Cuba provides the overwhelming majority of medical assistance in Timor-Leste, with 305 health workers on two-year missions, comprising 230 doctors, 25 nurses, and 50 health technicians. Cuba is also building capacity for the future with 600 East Timorese medical and allied students being trained on full scholarships in several Cuban universities. First proposed at a Non-Aligned Movement meeting in Kuala Lumpur in 2003, a formal cooperating agreement between Timor-Leste and Cuba was finalised in January 2007. Under the program’s ‘doctor replacement policy’, East Timorese graduates will ultimately replace the Cuban contingent within seven to eight years. Alongside the Cuban doctors and scholarships for Timorese students, a third element of the program establishes a medical faculty at the National University of Timor Lorosa’e. This separate cohort of 105 students in Timor-Leste is being trained under a new program of general integrated health instruction, first pioneered by Cuban medical teams in Venezuela. Under this program, East Timorese medical students work under the tutorship of sixty Cuban doctors, accompanying them on their daily rounds in the communities where the students live. This day-to-day practical experience is integrated with formal university training, and conducted in cooperation with the World Health Organisation to ensure standards. More than half of these Timorese students are now in their second year.*

One specific objective of the cooperation agreement in Timor-Leste was the reduction of maternal and child mortality rates, especially in rural areas. A recent program evaluation found that in the areas where Cuban doctors work child mortality is now 27.5 per 1000, a figure more than 50 per cent lower than elsewhere in the country. Maternal mortality has also steeply declined in the areas where Cuban medical teams work. The overall aim of the scholarship program is to achieve a ratio of one doctor per 1500–2000 East Timorese by 2015, when the estimated population of Timor-Leste will be 1.5 million.

Other active programs in the Pacific region include Kiribati, which hosts a Cuban health team of twenty doctors, with more to come in 2009, and the Solomon Islands, which is recruiting Cuban doctors to reduce its present doctor/patient ratio of 1:10,000, and earlier this year received the first contingent of a future cohort of forty doctors. Other cooperation agreement programs exist with Tuvalu and Nauru.

Back in Cuba, alongside the 600 Timorese medical students are 64 Pacific Islander students comprising 25 Solomon Islanders, 20 i-Kiribati, 17 ni-Vanuatu and 2 Nauruans. Planning is also advanced for a contingent of Cuban doctors in Papua New Guinea, despite strong diplomatic pressure from former Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer in 2007, who warned through the Australian High Commission in Port Moresby that the presence of Cuban doctors could ‘destabilise security in the Pacific’. In a rare display of defiance against the regional power, this pressure was overtly resisted by PNG Prime Minister Somare, with his health minister replying publicly that ‘really, it’s our concern whether we bring Cuban doctors’. There are also reports of Fijian interest in a health cooperation
agreement with Cuba.

In total, more than 126,000 Cubans have completed health missions in 104 countries, including large scale missions after natural disasters in Asia, such as the post-Tsunami teams in Aceh and Sri Lanka, a contingent of 1000 doctors in Pakistani Kashmir after the earthquakes in 2005, and two field hospitals after the 2006 earthquakes in Java. There are currently some 37,000 Cuban health professionals working in 70 countries, and 25,000 medical and allied students from 123 countries studying in Cuba, including 100 from the United States. Cuba is also training 21,500 medical students ‘offshore’ in their home countries, with the vast majority of these in Venezuela, being taught by 9230 Cuban doctors, and smaller programs in Guinea-Bissau and Timor-Leste. It is therefore no exaggeration to describe the Cuban programs as a global health program. The Cuban health programs are well suited for the developing world and Pacific nations, with a strong focus on preventative and community medicine and specific programs on malaria, HIV/AIDS, cataracts, and other diseases prevalent in developing countries. It is also better suited to systems with poor medical facilities, as the preventative community heath focus is less critically reliant on advanced medical technology than systems in developed countries.

Perhaps the most remarkable program, from an Australian perspective, was the Cuban-run English literacy program in New Zealand, among Maori and Pacific Islander communities. The Cuban literacy program Yo Sí Puedo (Yes I Can) runs in twenty-eight countries, in several languages, including Portuguese and Tetum language literacy curricula operated by eleven Cuban teachers in Timor-Leste. In 2003, the rector of the University Te Wananga o Aotearoa in New Zealand, Rongo Wetere, requested the assistance of Cuban literacy educators to solve entrenched illiteracy among Maori communities. A pilot project using the Yo Sí Puedo method started in June 2003 in two Maori and one Pacific Islander communities — with more than 5000 participants. Despite considerable opposition from at least one National MP, the program had 3168 people in classes as of June 2008, of whom 2092 had become literate since the program’s commencement.

These Pacific region missions are an increasing part of Cuba’s global health and literacy programs, which are distinctive in their emphasis on ‘south–south’ cooperation between developing countries, and the durable numbers of doctors and future graduates involved. So significant have these programs become that in September this year the inaugural ‘Cuba–Pacific Islands Ministerial Meeting’ was held in Havana. The stated goals of this new forum are to ‘assist small island developing states in addressing the effects of climate change, and in strengthening co-operation in health, sports and education’.

The Cuban health and literacy programs in Timor-Leste are notable, as President Ramos-Horta has often reminded reporters since, as the only international aid missions not to leave the country during the 2006 political crisis. Malmierca Diaz, the Cuban ambassador to the United Nations, stated in his address to the 2006 Security Council meeting endorsing the new International Stabilisation Force (ISF) presence that there had been too much focus on security, and too little on ‘the urgent and serious structural, economic and social problems’ afflicting developing nations like Timor-Leste. For Antonio Pubillones, a Specialist in International Cooperation from the Cuban Ministry of Foreign Relations, the ‘doctor replacement policy’ — embodied in the scholarships program — demonstrates a genuine desire to build capacity in the long term, rather than create a situation of enforced dependence on Cuba. While the health agreements clearly stand to benefit Cuba in terms of goodwill, Cuban cooperation officials are notably averse to the language of ‘state-building’, and stress that the health cooperation programs are technical agreements imposing no conditions, with wider health policy issues the sole preserve of host governments.

Despite one prominent attempt by the deceased rebel leader Alfredo Reinado to ‘redbait’ the former FRETILIN government on the issue in 2006, the Cuban health program remains as strongly supported by President Ramos-Horta and the new AMP government as it was by the former FRETILIN administration. And while there is considerable scepticism, and occasional hostility, from the US and Australian governments, they have ultimately been unable to mount substantive criticisms of Cuban health programs in the face of endemic doctor shortages in the region. Certainly, the charge the Cuba is ‘buying votes’ in the United Nations is easy to refute, as there has never been significant international support for the US blockade of Cuba and, with the sole exception of the Federated States of Micronesia (a ‘sovereign state in free association with the US’), none at all in the Asia-Pacific region.

Rather, the motivation for Cuban health programs appears to follow a more complex political and humanitarian logic: first, of internal legitimacy within the Cuban state socialist system, with its historical focus on universal health provision and internationalism as measures of good ‘socialist’ citizenship; and second, as a means of developing ‘south–south’ modes of development cooperation, and reinforcing the Non-Aligned Movement with practical development initiatives — all of which have broad implications for a ‘north– south’ balance of power which Cuba no doubt views as constructive. While it is true that the massive health program in Venezuela has reciprocal benefits for Cuba in the form of subsided oil, this ‘special program’ is an exception. In most cases, the costs of Cuban health and literacy cooperation programs are substantially borne by the Cuban government. Host countries are generally required to find accommodation for doctors, while the Cuban government pays doctors’ salaries and the scholarships for students studying in Cuba. While regional governments continue to face chronic doctor shortages and failing health systems, the number of Cuban health cooperation agreements is likely to expand throughout Melanesia and the Pacific in the near future.

* This paragraph was changed on 16/3/09. It has been corrected in line with the author’s original text. Arena Magazine apologises for the error, made during editing.

Michael Leach works at Swinburne University of Technology, and is a regular visitor to Timor-Leste.

‘If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change’, Prince Tancredi, in Il Gattopardo (1958),

Giuseppe T. di Lampedusa.

‘Empires everywhere, it seems, are on the move again’, writes Alison Caddick in Arena Magazine 96. That ‘big old world’ is still at it, and still guided by ‘hubristic notions of progress and supremacist nationalism’. Globalisation and global warming provide a new theatre for the old brutes, who continue to hog the centre stage as of right, shouting the old slogans louder than those quieter, smaller actors who have increasingly come out from the wings to occupy United Nations space: minorities, dwarf-nations and states like Singapore and East Timor, no-hope out-backs like Tibet, edge-lands like West Papua, reanimated fossils like Scotland and the Basque country.

For God’s sake — what can such pip-squeaks expect, in a globality so evidently configured by and for the big lads? As Caddick puts it, the reborn superpowers naturally seek to maintain ‘a way of life built on unsustainable economic and environmental assumptions … [and] cultural mores associated with the spread of a contagious form of high-tech capitalism’. When it suits them they are entitled to ‘put the clock back’, as Umberto Eco puts it in his new book of that title, with votes where possible (as in India), or by authoritarian means if not (as in China). What they really count on, she suggests, is popular feeling: ‘an exercise of power over actions and desire’, furnished of course by what Eco describes so accurately as ‘media populism’. The proverbial ‘small guy’ (and small nation-state) has no real option but to tag along and make the best of it. Tiddle-pots may sometimes choose sides, but are not allowed a side of their own.

Nor should they have that option, on one influential interpretation of events. The matter has been debated recently in Foreign Affairs, following Jerry Muller’s article in their March–April 2008 issue ‘Us and Them’. In the current issue the question is summed up by none other than Condoleeza Rice. Entitled (yep) ‘The New American Realism’, George Dubya’s Secretary of State is kind enough to add an explanatory subtitle: ‘Rethinking the National Interest’. In years to come (whoever wins in November) the latter must go on being guided by ‘this uniquely American realism’. Unique? It looks awfully like the Great-Chinese and Great-Russian realism that recent events have disclosed. After Iraq and Afghanistan have come Tibet and Georgia. ‘Responsibility’ accompanies ‘stability’ in all these national-interest justifications. Globalisation is fine, but cannot be allowed to upset things.

An academic team has been assembled to back Rice up. Their aim is reinforcement of centre-stage, loud-voice nationalism: ‘responsible’ big-lad politics, in fact. The vanguard is a Harvard–UCLA Sturmabteilung captained by Richard Rosecrance and Arthur Stein, co-authors of No More States? Globalization, National Self-determination and Terrorism (2006). Their message is that ‘apostles of national-self-determination would do well to consider a still more important trend: the return to bigness in the international system’ (Foreign Affairs, vol. 87 no. 4). Some idea of what this implies can be glimpsed in another astonishing essay from the same issue: C. Fred Bergsten’s ‘A Partnership of Equals’, which entreats Chinese leaders to stop being so modest, and turn into international Big Lads with whom Condoleeza can make deals, even alliances. Hey, Beijing, stoke up all that hubris and supremacism, time you joined the club: didn’t you know that economic power entitles you to being a bigness-bully?

Not so long ago, I doubt if Foreign Affairs could have published such rantings. But now there’s something in the air, as Caddick recognises. In the mill-race of globalisation, the previously unthinkable now gets tossed up like this almost every day, casually claiming normality: back-room fantasies, foregrounded as ‘speculation’. The deeper moving impulse behind the No More States? team is simply Great-American nationalism, more often glimpsed in weekend drag these days, as ‘neoconservatism’. However, McCain and Palin are working on a full dress musical revival for the coming Presidential elections.

Naturally, returning to bigness can be seen as favoring the old baton-wielder, the United States of America. But the point is, the latter is also favored by the new conjuncture. As Caddick puts it: ‘The strongest element in this depressing scenario is a common interest shared by these competing empires’. It’s what they jointly perceive as stability and continuity, and holding the clock hands firmly back. Condoleeza Rice’s ‘realism’ is simply an acknowledgement that, good as it was being the superpower, this couldn’t go on for ever. However, much may yet be saved via formal or tacit understandings among suitable ‘equals’. The resultant common interest leaves enough space (for example) to Barack Obama’s notion of the United States returning to ‘inspire’ the globe and renew the leadership beacon. ‘Hegemony’ is the new buzzword here: a fuzzy concoction counting on small fry to colonise themselves, by seeking guidance, collegiate support, orientation conferences and so on.

But surely Caddick’s analysis may be interpreted as pointing also to something more significant, way beyond such compromises. A growing number of people and states in the new global times have no wish to hegemonise themselves, do not long for an eventide beacon, or thirst for inspiration from the City on the Hill. ‘For God’s sake, leave us alone!’ may convey their attitude more accurately. I think quite a few of them resent having been made to feel, six months in advance, that an election where they have no say is, none the less, important enough to make them take sides. This isn’t internationalism. It’s more like unilateralism off its hinges, still pretending to be the only show in town. That there’s more than one unilateralist around — a unilateralist gang, as it were — is no consolation: the streets are even less safe than before.

So what’s the answer? In the decorous language of international relations it’s called ‘multilateralism’ — coined in French, not by chance, as le multilatéralisme. Small guys can defend themselves only by sticking together, and working out their own common interests as a kind of trade union. In the appropriate wider sense, democracy and equality are on their side, not with the City-on-the-Hill kids. The latter want protection money and obeisance (for which of course neoliberalism was the ideal missionary church). Multilateralism calls for something different: initially more modest but ultimately stronger, and more durable.

As for the big-lad populations, I quoted the most famous elegy for a dying culture above, from Colquhoun’s 1960 translation of The Leopard. But the original was slightly more eloquent: what Tancredi said was ‘bisogna che tutto cambi’ — everything, every single thing, has to change. I doubt if Count Lampedusa was looking ahead to globalisation, in 1958, but that’s how it has turned out: like it or not, ‘everything’ and everyone has got involved. And for that very reason, more breathing-space is urgently needed to make the global deal more tolerable. No doubt this is true for big-shot masses as well — but then, that’s the real point: it’s their problem, not ours. They are just nation-states like the rest us, if somewhat weighed down by their ridiculous scale. Would a short cure of ‘isolationism’ really be all that bad?

‘Globalisation’, by contrast, has to mean more differentiation, and substantial rather than formal respect for diversity. This is why Kevin Rudd’s theme of ‘middle-range’ policy and ambition could be so important. He has returned to the idea often enough, since his Lowy Institute address in 2007, and it must be hoped he really means it. David McKnight commented on the trend, pointing out how it represents a rejection not just of neoliberal mania but of the latter’s intellectual basis in the earlier work of Friedrich von Hayek. We may be entering an ideal, and rather prolonged, moment for movement in that direction. Having been disabused of state-led, short-cut socialism in 1989, electorates have now been even more thoroughly disenchanted by the collapse of its contrary, the weird right-wing ‘historical materialism’ of marketolatry and deregulated enterprise. Hayek always urged the Right to imitate the Left in seizing and publicising power, and was rewarded with disastrous success in the 1990s. However, part of that mimesis has continued on into its latter days: the ideological foundering of the Right has now followed (and may well exceed) that of the Cold War Left.

We don’t know how long this disarray will last. In his history of the 1929 Great Crash, J. K. Galbraith points out that about five years passed after the worst moment in 1931–32. Not until 1938 can one find ‘the leaders of the original shock troops (of the New Deal) polishing up speeches on the virtues of the free enterprise system’, satisfied that all that was possible on the public side had been done. George Soros thinks we are not yet at the worst point of system failure. But whoever is right on this, it seems reasonable to hope that, this time round, the disorientation is more fertile.

Rudd’s government had the good fortune to take office in its early phases — the contrary of Brown’s faltering Labour Party regime in Britain, originally set up all too close to the ’90s high tide of neo-liberal exaggeration and optimism. Carried forward on the latter, Blair and Brown felt compelled to focus on the futile business of remaining ‘Great’: the tradition of a once major state that finds it very hard to embrace middle-range identity and aspirations. Instead, it has clung to a Special Relationship that was in truth concealed prostration and camp-following. In other words, the United Kingdom. has consistently chosen the opposite of Rudd’s proposed modesty and co-operative initiatives.

And yet — ‘Never has there been a better opportunity to strike a new social contract between private capital and the people’, wrote Scottish commentator Iain Macwhirter in the Sunday Herald recently (21 September). British Labour seems incapable of making the case. Is there any hope that Australian Labor can do better? ‘Looking at the wreckage wrought by unrestrained greed during the boom years (Macwhirter continues) this should be a great time for a social democratic party like Labour — an opportunity to reaffirm its fundamental values. The people who should be on the defensive are the free-market Conservatives and their friends in the City who have brought us to this state thanks to their bonus culture and predatory lending. All those neo-liberal nostrums about the evils of government intervention have been swept aside as financiers fall over themselves to get state subsidies … ’ Socialism for the banks, as it were, in the service of saving face — Britain’s ‘world role’ — and keeping up with Caddick’s empires on the rebound.

Isn’t this also a new context for the argument on republicanism? Now that a convinced republican has become leader of the Liberals, the case is bound to be re-opened anyway. But the wider republican tradition has always been about more than doing away with monarchy: it embodies a positive drive as well — the reconstitution of collective will and ambition, a reformation of identity and belonging. As Caddick put it, in ordinary (‘middle-range’) states, ‘for ordinary people the struggle and strategy will have to take a different form …’ one that no longer denies ‘more subterranean channels of cultural identity and social meaning’. Wasn’t that a part of Rudd’s great apology to the Aboriginal peoples of Australia, and of the extraordinary emotion it generated? She’s right: the well-springs are there, and calling for more than exploded formulae and time-worn rules.

Tom Nairn is research professor at the Globalism Institute at RMIT University.

This is Trepang — an indigenous opera performed on four consecutive nights at this year’s Festival of Darwin. The Yolngu people from Elcho Island in North-East Arnhem Land have joined with Macassan performers from the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, to retell their shared history and celebrate their family connections. Trepang director Andrish Saint-Clare has been nurturing the project since 1994 when he first posed the idea of a Trepang performance to senior Yolngu people at Elcho Island, and began the process of negotiation involved in staging such a cultural performance. This includes seeking and receiving permission from the owners and managers of the cultural material in the performance. Since then, with the support of the Elcho Island community, Trepang was successfully staged as a community celebration at Elcho Island in 1996, and subsequently developed into a stage production for a festival to commemorate the Kingdom of Gowa in Ujung Pandung in 1997. This year’s performance was the first opportunity for non-Yolngu audiences in Australia to see the show.

The 1999 Darwin Festival was held in the shadow of the horrific events taking place in nearby East Timor. With the constant sound of army Hercules aircraft flying overhead en route to and from Dili, thoughts of East Timor pervaded the festival. Trepang performers dedicated their opening performance to the people of East Timor, in the spirit of hope of negotiated relations between neighbouring cultures.

The performance begins in the Sulawesi capital, Ujung Pandung, the old city of Macassar. Once the home port of the Macassan traders, who for several centuries or more travelled in their praus to the coast of north Australia to collect trepang (a sea cucumber) which they traded with China. At the start of the monsoon each year the Macassans would travel with the winds to what they called Marege, and negotiate and trade with the coastal Aboriginal people for rights to collect trepang. When the monsoon was over they would return home. Over time a pidgin ‘Macassan’ became the lingua franca for much of the north Australian coast, for as well as in dealings with Macassan trepangers, it was also used among the Aboriginal peoples who, through their employment with the Maccassans, came together over large distances.

In return for the right to harvest the trepang in Yolngu territories, and in exchange for Yolngu labour employed to aid in the harvest and processing of trepang, Macassan goods such as cloth, tobacco, knives, rice and alcohol were traded with the Yolngu peoples. These goods, and contact with Macassan traders, have had a lasting impact on Yolngu culture and cosmology.

Macassan traders had stopped visiting Arnhem land shores by 1907 as a result of the introduction of taxes levied by the South Australian government against Macassan praus, and other actions by missionary groups. Nevertheless, details of this period of material and cultural exchange remain a part of Yolngu living tradition. The time of the Macassans is described by some Yolngu as a kind of cultural ‘renaissance’, the products of which are recorded in complex oral histories, song cycles, ceremonial dance and artistic works. The Trepang performance is based on a richly coded ceremonial song cycle of mortuary rites which are regularly performed in North-East Arnhem Land today.

While Trepang is a reproduction of the first contact experience between the two cultures, it is also a ‘play within a play’. Trepang is a celebration of a relationship that is enmeshed in historical tensions and ambivalence. The narrative focus of the performance is a romantic ‘love trade’ in which a Yolngu girl meets a Macassan sailor, who trades with her parents for her hand. Yet the Yolngu songs performed in Trepang do not echo such romance; they are full of sorrow, stories of abduction and the forced trade in Yolngu women that developed in the Macassan period. Likewise, the Macassan goods brought both benefit and turmoil for the Yolngu. Knives and alcohol proved lethal, especially when combined with angry retribution over the abductions of Yolngu women. Conflict and bloodshed figure prominently in the Yolngu oral histories of the period (although not particularly among Yolngu on Elcho Island, where relations were mostly peaceful).

Yet out of this period were forged the family ties that Trepang now celebrates. Mansjur, the male lead in the Macassan cast, is a grandson of a Macassan sea captain, Otching Daeng Rangka, who abducted and married the great-grandmother of Matjuwi, the senior Yolngu ceremony leader in Trepang. According to Saint-Clare, the composition of the cast in Trepang was dictated, in part, by the Yolngu insistence that the performers’ kinship relationships to one another reflect this ‘true story’, and thus honour the legacy of that relationship.

There are other reasons too for the Trepang celebration. The story retells a sentimental history fresh with enthusiasm for renewed contact. For the Macassans, it is a reminder of the past greatness of their Kingdom of Gowa and of the seafaring might that their port city, Macassar, once enjoyed, positioned at the centre of East Indies trade routes.

For the Yolngu, it shows others that long before Europeans arrived in Australia the Yolngu people were ‘business people’, engaged in the commerce of international trade. Despite the sorrow, Trepang also recounts stories of positive relationships formed through this period: the blood ties, the exchanges of language and names, the co-operative working and trading relationships. Beyond the, the Maccassan period is remembered as a time of both the new and of renewal, a time when the Yolngu created a new identity and controlled it on their own terms firmly within the traditions of knowledge that have existed for them ‘from the beginning’. It is a sentiment as forward-looking as it is nostalgic.

Twenty-five years ago, Julie Barbosa, who now lives in Broadmeadows (a suburb of Melboume) saw the lights of a Norwegian cargo ship blinking silent passage through the deep waters of the Wetar Straits that lap the north coast of East Timor. She morsed distress, and ten days later, with a hundred other government workers, landed in Darwin, a bewildered refugee of a decolonisation program that had been pushed too fast, and manipulated by a cruel and clever neighbour. They thought they’d be back home in a month or two, but instead they became the first Timorese in a polyglot of cultures that Australia had only just begun to acknowledge. Tonight, in St Patrick’s, Julie’s family’s richly woven tais adorn the altar, its deep cherry-brown border caught in a glow of light that frames an opulent stillness; gold-flecked mitre, viridian majesty of the robes, the priests arced around the altar, heads bowed, hands shaped for prayer, ready to begin chanting the ancient ritual text.

Patsy Thatcher is in the seventeenth pew, kneeling – or should I say half-kneeling – in that manner of the well-bred agnostic where most of the body’s weight remains on the bench seat. She was born in Woolamai, near Wonthaggi, about sixty years ago, the daughter of a member of the Communist Party of Australia. At some stage in her life Professor Herb Feith, a Jewish scholar from Monash University, suggested she document the lives of East Timorese in Australia. This she did, although the Timorese mostly ignored her drama of questions and invited her, instead, to all their social and political functions. Their preference for this sort of social collaboration meant Patsy has attended many Catholic Masses. She still looks uncomfortable in the religious setting and almost celebrates her ignorance of the rite’s endearing irrationalities.

Paddy Murphy, my godfather’s wife, is in the front seat that Max Potter, the caretaker of the Cathedral, always reserves for her. Paddy’s faith in God is complete and regardless of priests and the occasional bishop who get in the way. She’s the mother of five who’ve all turned out very well indeed – despite the hardships – and grandmother to thirteen more. Her father was Secretary of the Labor Party in Ballarat for five years, and absolutely loyal to the Party all his life, although he resigned for moral reasons after Whitlam ‘disbanded conscription and wrecked Australia’. He was also a very good Catholic, but hated priests playing politics and telling parishioners to vote for the Democratic Labor Party who were ‘all scabs, the lot of them, splitting the Party and betraying the country’. She and Joe worked hard to send their boys to the Jesuits’ Xavier College in Kew, where they sat side by side with the sons of Bob Santamaria, another good Catholic (Italian) who led the unfortunate split in 1955. Many of her friends had voted for these doom-bound rebels, so she learned to hold her tongue and keep her nose right out of politics. However this didn’t stop her from taking the right steps to speak to the right people about matters pertaining to East Timor. This is attested to by the photo of Paddy and the Pope which overwhelms the entrance to her small flat in Mont Albert. The gilt-framed photo was taken in 1998 by the Vatican photographer in the Pope’s private chapel.

Abel Guterres sits, head bowed, in a pew at the back of the Church. Years ago, in 1975, in the middle of the same inferno that prompted Julie Barbosa to signal the Norwegian cargo ship, Abel hijacked a Red Cross aeroplane in Baucau and flew to Australia. Later, perhaps in 1983, he knocked on Patsy Thatcher’s door in Middle Park and asked her to document the role of women in East Timorese society before and after the Indonesian invasion. Abel has worked for Melbourne’s public transport service for twenty years, and filled every hour in between lobbying politicians, organising meetings, arranging aid, and telling the story of East Timor. In July 1999 he returned to help with the ballot, euphoric that a democratic process, at last, would render worthwhile the long loneliness of life in exile. Back in his homeland his well-honed diplomacy bore sweet fruit, for he was able to arrange a meeting between Taur Matan Ruak, leader of the resistance in East Timor, and Bishop Hilton Deakin, Vice-President of Caritas International (arguably the biggest non-government organisation in the world). The bishop, who is the main celebrant in St Patrick’s tonight, had to trek for three hours in a clapped-out jeep and another five on foot to the fighters’ cantonment in the mountains. They asked him to bless their small bamboo church, the Chapel of the Holy Family, which he christened Freedom Chapel, and to baptise a baby, Izildo Freitas, who will be known forever as the one who had water poured over his head by a ‘red’ bishop. He listened as the men, chewing betelnut, recalled years of routing the bush for berries to eat, of their comrades’ deaths left unattended on the rocky peaks; and then, together, they prayed for a peaceful referendum. Abel stayed on while the United Nations implemented the ‘key to peace’ and was forced to watch as his friends and relatives were hacked to death and his country was burned to the ground.

Sitting beside Abel in the back row is Alan Matheson, the International Representative of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, and Leigh Hubbard, former Industrial Officer of the Plumbers Union (now the CEPU) and current Secretary of the Victorian Trades Hall Council. Neither usually goes to church, but they are here tonight to support Abel and his community, to ameliorate the troubles, share the sorrows, nourish this latest Gethsemane. And, I suspect, to reflect upon the safety of their workers during the Union strike against Indonesia’s Garuda. The fight started at 4.30 this morning when twelve workers raced forty Victorian Police to the rollaround gate at Tullamarine. The tangle of burly arms and legs locked in battle along the baggage carrier, and ended up at the bottom of the shute, bruised and battered like a new-shorn sheep. Police made a couple of perfunctory arrests, but essentially the workers and the Timorese (who had maintained a rhythmic chant throughout) won the day and Garuda had to cancel the first of many flights. The media failed to capture the pain or the glory, and interviewed a motley of Australian brats who tried to debase the coinage by proclaiming their democratic right to visit the Indonesian island of Bali.

Lots of other Union members are at the Mass because they’d heard the Victorian Trade Union Choir was singing. No one can recall the Union being invited to St Pat’s, let alone bannered members being requested to lead a procession of firecoal-red-robed priests. Typically, no one seems able to recall exactly why, either. In truth, the Labor Party, political arm of the workers’ movement, was once considered to be concerned (some say exclusively) with bettering the lot of impoverished Irish Catholics. Then some members began to make overtures to oppressed Russian (not necessarily Catholic) workers, causing other members – more loyal to hearth and home politics, and, incidentally, led by a charismatic Irish Bishop – to see red and split the party. Such was this group’s bitterness that it was prepared to couple with Australian Communists just to keep the parent body out of Federal Parliament for years (and years).

Everyone knows the Catholic Mass is a tightly structured series of liturgical events with a miracle in the middle. It’s been like this all over the world for a couple of thousand years. However this Mass in St Pat’s was already suspiciously different. For a start, the ritual hadn’t begun with an organ-generated hymn, but an evocative two-phrase melody resonated by a buffalo’s horn and a thundering rap on a magnificently carved drum. This was a novel soundscape for some, but for many others a deeply emotional moment. Few realised it was also animist Timor displaying its proud tradition, perhaps for the first time, inside the sacrosanct boundaries of the Catholic ritual. Then there was the business of the trade unionists, some with bannered lettering, some with sheets of music, some unsure which knee to genuflect with. The Diocesan chiefs hadn’t known the banners were coming, and were uneasily surprised to note their passage in the procession. They’d been worrying for days about what the unblessed choir might be singing, and had bent their proud heads to ask; but most had replied ‘I dunno, probably thingummyjig’. This left the chiefs in the unenviable position of having to heap their faith on a couple of hopes that thingummyjig would prove to be appropriate liturgical text. When it was time for the sermon to be delivered, the Bishop, who had recently returned from his thirteenth visit to Timor, moved deliberately to the microphone at the edge of the altar. He welcomed the Victorian Trade Union Choir, then said, ‘When this night is over the word will go from here to wherever people will talk about East Timor that we are in solidarity with you’. Rising his arms aloft, he invited the congregation to stand and with joined hands to sing ‘Solidarity Forever’, the Union’s anthem. There was silence. An electric silence. The choir itself looked shocked. For, in the name of the East Timorese, the Bishop had invited fifty years of history to fall over and reconcile. And here we were, only two-thirds of the way through the ritual.

But in St Patrick’s on Thursday 9 September 1999 a very old ritual provided structure for the release of energy that had been tied up for a long long time. The four thousand who sang together an old tune of six words – and then spontaneously clapped for such a long time that the bishop eventually had to ask them to stop – became 26,000 in Bourke Street the next day; and Abel Guterres, the village school teacher from Baucau, looked beyond the gathered throng and saw his diplomacy become new Australian foreign policy. A week after that there were 40,000 in Spring Street, and old soldiers whose lives were saved by Timorese during the Pacific War rejoiced, because their nation had decided to pay its debt to the East Timorese. Peacemakers, blessed peacemakers, reached out to kin in Indonesia who had courageously supported the rights of the Timorese to self determination. Peacemakers recalled kin in Burma and the West Papuans of Irian Jaya who had voted for their freedom but then were robbed. And peacemakers everywhere were reminded of the power of solidarity to render their cause anew.

At its most basic level, the republican model of government holds that a community should govern itself. The community is the highest court of appeal, not a distant monarch or deity. As such, its success depends upon citizens taking an active role in public debate. To do so, they must feel that their participation matters.

This was precisely where the ‘Yes’ case failed. Debate, such as it was, was reduced to simplistic sloganeering, a seemingly endless parade of celebrities repeating a sentiment that, if opinion polls are any indicator, the majority of Australians agree with anyway – i.e. that an Australian should be the head of state.

No doubt presenting the ‘Yes’ case in such simple terms was a tactical move, designed to allow for easy media consumption. But in confining debate thus, the republican cause ceased to be republican in anything but the shallowest sense. Absent was any sense of what it might mean to be a citizen in an Australian republic or indeed what sort of nation Australia should be as we enter the twenty-first century. This failure to engage was reflected in the voting patterns, which indicate, quite unequivocally, that the referendum divided Australians between those who feel their involvement in the life of the nation slipping away and those who are seen, rightly or wrongly, as being the ones wrenching it from them: a division that is expressed geographically in a gap between regional and rural Australia on one end of the spectrum and the city centres on the other. In the current issue of Arena Magazine Doug White explores the meaning of the referendum result further, interpreting it as a victory for those excluded from mainstream political processes, and, implictly, a vote in favour of more radical political change.

What was missing from the ‘Yes’ case was any sense of what Benedict Anderson recently referred to as the nation as a ‘common project’. Anderson’s understanding of the nation as a ‘common project’ suggests an idea of the active involvement of different groups in an ongoing process of dialogue and negotiation, through which the nation is continuously enacted and re-enacted, made and re-made. It is this shared involvement in the project of the nation that is held in common by its members.

Anderson contrasts this conception of the nation with another quite different idea: the nation as an ‘inheritance’, an unchanging ‘thing’ from the past to be preserved and protected. Where the nation is conceived as an inheritance, Anderson argues, the will to preserve it takes over as the prime expression of nationalism, often creating divisions and, all too often, violence among rival claimants. By contrast, the idea of the nation as a common project allows for diverse, even unexpected expressions of nationalism. Anderson suggests, for example, that shame at the actions of one’s nation can be an indication of a deep nationalist sentiment – the reason being that members of a common project are morally culpable for anything done in its name, even if they personally had no hand in it. In Anderson’s words:

No one can be a true nationalist who is incapable of feeling ‘ashamed’ if her state or government commits crimes, including those against her fellow citizens. Although she has done nothing individually that is bad, as a member of the common project, she will feel morally implicated in everything done in that project’s name.

In ‘official’ pronouncements of Australian nationalism and definitions of the national interest, shame is a scarce resource. Look no further than Paul Keating’s recent apologetics for the Indonesian Government. Keating argued that John Howard had single-handedly created the conditions for militia violence in Timor, by sending a letter to then President Habibie pressuring him to deliver greater autonomy to East Timor. So upset by the letter was Habibie, according to Keating, that he announced the referendum on independence prematurely, without consideration for the likely violent consequences. Keating claimed that Howard’s letter was motivated by populist opportunism, and in pressuring Indonesia thus, he had put the Timorese people and Australia’s ‘national interest’ at risk.

But whose interests are we talking about here? Certainly not the Timorese who, after years of oppression at the hands of Indonesian military forces, voted overwhelmingly for independence. Neither was Keating expressing the interests of the hundreds of thousands of Australians who over the years and months have worked and rallied in support of the Timorese cause, whose membership in the ‘common project’ of Australia has left them ashamed and angry at the role successive Australian governments have played in arming and training the Indonesian military forces whose links with militia forces are now beyond dispute.

The four thousand people who packed Melbourne’s St Patrick’s Cathedral in celebration of East Timor’s newly won independence, as described by Louise Byrne in the current issue of Arena Magazine, are a living embodiment of this common project, their differences in belief and politics overshadowed by their disgust at Australia’s record in Timor.

By contrast, Keating’s remarks demonstrate an unwillingness to be involved. His comments reflect nothing more than a desire to protect his own place in history, even if that means preserving the shameful legacy he and others have bequeathed to the nation. Moreover, the feebleness of Keating’s analysis suggests that it was borne out of desperation – an attempt to play down the contribution of two decades of Australian aid, training and support to Indonesian military forces in fuelling the current situation in East Timor, thereby absolving himself and his Government of any moral culpability.

The flip-side of Keating’s recalcitrance over Timor is his successor’s continuing inability to offer a genuine apology to the stolen generation. John Howard famously dismisses calls for an apology as the product of ‘a black arm-band view of history’. Considering Anderson’s view, however, the ‘black arm-band view of history’ that Howard holds with such contempt, suggests a deep commitment to Australia.

Howard’s unwillingness to enter into a more complex engagement with Australia’s past (and thus its present and future) stems from a shallow involvement with the nation. Howard’s view does not allow for questioning, or indeed shame at the dispossession and oppression of indigenous people, since this would tarnish and thus devalue the inheritance. All that can be permitted are a few carefully selected ornaments from Australia’s past to give the appearance of involvement: Menzies’ desk, ‘The Don’, or an Akubra at the weekend. Anything more substantive than this eternal parade of the national furniture is ruled out as un-Australian.

There are, however, other more productive ways of engaging with Australia’s past. Graeme Byrne’s careful deconstruction of the national mythology surrounding the Snowy River Hydro-Electric Scheme in the current issue of Arena Magazine suggests one example. Byrne’s analysis de-stabilises several of the cultural meanings associated with the Snowy, highlighting the exclusions of history, politics and culture upon which they are built. In complicating the Snowy Scheme’s place in Australia’s national mythology, Byrne’s analysis shows the darker side of the Scheme, particularly the shameful history of industrial and environmental exploitation. Far from destroying the place of the Scheme in national mythology, however, Byrne’s more complex interpretation suggests how it might be reinvented as an example of an alternative model of national development and nation-building in which both pride and shame have equal place.

What does all this have to do with the republic? Simply this: if an Australian republic is to be worthwhile, and seen as such, it must address the hard questions that come with deep engagement with Australia as a common project. Republicans cannot afford a surface encounter with the nation, limited to media-friendly slogans. The republic debate needs to encompass and address more difficult issues, from the dispossession of indigenous people to the reconstitution of local community by processes of globalisation. If it does not, the debate over the head of state will appear to most Australians, quite rightly, as a minor and largely irrelevant quibble between rival claimants to the national estate – the only difference between them being that one wants to instal a president where at present there is a queen.