text that shall > comment on me. I will not say a word that is not the Gospel's own, > because there is not a clause in it that is not mine. I will echo its > voices, and it will shout out my silences. May it please God that men > on earth might listen to them, that they might not come to be heard in > Heaven.[^158] For Vieira, Brazil promised the fulfilment of the messianic hopes that drove the Portuguese empire. As these met the inexorable force of colonial greed and violence, hope devolved into a yearning that was not without political relevance. In the nineteenth century, *saudade* in Brazil thematised the fraught reconciliation of Portuguese and native Indian peoples. The simple life of the native was idealised in the popular genre of the *Indianista* novel. José Martiniano de Alencar was a political orator whose novels constructed a myth of Brazilian origins in the love shared between Portuguese and Indian. His *Iracema* (1865) is set in the founding period of the nation, when Indians still controlled much of the continent. A lone Portuguese is seduced by a young Indian woman, Iracema (an anagram of America). Iracema bears their mestizo offspring but wastes away when she realises that her husband pines for Portugal. Father and child journey to Portugal, but return to establish a new life under a Christian god supplemented by an Indian understanding of nature. While *Iracema* can be dismissed as a thinly veiled conspiracy of patriarchy and colonisation, there is some evidence that native culture influenced the writing. Characters never use 'I' in speaking but refer to themselves in the tribal manner, using the third person. Alencar employs natural metaphors with an archaic formality: > As the dry prairie, at the coming of winter turns green again and > arrays itself in flowers, the beautiful daughter of the interior, with > the return of her husband, took on new life; and her beauty > embellished itself with soft and tender smiles.[^159] Alencar does not shy from expressing the sexual intimacy shared between Portuguese and Indian, albeit in florid style. A reddened cheek signifies Iracema's loss of virginity, 'like the first ray of sun glittering among the red clouds of the morning'.[^160] According to *Indianista* mythology, Brazil was founded on a submission to sexual temptation. In the development of Brazilian popular culture, Iracema eventually evolves into the *Black Orpheus*, Bossa Nova, the girl from Ipanema, the fleshy Rio carnival, Sergio Mendes and the Copacabana. It seems the antithesis of Australian colonies, which resounded with the clump of British boots; where character was built on the repression of desire---a fair go for all, rather than one from the heart. As well as its sexual license, the messianic theme of colonisation also had a role in radicalising Brazilian politics. At the beginning of the twentieth century, a popular leader in the Brazilian town Contestado was killed in a confrontation with police. His followers refused to believe his death and vowed to continue the struggle. This *Sebastianismo* transformed the population into a resolute fighting force and the conflict escalated into a military confrontation. Even today, *saudade* continues as a critical force in the reconciliation of the Portuguese empire. A woman in South Africa has established a website called *Saudade*[^161] to articulate the experience of the exiled Portuguese Sephardim. She quotes a poem that links the displacement of the Jews to the experience of the homesick colonisers, abandoned families, immigrants to the new world, righteous Gentiles and those who fled the inquisition. The collective condition of s*audade* uses the empire's failure as a way of victimising the Portuguese nation as a whole and thus absolves it of earlier acts of violence. Despite its dissolution, the world today still bears the tidemarks of this sixteenth century burst of conquest. Portuguese is the fifth-most widely spoken language in the world. The Japanese word for thank you, *arigato*, is derived from the Portuguese *obrigado*. It wasn't until the reversion of Macao in 1999 that the Portuguese empire came to a formal end. Yet the business of Portuguese colonisation is not over. Though independence was granted to East Timor in 1975, the Portuguese have continued to exercise influence over its destiny. And with the departure of the Indonesians, they have been invited back. The Portuguese return now to meet the new colonists of Southeast Asia, the British descendents from Australia, a country they first encountered back in the sixteenth century. #### **Listening to Senhor de Lemos, between Warrnambool and East Timor** The relationship between Portugal and Australia is characterised by a blend of high romance and low politics. To gently unravel the details, I pay a visit to my local Portuguese consul, Senhor Carlos Pereira de Lemos. Senhor de Lemos resides in a part of suburban Melbourne that is being slowly enveloped by corporations. On the way to the consulate, you pass a brooding monolith clad in black glass, locally known as 'Battlestar Gallactica', which is the centre of operations for the Coles Myer conglomerate, Australia's largest retail chain. A few doors down is a quaint residency containing the Portuguese Consulate, which is reached by a side door and has the relaxed feel of a country post office. I ask the women at the counter for Senhor de Lemos and he appears from behind, beckoning me into his office. Pereira de Lemos is a dignified elderly man whose life has spanned the endgame of the Portuguese empire. He had worked in Mozambique and East Timor before taking his current position, where he has overseen the speculative colonisation of Victoria's west coast. He settles back into his comfortable chair and recounts the story of this strange encounter between Portugal and Australia. 'It all began with the book by Mr McIntyre ...' In 1977, the Victorian historian Kenneth McIntyre published *The Secret Discovery of Australia,* which argued that a wreck reported on the coast near Warrnambool was a Portuguese caravel belonging to the explorer Christovao Mendonca. Mendonca had departed from the Philippines to intercept Magellan's circumnavigation but was lured away by the thrill of discovery. McIntyre examined sixteenth-century Portuguese maps and found an outline that resembled the Victorian coastline. One map appeared to end abruptly at Warrnambool, suggesting that a mishap had occurred to the fleet, such as the loss of one or two vessels. Despite their supposed presence in this area, the Portuguese colonisers left virtually no trace. One reason for this was the fifteenth century Papal Treaty of Tordesillas, which divided the world between Spain and Portugal. Portugal was granted the Eastern hemisphere, which included Brazil but only a thin slice of Western Australia. Any evidence of their presence on the Spanish side of the world would cause problems. Before McIntyre's book, the wreck was the subject of much speculation. In what is considered the first Australian novel, *The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn*, a German doctor romances the Victoria coastline. From the very start, the wreck posed a challenge to the 'Immaculate Conception' of Cook's discovery: > Down the coast here, under a hopeless, black basaltic cliff, is to be > seen the wreck of a very, very old ship, now covered with coral and > seaweed. I waited down there for a spring tide, to examine her, but > could determine nothing, save that she was very old; whether Dutch or > Spanish I know not. You English should never sneer at those two > nations; they were before you everywhere.[^162] In 1836, the wreck was sighted along the rugged beaches between Warrnambool and Belfast. It gained the name 'mahogany ship' from the hardness of its timber. In 1884, a report in the Melbourne *Argus* associated this wreck with 'the first navigators who saw our shores'.[^163] The last sighting was in 1890, and since then what wreck there might have been has been submerged by encroaching sand dunes. During the early part of the twentieth century, the mahogany ship was the subject of much discussion in the press. The following report in the 1929 *Argus* solicits a fanciful colonial imagination: > It was Kipling who proclaimed the power of scent over sound and sight > to bring to mind forgotten memories. The cold type of modern newsprint > can be equally effective. A small paragraph in the Camera Supplement > on June 22, referring to the 'Mahogany Ship', carried my mind back to > many happy days spent among the wind-swept sand dunes near > Warrnambool, days when, armed with wooden swords and blessed with > vivid imaginations, we scoured the hillocks for traces of the long > lost wreck and its treasures.[^164] For a country with a shamefully short history, the wreck promised a deeper connection with Europe. The champion of the wreck, curator of the Warrnambool Museum J. Archibald, claimed the wreck was 'the only piece of historical antiquity on the Australian Continent'.[^165] McIntyre's *The Secret Discovery of Australia* led to a renewed search for the mahogany ship. In June 1999, some fragments of oak timber were found in nearby dunes. Remote sensing surveys indicated the presence of a large object inside the dunes, though subsequent searches have yet to uncover any wreck. Despite the lack of hard evidence, the city of Warrnambool has capitalised on the hypothetical Portuguese wreck. The first major 're-discovery' was a documentary made for Channel 7 by the businessman adventurer Dick Smith. In 1981, a plaque was constructed to commemorate Mendonca's visit. A decade later, a Portuguese marble cross, the Padrão, was erected on Warrnambool's cannon hill, named after the artillery placed there to defend the port against Russian invasion.[^166] Senhor de Lemos lights his pipe and outlines how the Portuguese empire is beginning to re-emerge in tourist attractions, 'We saw that one had been erected in Hawaii, so it seemed a good idea for Australia as well. These crosses marked the furthest point of each explorer's travel.' Soon after, the Minister for Tourism, Steve Crabbe, offered a \$250,000 reward for anyone who found the ship. The most recent public art to mark the Portuguese presence were busts of Vasco da Gama and Prince Henry the Navigator created by the distinguished sculptor Jose Nuncio. Senhor de Lemos explains how the memory of a lost empire has travelled south: > I was talking with the Governor of Macao, Rocha Vieira, about the need > to mark Portuguese presence. There was a conference at La Trobe > University in 1998 to celebrate the 500^th^ anniversary of Vasco da > Gama's voyage to India. We had to work quickly, before the changeover. > We ended up flying the busts over by plane. Warrnambool was given the > sculptures on the basis that they would landscape the area. Abandoned by its last remaining colony, Portugal had to find a new home for its myth of empire, which it discovered in Warrnambool. A Victorian town famous for its wool stores, butter factory and passing whales now has the Portuguese explorers to add to its assets. The empire is growing. The local McDonalds now features a replica of the mahogany ship in its play equipment. The Mahogany Walking Track is a 22km trail that extends from Warrnambool to Port Fairy, past the possible site of the ship. Each year, the city celebrates a Portuguese festival with song, dance and food around the Padrão. The Padrão has been vandalised twice, but each time it has been painfully reassembled. Today the cross looks more like a mosaic than a sculpture---testament to the city's continuing commitment to its own Portuguese myth. Does this antipodean romance mean anything to those living in Portugal? Senhor de Lemos winces as he gingerly guides one leg over the other. 'Our historians are not interested in Australia. Why bother, they think. What does it add having one more piece of land discovered?' The consul does not seem to be getting any credit back home for his trouble. But in Australia, the possibility of Portuguese visitors evokes an antipodean version of the *saudade*, where shifting sand dunes substitute for treacherous seas as the force of oblivion. James Bradley's much-praised novel *Wrack* moves between sixteenth century Portuguese exploration and a contemporary love affair in northwest Australia. An archaeologist searching for evidence of Portuguese exploration uncovers a murder that entwines history with human passion. The wreck becomes a motif of lost possibilities: > In the end, nothing is certain, save that which we feel. Nothing we > remember, nothing we believe, all are just stories and echoes. The > past is a shifting sea where nothing is certain, and where the things > we seek cannot be found, a place where we seek lands that rise from > the mist into the glare of the sun and then vanish again, as quickly > as they arrived. A shifting sea with nothing at its centre, except > illusions and loss.[^167] The Portuguese contact with Australia plays a similar role in the imagination to the Phoenicians in England. Its elusive history provides space for romantic scenarios that allude to other planes of historical reality. But it is the comic representation of Portuguese contact which reveals most about its place in the evolving story of who Australians are. The popular ABC television comedy *Sea Change* is based on life in a small town on Victoria's west coast (it is shot partly in the beach resort Barwon Heads). In the episode 'I Name Thee Bay of Pearls', the mayor, Bob Jolly, attempts to win tourists by manufacturing a theme-park history, titled 'Ye Olde Pearl Bay'. Given the lack of any historic artefacts, the mayor discovers that mystery can be gained by the mere possibility that an old object belonged to the early explorers, such as the Portuguese. He thus declares that a rusty car gasket *may have been* a Portuguese cooking implement. It is the very uncertainty of the attribution, rather than its Portuguese origin, which grants it mystique. Taking *Sea Change* as our cue, it would be tempting to dismiss Australia's association with the Portuguese empire as idle fancy. However, the liberation of East Timor from Indonesian rule has brought Australia back into contact with the Portuguese---a reunion that harbours a more radical local genus of *saudade*. In 1566, soon after the purported visit to Australian shores by Mendonca, the Portuguese built a garrison and fortress in Timor. A Portuguese settlement grew with Europeans, Christian converts and European Malays (called 'Tapasses' by Portuguese and 'Black Portuguese' by the Dutch). In 1859, the island was divided, the east under Portuguese control, the west under Dutch. The Portuguese who controlled the island tended to be temporary colonisers doing their time. By 1912, a local rebellion threatened Portuguese control of Dili itself, but it was violently suppressed with the aid of African troops from the Portuguese colony of Mozambique. During communist rule in 1975, Portugal granted independence to most of its colonies, including East Timor, Angola and Mozambique. Independence freed the country to be invaded by Indonesia, for which there was no official criticism from the Australian government. For 25 years, East Timor was ruled by Jakarta, a city three times as far away as Darwin. East Timor was eventually able to vote for its independence at the end of 1999. After having given up East Timor to Indonesia, it was hard for Australia not to intervene now the previous calls for independence had been proven justified. They were also neighbours. The distance between Timor and the northwest coast of Australia is less than that between Melbourne and Canberra. In September 1999, Australian troops spearheaded a peacekeeping force to establish law and order in the transition from Indonesia to self-government. On return, the commander, and Australian of the Year, Peter Cosgrove, justified the invasion as a 'very Australian' defence of the underdog: 'we looked over our front fence and we saw, in our neighbour's home, his house on fire and a big bully punching the neighbour in the nose. We hopped the fence.'[^168] For once, Australia got to play the tough guy in world affairs. East Timor became a meeting point between recently arrived New World colonisers from the south and the recently returned Old World colonisers from the West. Comparisons were inevitable. The Portuguese appeared to be half-hearted settlers. José Ramos-Horta claimed that during Portuguese rule 'The clock of development didn't tick there.' The Portuguese had left virtually no infrastructure in their wake. The road built by the Japanese in the year and a half of their occupation during WW2 is seen as a more enduring legacy than anything the Portuguese government contributed. Senhor de Lemos relights his pipe and reflects on his life in East Timor: > was paradise, very easygoing life. Portuguese so-called colonial > presence was accused of not developing. Portuguese were laissez-faire. > They were not pushing people around. Life went on. No poverty, people > lived easy, they have their own life, and there was no interference. I > never felt my life was threatened. While it is possible to dismiss these remarks as guileful evasiveness, they do harbour a challenge to the more evangelical style of colonialism in Australia. But contrast with this mellow Portuguese attitude, the Australian mode of settlement seems ambitious, efficient, and prosperous---though maybe it lacks a little soul. How could it have been otherwise? The relaxed nature of Senhor de Lemos is reflected in the way an Australian artist of Portuguese descent has made work from the natural materials around her. Philomena Hali (née Rebola) was born into a family that had come to Carnarvon in northwest Australia from the island of Madeira. In Madeira, her father's family had lived in a cave, providing everything for themselves. They carried the same lifestyle into the banana plantation where she grew up, and at which she worked after school. 'Every time you killed something, you had to eat nose tip to tail, tip and everything in between. Open the pot and you'd see it all, chicken, chook heads, comb and beak. Just life.'[^169] In her art practice, Hali demonstrates a similar economy. In workshops with Aboriginal 'ladies' from the top end, she has learnt basket-making techniques and woven her own spinifex basket. She prefers spinifex because its natural gums bind the fibres together. Spinifex does not need soaking---'I tend to carry a little bag of needles and thread, and I can just sit and work on something without having to worry about water.' She even makes cards from old tea bags. Nothing is wasted. This down-to-earth, practical art is far removed from the mystery of Portuguese empire as perceived from the *outside*---the myth of the lonely caravel whose contact with the continent has been lost forever to history. Hali's art reflects what life might have been if Australia was *inside* the Lusitanian world---relaxed, grounded and retrospective. It is a world that East Timor prefers to be inside once again. Shortly after independence, the National Council of East Timor Resistance decided to retain Portuguese as the official language, ahead of English. Why would the East Timorese be still loyal to their ex-masters? Only a minority of the population speaks Portuguese, principally those veterans of the resistance. The majority language is Tetum, but most young speak Bahasa Indonesian or English. Senhor de Lemos is frank: 'The Timorese realised that they didn't get the same support from Australia. They resent that.' But he is quick to defer, 'They are very "forgive and forget" people. They want to move on.' The Portuguese maintained an open support for independence. While successive Australian governments condoned the Indonesian invasion, the Portuguese made an international stand in support of resistance and provided assistance such as use of satellite phones and travel for Ramos-Horta. Today, the role of Australians in monitoring the changeover from Indonesian to self-government promises to redeem this meek history. Melbourne artist Tom Nicholson shows how East Timor offers an opportunity for a more heroic role in the world. Nicholson was one of the many affected by the sincerity of the East Timorese students agitating in Melbourne. He travelled to East Timor twice, before and after the ballot. For Nicholson, the returning Portuguese offer an ugly side of colonialism: > Portuguese were thanking them \[East Timorese\] for giving back their > colony. They drive around 100km an hour, on roads that are unspeakable > shocking. Always kids milling around the road. The Dili morgue is > overflowing with people killed by army trucks. The Portuguese soldiers > look morally obese in a country of skinny people. Drive around with > machine guns loaded up when the whole country is meant to be > de-militarised.[^170] Before the ballot, Nicholson made thirty-three hand-drawn copies of the leaflet that Australians had dropped over East Timor in 1944. The leaflet was an expression of solidarity and encouragement from the Australians towards the East Timorese, informing them of recent Japanese defeats and their own impending liberation. The action is personal and wistful, referring back to a time when Australian foreign policy was aligned with unambiguous good.[^171] But Nicholson could see the hypocrisy of the Australian story of success: 'there was an erasure of history for the past twenty-five years.' For Nicholson, one of the revelations in his visits was the realisation that there was a part of the world where Australian foreign policy could actually make a difference: > People knew about the differences between Gareth Evans and Alexander > Downer. It was one of the few areas where Australia made a difference > on the world stage, although in the end we were unashamedly pragmatic. Though critical of the occasional smugness in their role as 'saviours', Nicholson saw Australian troops as fairer than other nations. The views of the East Timorese themselves are slightly more complicated. Sam de Silva is a media activist who spent three months in East Timor after the ballot to run media workshops. Though Sri Lankan by birth, his darker skin and Portuguese name led most locals to think he was one of their own. Consequently, they were able to talk about their impressions of Australians with great candour. De Silva claims that the Australians were considered quite friendly but less effective than the Europeans or Americans. There was some unease with the way Australians were settling into East Timor. Some locals feared that Australians would bring a 'Bali culture' with them, with liberal sexual that were offensive to the conservative Catholic East Timorese. Australia's failure to stand up for the East Timorese on the world stage is still remembered: 'Australia is seen as a lap dog to Asian dictatorships, the US and other dominant countries of the west.'[^172] The lesson of resistance is something that Nicholson easily translates to the local demonstrations such as S11, the unruly protests outside Crown Casino to disrupt World Economic Forum delegates in September 2000. One of the most controversial aspects of that Melbourne protest was the response of the state premier, Steve Bracks. He told reporters 'It is not Australian---it's very un-Australian---and it's obviously a matter which is of enormous regret to me as premier of Victoria and I think most decent Australians as well.' There is a thin line between the 'Australian' act of 'jumping the fence' to help a weak neighbour, and the 'Unaustralian' collective action against the system. Ironically, the title 'Unaustralian' has since become a rallying point of political action. Soon after Bracks' statement, the demonstrators were joined by a figure playing a mounted Ned Kelly, bearing the title 'Unaustralian'. Like the returned lost King, this symbol of Australia's rebellious spirit finds a new vocation in a contemporary context of conformity and political impotence. 'Unaustralian' has become an ironic rallying cry of national identity. Melbourne jeweller Roseanne Bartley has developed a series of 'Unaustralian' tags that have been distributed so they can be worn by a large cross-section of people. She has been collecting responses, and is surprised to find a lack of any negative feedback to the wearers. The land of Unaustralia harbours a lost world of political engagement and collective action. This Unaustralian push takes on a particularly Latin flavour in what might be considered the two seminal films of recent Australian cinema. These films marked an evolution from mythic roots (such as *Picnic at Hanging Rock* and *Gallipoli*) to the comedy of suburban life. Baz Lurmann's debut *Strictly Ballroom* (1992) pitted passionate Latin culture against the rule-bound Anglo mentality. The young competitor Scott Hastings brings authentic Latin techniques into the closed circle of rigid Aussie dance codes. The film reaches its delirious comic end with a mass of competitors frolicking in Latin frenzy. A decade later, *Strictly Ballroom*'s scriptwriter, Andrew Bovell, heralds a change of similar dimensions in the film *Lantana* (2001), billed as a 'mystery for grownups'. The suburbs are no longer the site of childish fun, they are the scene of indelible human tragedy. The catalyst for this transformation is Latin dance classes, where the film's hero, Leon Zat, finds his wayward sexual desires unleashed by the sway of bodies. The animal honesty of Latin dance contrasts with the forced cheerfulness of suburban life. The resulting destruction of his family life, echoes the tragic murder mystery he is commissioned to solve. It is significant that the two rites of passage that have radically changed Australian cinema have been written by the same author. It is curious that both plots revolve around the dialectic between Australian domestic order and Latin emotional expression. In Bovell's cinematic diptych, Latin dance reflects a vulnerability in the Australian attitude to the very passions it seeks to repress. #### **I come from Rio** The circumstances of history have conspired to bind Australia to the myth of Portuguese empire. Portuguese history both precedes and succeeds Australia as a colonising nation. The Portuguese both outlined the continent's shores two centuries before Cook and stood up on the world's stage for its own ex-colony on Australia's doorstep. Their action showed 'Australian' to be a sign of timidity, but the 'Unaustralian' *saudade* remains as a place where dreams of lost opportunities might grow. I get up to leave, 'One more thing ...' Senhor de Lemos fusses with his pipe and I suspect he could easily spend the rest of the day chatting with me about his country's glory days. 'Did you know that Captain Philip was trained in the Portuguese navy?' I looked up a few books and found that he had indeed been a captain in the Portuguese navy between 1775 and 1778, assisting in their war against Spain, a mutual enemy. During this time he transported convicts from Lisbon to Brazil, which would certainly have impressed his future employers. Thus on the First Fleet's journey to found the colony of New South Wales, Captain Philip was given a warm reception in Rio de Janeiro. These proto-Australians stayed five weeks, not only to gather plants and seeds, but also to consider what might be achieved with convict labour. As Manning Clark reports, the colonists' responses differed: > One officer wrote back to London saying that his spirits had soared on > reflecting that this flourishing and important colony was originally > settled and peopled on a plan exactly similar to that of the present > expedition. But Phillip would have none of this: he was confident he > would see the time when Botany Bay would be of more use to England > than as a drain for its more degraded inhabitants.[^173] Portuguese were there at the colonisation of Australia---not in person, but in the back of English minds. The British way would be more practical; little would escape the controlling powers of the state. But two centuries later, as Australia has developed into a virtuous nation, there is a hint of yearning, a *saudade*, for the passion and adventure of the Portuguese explorers. As encapsulated in the classic song diptych of Peter Allen, 'I still call Australia home' for stasis and comfort, but 'I go to Rio' for engagement and life. #### **Sources** Portuguese colonisation was original discussed at Broken Hill Regional Art Gallery. Special thanks to James Bradley, Carlos Cordeiro, Carlos Pereira de Lemos, Sam de Silva, Philomena Hali, Kenneth Gordon McIntyre, Tom Nicholson and Joaquim Silva. Leonard Andaya, *The World of Maluku*, Honolulu: University of Hawiai, 1993. C. R. Boxer, *The Portuguese Seaborne Empire: 1415--1825*, London: Hutchison, 1977 (orig. 1969). Luis de Camoes, *The Lusiads* (trans. Landeg White), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Manning Clark, *History of Australia*, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, **date?** Henry Kingsley, *The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn*, Adelaide: Rigby, 1976 (orig. 1859). Kenneth McIntyre, *The Secret Discovery of Australia: Portuguese Ventures 200 Years before Captain Cook*, Medindie, SA: Souvenir Press, 1977. ## **Sermon on returning from Rome** My dear country, I've been a neglectful uncle, forgive me. Some business in Rome, you know. It's good to be back with you again. We can sit together again on the verandah, gaze at the Southern Cross, and share our crazy dreams. What a beautiful land you have here. Your soils may be dry, but our saviour has kindly given you rich minerals and sparkling gems to make a beautiful world for yourselves. Your splendid settlement exceeds even the richness of the land. The Australian peoples are like a good caçarola don't you think, with many different colours and histories adding to the rich flavour? In your people you have the timeless wonder of the Aboriginal, the physical strength of the Pacific Islander, the cleverness of the Chinese, and the sensitivity of the Portuguese---maybe throw a little French garnish in at the end, too. What a delicious blend it is! A good meal of caçarola can sustain me through months of clever talk with those bigwigs in Rome. And what a delightfully simple life it is that you have here. All you need are a couple of sticks and you can beat out a *solfar* rhythm and play songs of *vaziosmo*, and dance the *joelho*. Afterwards, sipping some *bagosuco* on the verandah, you can wonder at the sheer enormity of this land. Sometimes I feel like a flea on an elephant, don't you? Hey, congratulations on this Australian catechism that you've put together. There are some seriously mad stories, like the one about Adam and the multi-coloured snake. And Saint Teixeira who takes the frogs to heaven during droughts. Seriously silly. It's too easy sometimes to think of our saviour as someone who stands on high in grand cathedrals among people with elaborate costumes. But the Jesus we know is with us, the people. He isn't in Rome, he is in the laughter of that little girl and the pride of her father who tilled the soil through drought and flood to support his family. Our saviour lives here, with the people. Australia, how can I explain what I feel? The sweet chorus of feathered ones welcomes me home with melodies dancing around the trees. The sun retires from the sky with gorgeous colours that entrance my eyes. And smells snake their way through my nose and awaken memories buried in my childhood. I feel transfixed by the aura of this land so redolent of archaic mystery. Sometimes it seems that my heart is as much Australia as its red rocks and sinuous trees. I'm in love with this old place, I confess. But I get a little carried away. Love should not blind us to the difficulties we face. In any good marriage, love is tempered with open talk, when husband and wife let their feelings out. And if you don't mind, I do have something to say right now. I hope you can take it in good spirit, as a sign of the trust that has built up between us. We are a very close family, us Portuguese. There is the proud father in Portugal, looking out bravely to the Atlantic. The days of adventure are over for him---journeys that took him beyond the known world to far places no-one had yet dreamt of. Wise, but a little melancholic, Portugal gazes out across the Atlantic to those precious sun-kissed islands: woody Madeira, soulful Cape Verde and the brooding Azores. Then there is the eldest daughter, Brazil, a handsome girl with fine hips who has borne us so much succulent fruit. In Brazil we learnt to be a little less serious, forget the blues, and sway with the rhythm of things. Over in Africa are our faithful cousins: the idealistic Angola, the spirited Mozambique, the proud Guinea-Bissau. And around the Cape are our exotic Asian cousins: the sumptuous Goa, the industrious Cochin, the elegant Sri Lanka, the wayward Macao and your little neighbour, the soulful Timor. And finally, we come to you, our trusty younger brother. It is you that our father searched for all those centuries ago---a country that was proud to light the beacon of faith in the dark world of ignorance. Our father invests great hopes in you---hopes for a world united in love and devotion to the one true saviour. And you have largely rewarded his expectations, like a good son, a trusty brother. It was you who put together the League of Roses that joined us together as a harmonious family. But dad has been a little worried lately, I must be frank. Is it possible that you have become slightly lazy, sitting out on this verandah, taking in the glowing horizon under the soothing rays of the northern sun? While you have been dutiful to your immediate family, I fear you may have neglected your cousins and neighbours. They look to you, you know, for guidance to help them in their current plight. As you know, the world is beset by many problems at the moment. First, there is that bully at large again forcing sweet, innocent women and children to give up their freedom for a life of harsh restrictions and slavery to their cruel god. Some are lucky enough to escape. You are very kind to look after them, but what about those who remain? How can you help them? Then there are the greedy robbers enslaving the poor worlds, forcing them to work for a pittance so that the rich masters can buy their fifth car, or third holiday home. Haven't you noticed them sneaking in at night, setting up factories in your own land, paying a pittance and spoiling your rivers? Your cousins need you. There are your Chinese cousins just to the north, who are being hacked to pieces by fundamentalists. All around Indonesia, innocent Christians are being savaged by militant mobs. And those beautiful Tibetans are being overrun by communists. A little to the west are the Kurdish people, torn into pieces by national borders. The Lebanese are still lorded over by Syrians. Likewise the Albanian cousins, split over four countries. The devout Poles pulling themselves out of the Russian grip but not wanting to be devoured by the West. The Quebecois, Cubans, Okinawans, Ainu, Greenlanders, Fijian Indians ... there are so many waiting for someone to lead them. Of course, not all are people of the true saviour, but we can lead them to the church once they understanding the warmth of our love, don't you think? It's all very well to have the sweet-smelling League of Roses---that is very nice. But we can see further than that, can't we? Can't you see the Southern Cross beginning to twinkle on the horizon? Hasn't our destiny always been within those four stars, guiding people to the world of freedom and love? Why don't we get back onto that path? Let the League of Roses rest for a while. Let's begin to think about a League of Thorns---a group of nations who are stateless, who are vulnerable to the powerful forces of global capital, whose only hope of survival is to work together, to support each other, to trade together, to bank together ... to pray together. Let's spread Jesus' love to the oppressed and exploited peoples. It's time for the meek to finally gain their rightful inheritance. Just a thought, brothers and sisters, just a thought. But the mind needs a little sustenance for good thinking, eh? What happened to those prawns? Is that some chenqueru I smell in the pot? You wouldn't be able to let a tired old Cardinal have some of that caçarola would you? Maybe even a glass of wine. Ah nieces and nephews, it's good to be back home, in Australia!