Conversation For Peace Podcasts
2008-08-24 Peace and violence
Encounter
How do religious traditions of non-violence cope with the realities of political oppression? In Burma, voices within the community of monks are calling for armed resistance against the military junta - is this against Buddhist teaching, or is armed struggle an aspect of Buddhism that we romantically choose to ignore? read less
Latest Episodes for this Channel
2008-08-24 Peace and violence
Sat August 23 2008
How do religious traditions of non-violence cope with the realities of political oppression? In Burma, voices within the community of monks are calling for armed resistance against the military junta - is this against Buddhist teaching, or is armed struggle an aspect of Buddhism that we romantically choose to ignore? read less
2008-08-17 Staying with the Stories - Aboriginal Communities and the Churches in Central Australia
Sat August 16 2008
Encounter visits Central Australia where many Indigenous communities have been affected by recent events including the Northern Territory intervention. Local Churches have stayed with the communities and found ways to engage with Aboriginal culture and its stories. Bill Bunbury reports from Alice Springs and surrounding country. TRANSCRIPT: Bill Bunbury: You´re with Encounter on ABC Radio National, and this week we´re in Central Australia and `Staying with the Stories´. Tracy Spencer: My name is Tracy Spencer and I´m one of the ministers in the Alice Springs Uniting Church. About 18 months ago Alice Springs was getting a very bad serve in the media, and anything negative that could be said of a place was being said about us. Some of it was true, but none of it was the total picture. So the effect that we saw on the community around us was one of plummeting self-esteem. Everyone thinks Alice Springs is dreadful for all these reasons. And so we thought, well, there is another part of the story that also needs to be told. Walter Shaw: My name is Walter Shaw. I live in a town camp within Alice Springs and we´re affected by the intervention because we fall in the prescribed areas. I feel demonised with legislations that are part of the intervention. I feel racially vilified, I feel socially segregated. All Aboriginal people don´t partake in the form of being chronic alcoholics, the social dilemmas of child abuse, child neglecters, chronic alcoholics. So for myself personally as a first-time father and as a husband who is doing the right thing for his family and also the broader community, I feel like we´re rowing up a certain creek without a paddle with us. Barbara Shaw: My name is Barbara Shaw and I live at Mt Nancy camp, now a prescribed area under the federal government´s Northern Territory emergency response intervention. When it first started and they started going out to communities, they had the people worrying about the safety of their children and whether their children were going to be checked with anything, with the child health checks, and if they found anything they were worried that their children were actually going to be taken away. So then that´s another case of a new generation in the stolen generation, and that´s what a lot of the old people that lived through that stolen generation and had their half-caste children taken away from them, that´s what they were worried about. Walter Shaw: And at the end of the day we have to predetermine our future and it needs to be in a partnership agreement with the two tiers of Australian government; the state government, which is the Northern Territory government, and also the federal government, and work in a partnership agreement to overcome the epidemics, both social and economic disadvantages within the Aboriginal community of the Northern Territory. Bill Bunbury: You spoke earlier about having white friends here. Are people in the community concerned about this side to the Aboriginal community? Walter Shaw: I believe that there is non-Aboriginal people that have concerns about the rights of Aboriginal people and how they have been treated, and the people who are non-Aboriginal and are concerned about the treatment that government is imposing on the Aboriginal people are fair minded Australians. Bill Bunbury: Welcome to Encounter. I´m Bill Bunbury and I´ve just returned from Alice Springs where I spent a week talking with both Indigenous Australians and a number of Christian communities about their interaction with Aboriginal communities in Central Australia. I´ve called this Encounter `Staying with the Stories´ because many Australians in the churches of Central Australia have done just that; they´ve stayed and listened and supported Indigenous concerns. I met nuns who´ve worked in Central Australia for over half a century and congregations who´ve built bridges between European and Aboriginal Australia in a variety of innovative ways. This Encounter will offer a local, Central Australian perspective on recent issues affecting Aboriginal communities, including the recent federal intervention in the Northern Territory. We´ll continue to hear in the program from both Indigenous and European Australians and we´ll explore in particular how the Christian churches are living in dialogue with Central Australia´s original inhabitants. I began my week in Alice Springs with the Salvation Army, which works continuously with homeless people, some who come in from the hinterland and need shelter or those who want to leave Alice Spring´s numerous Indigenous camps scattered round the fringes of town. Shirley Baker was my guide. Shirley Baker: This is a town camp, tin shed dwelling one. Most of them have a concrete brick one, this is probably lowest of the grade town camps in town. I met a lady who lived in one of the tin sheds over to our left and there wasn´t any type of running water or any...it´s basically what I would call a tennis shed, and that was her home with five children. She managed to get those five children clean, clothes clean and to school on a regular basis. Adye Viney: It is easy to generalise, and I guess one of the problems we have is that people see things and make a generalisation. There´s a lot of displacement, and the conditions that people live in in the rest of Australia compared to what Aboriginal people live in, this is the group I´ve seen with the most difficulties in their day to day lives. Bill Bunbury: Adye Viney, Salvation Army minister, Alice Springs. Adye Viney: One of the really big problems is the pressure on Aboriginal people culturally from their families. Their families expect a lot of them and there´s a very complex relationship structure in Aboriginal families. So the concept of ownership is very loosely based on what we would describe or understand and so what you have belongs to everybody, anyone can come and utilise your resources. And because of the cultural obligations, really there´s not much you can do about it. So that makes it very difficult for people just to cope in their day-to-day life. The other problem of course is overcrowding in houses, housing that´s generally substandard compared to the rest of Australia, also makes it very difficult as well. Bill Bunbury: What effect does all this have on the appearance of Indigenous people to Europeans living in Alice Springs? Adye Viney: I think that´s part of the issue, especially when people visit here who don´t understand the complex backgrounds that people face. They see the upfront stuff and they make a judgement about people´s lifestyles based on that, which is often inaccurate in terms of the people themselves, and it´s very easy to label everybody the same because of that. Bill Bunbury: How about the locals? Adye Viney: There´s varying viewpoints in the local community. The whole Aboriginal issue is very, very complex and there are no easy answers to any of these problems, so there are varied opinions around the town; some people are very sympathetic to the cause and will do anything they can to assist, others would be fairly judgemental in their approach Shirley Baker: I´ve completed the task now of checking the Centrelink payments automatically notified to us and I´m probably ready to go. Bill Bunbury: And you´re going to take me to..? Shirley Baker: I´m taking you first of all to our Towards Independence Alice Springs storage shed, I have seconded a mattress this morning for a future need and I´m going to put this mattress into the shed. Just got to code in here at the storage shed. So we´ll just unlock the door and put this mattress that I seconded this morning. Bill Bunbury: Do you want a hand with that? Shirley Baker: At the moment I just need to set up so I can just pull the mattress out and then I might accept your kind offer. What we´re actually looking at is two cultures running parallel. I guess something that sticks out in my mind as a welfare worker is the issue about who´s got the balance of power, and always the power sits with the source of money. And of course the source of the money is the government, and government translate from parliament in Canberra right down to the mostly white faces behind the counter in the offices here in Alice Springs; for example, Centrelink. So the Indigenous people are sort of controlled by the need to comply with the rules. Now, they don´t understand the rules. Centrelink and Territory Housing will say, `But we sent them a letter.´ Okay, that´s good, where did the letter go? It went to, say, Utopia community 300 kilometres away. Now, the family might not be out there because they´ve had to move to, say, Yamba outstation which is about 60 kilometres north on the way to Utopia so that the children can catch a school bus to get to school because this is one of the family´s goals. They haven´t got housing in town so they´ve worked out a way. They haven´t understood their responsibility to let Centrelink or Territory Housing know that your address has changed. Also I think their life, whilst we might think it looks very peaceful, just sitting around cross-legged in the sun a lot, it´s a day-to-day, meal-by-meal survival. That takes up a lot. I´ve actually lived on the breadline myself when I was first a single parent, many, many years ago. I know how much effort and energy you expel to make ends meet and to survive. Walter Shaw: If I wanted to go to the shop and buy food and ration for my household I´d have to go to Centrelink to receive a store card and then go to a nominated store, stand in a queue with a store card instead of standing in the queue with cash in hand. I feel socially segregated from normal people out in the community, and when I talk about `normal people out in the community´ I´m talking about the normal Australian. I´m as normal as the other people that don´t have a store card that shop at the same store as me. Shirley Baker: I was behind a lady who had only 20 cents on her card of credit and the cash register lady said, `Do you have more money?´ `No,´ she said. `Well, you need more than 20 cents.´ And she would have had, I would say, a good $50 worth of items in scan, not that I was being nosy, but because I work with people to be able to understand the embarrassment and the impact on self-esteem and their sense of worth and value as a human being...I mean, sometimes you could sit down and weep really. Barbara Shaw: I´m 100% against the intervention because there´s better ways to work with Aboriginal people, and especially...I was doing my own intervention before the Northern Territory came out, saving children. I run an official safe-house for kids on our camp here. I believe that there´s better ways to work with Aboriginal people because of the impact that the intervention is having on them at the moment. Bill Bunbury: What´s the effect day-to-day of the intervention on people´s lives? Barbara Shaw: You know, a lot of people are angry and confused. They´re angry that it´s happened just to only Aboriginal people living in prescribed areas, and they´re confused on why the intervention was brought out, especially those that already look after a lot of kids, and considering that our communities in remote areas were dry communities anyway. Bill Bunbury: Barbara Shaw, Walter Shaw´s sister and also resident at one of Alice Springs´ 18 town camps. Her concerns about the intervention are shared by Uniting Church minister Tracy Spencer. Tracy Spencer: Eighteen months ago we saw the media on the east coast really affecting the way that people in Alice Springs thought of themselves. When the intervention landed upon us I saw a similar dive in communal self-esteem, but this time it was particularly pegged on that racial divide because the intervention was racist, and I say that not necessarily in a pejorative way but in a factual way. To carry out the intervention, the government of the day had to set aside the Racial Discrimination Act because if they hadn´t done that they would have been accused of breaching it because a number of the measures taken under that were specific to people of a particular race and postcode. From my point of view, that´s been one of the worst parts of the intervention, to know that our government could so easily dismiss an act of parliament that this country took a good long time to be able to achieve. You look at our history under which people of other races were not protected, we fought to get that in the parliament, it was there, and it could be dismissed in a day´s worth of sitting. So I found that particularly scary. What the intervention then meant practically for a number of my friends who suffered the welfare quarantining because of race because they lived in a designated area, they were suddenly being told by Centrelink, `We don´t trust you to manage your money.´ And yet these were people who had lived responsible lives, held down jobs, been good corporate citizens, who´d managed their money for decades, who were suddenly being told, `We don´t trust you with your own money.´ The effect...again, I saw people become ill and stressed and have months of wrangling with Centrelink before there was any possibility of recognising their ability to manage themselves. And that´s just the welfare quarantining. The sort of talk at the time about child abuse tarred all Indigenous men as paedophiles and that was simply completely untrue. The report `The Little Children are Sacred´ was a very good report, but one of the things that worried me, because I´d worked in the field of child sexual abuse for a long time, including here in Alice Springs...one of the things that worried me in the report and subsequently was the lack of statistical data about the extent of the problem in comparison with the rest of Australia. And that´s not to say that I am suggesting for a moment that child abuse isn´t a problem in remote communities, but I would go on to say that child abuse is a problem in every community, Indigenous or non-Indigenous. We know and we´ve known for so long that one in three girls and one in four boys in Australia are sexually abused by the age of 16, and that is a crisis and is an emergency and it is an epidemic, but it´s not something that the government moves on by sending the troops in to every suburb in Melbourne. That´s happened to communities here...and the Uniting Church synod in October last year which includes quite a number of Indigenous members, heard the stories of our Indigenous brothers and sisters, what happened on their community. They used the term `war´; `we felt like this is war´, `the army came into our community´. They felt like their children were being taken again. `People want to look at our children, and are they going to take them away from us?´ They felt that the programs that they already had running that were successful were completely ignored and therefore they felt that their own efforts were being dismissed and put down. So they really asked us non-Indigenous members of the synod to stand in solidarity with them in condemning the intervention, and that´s what we did. We came out with quite a strong statement saying we wanted the intervention stopped and we wanted the government to engage in proper consultation to address the issues. Our Indigenous members of synod made the point to us, it wasn´t a lack of consultation. They said Mal Brough came and he sat with us and he listened to us and he went away and he came back again and he listened to us again and we thought he understood, and then he went and did something completely different. They said it wasn´t a lack of consolation, it was a betrayal, and that´s what they felt the government did to them in the intervention. Bill Bunbury: Uniting Church minister Tracy Spencer. One way her church strives to improve understanding between Indigenous people and others in Alice Springs is Storywall, an unusually public film show. Storywall screens on a long white wall, right in the centre of Alice Springs, very visible from the Todd Street pedestrian mall, making tourists and locals alike highly aware of its images and sounds. A Changing Raceexcerpt : Many good people have encouraged me and other Aborigines like me who have risen in the world from the same background as these children you see. They will have been taught, as we were, that the greatest difference between the Aboriginal law and the white law is sharing. Among ourselves what belongs to one automatically belongs to the other—could not the white people also apply this law? Bill Bunbury: The night I went to see the show it was evident that both locals and visitors were seeing a bit of Central Australian history not always featured in tourism brochures. One often-screened film is A Changing Race. It was made in the 1960s, lost for a while, but relocated and donated to Storywall by long-term Alice Springs resident and retired truck driver Tony Liddle. Tony Liddle: They interviewed a lot of those old people back about...probably would have been about 1964 or something when they started, and all the old men that had worked all their lives and never had any rights at all, so that´s probably where it started from. Tracy Spencer: Being in such an open space and such a free space, people gather to watch together who we are, they learn about each other in that process and they also then have a chance to engage with each other, interact, and recognise that in fact what they´re seeing on the wall is their community, it belongs to all of them and all of us. Bill Bunbury: When I left the Storywall celebration last night, the films, I saw something quite different. When I walked into the car park behind your church there was a much more violent scene, people abusing each other, shouting, a lot of drinking. It seemed a different world from the kind of scene I´d just seen where people were talking honestly and openly about their history and sharing. Can you comment on that? Tracy Spencer: That´s certainly a part of the Alice Springs landscape as well. It was something that one of the traditional owners who was at Storywall last night, Betty Pearce, commented about on the radio this morning, and her reading of what was happening there was a group of people from much further north coming to town and behaving badly. And one of the strong things that the traditional owners here have said is they´re not interested in discussing antisocial behaviour, they want to discuss anti-cultural behaviour, because there are expectations and standards of behaviour that they as Arrernte custodians expect of people, all people, coming onto Arrernte country. And so that kind of behaviour is not acceptable to them and certainly shouldn´t be tolerated by anybody. Having said that, what you saw last night and where you saw it is also important and helps to explain part of the Alice Springs landscape. That car park where you were walking through is very poorly lit, and we´ve been in conversation with council to have that area (because it impinges on the back part of the church site too) much better lit. But also it´s across the road from one of the takeaway bottle shops in Alice Springs, and so when that bottle shop closes around nine o´clock, and that was in the vicinity of the time you´d be walking through there, people have bought their last grog for the night and so they go and find a dark nearby place to drink it, which is illegal under our dry town legislation, but had been for many, many years under the two-kilometre law anyway. And so police were called and they responded. They can´t be there within 30 seconds, and often these fights...they come together quickly and then they disperse as well. So how effective what police presence can do is limited, not because of the police, because of the nature of that kind of engagement. So partly what you were seeing there, I guess, is an effect of alcohol in town which, way before any intervention was enforced, there have been groups in this town and across the Territory trying to work towards solutions to deal with the absolutely epidemic problems that alcohol causes across the Northern Territory community but also specifically within the Indigenous community where alcohol is responsible for a vast majority of violence within Aboriginal communities and of health problems for Aboriginal people. Those two reasons alone are enough to say we need to be looking very strongly at restricting alcohol, managing alcohol, and also then providing rehabilitation for those affected by alcohol. Bill Bunbury: Tracy Spencer of the Uniting Church and yet another story of the Centre. But if that´s a different tale, it´s just one of many narratives in a complex story. And, as the Storywall project shows each week, listening to each other´s stories is vital if people want to build bridges between cultures. That´s a view which John Huigen shares. He´s a member of the local Alice Springs Baptist church. John Huigen: Mistrust or misunderstanding can´t be dealt with theoretically. So by building relationships with people and understanding the way they see the world goes an exceptionally long way, assuming you enter into that conversation with an open mind. Bill Bunbury: John Huigen. And, as with the Uniting Church, John´s Baptist congregation has looked for ways to open those conversations. It meant a search for common interests. John Huigen: Well, I think common interest prevails because you go to church for a particular reason and we all have a common goal and a common God, if you like, so that gives you something to talk about immediately. But in our church (I go to the Alice Springs Baptist church) sometimes even that´s not enough, especially when you have a larger church, our church is 400 people or so, so it becomes a bit of a microcosm of normal society really in the sense that like is attracted to like within that group. So sometimes other activities are useful in creating areas of common interests and so forth. What emerged a couple of years ago was the Aboriginal people, Warlpiri people, mainly go to our church, and the white fellas came up with this idea of going out for bush tucker picnics, which was really interesting because it´s something that the Yapa turned the tables around a bit. The Yapa are keen to go on country but often don´t have the means to do so, and keen to share their knowledge. Of course us white fellas, for many people they´d never been on country with an Aboriginal person actually, and what happens is there´s like an interpretation process, if you like. You can go for a drive on your own and wander around the country but that´s very different than going for a drive and then having an Aboriginal person share their perspective on what country means for them and so forth. What was really powerful about these bush tucker picnics was a significant flip-around, if you like, of the power balance. In many respects this was about being able to develop a relationship with the Yapa in a situation where they were the ones who had the knowledge and were in a situation where they were exceptionally comfortable and were able to give so much. And that common interest, if you like, and those shared experiences then flow through. So the next time you bump into them at church then they´re going, `Oh,´ and you can talk about a shared experience and you´ve got something then. And then once you go beyond that shared experience you can then start building relationships and you can learn from each other. Rachel: We was talking about it, to take them, to teach them about kangaroo tails and other bush tuckers, where we´ve been going hunting, and show them what they look like, what they taste like. Amyas Lennie: These women are incredible, their ability to find food out here where some people drive through and see nothing. These amazing women...look, their attention to detail, their knowledge of place and space; they never get lost here whereas I´ll turn around and not even know which direction the cars are. Bill Bunbury: Baptist church member Amyas Lennie. Amyas Lennie: I think it´s a beautiful part of the way that the church worships as a family and shares knowledge and shares leadership. The ladies here are demonstrating amazing leadership and generosity and this is their turf. What´s really exciting...one exciting change that´s really been happening is the Aboriginal people in the congregation have been expressing themselves more and more confidently in their worship and the I feel the church has opened up to that more and more, and this is grown out of a need for knowledge gaps to be filled, for people to get a deeper understanding of just different life ways, different journeys, and this is one way that people experience that. Bill Bunbury: How do you know where to look, Rachel? Rachel: We dig the hole and if we find some honey ants then we just dig a hole. Bill Bunbury: You can tell just by looking at the ground, can´t you? Rachel: Yeah. Our grandmother teach us, and Mum, our parents. Bill Bunbury: Rachel, has the bush tucker picnic been good for people? Rachel: Yes. Bill Bunbury: What do the white people find when they come out here and do bush tucker with you? Rachel: We just make people friend; do you want to come with me hunting? We´ll show you our food. And we did. Bill Bunbury: Any luck yet or not? Rachel: Not yet. Brett Butler: Not yet, but it looks good. Looks promising. Yes. A lot of pressure on, you know. Rachel: See, in the old church we didn´t even talk to one another. In this new church, we´re friends, we love one another. Brett Butler: We all sit together, whereas in the old church you used to sit separate to us in a different place every time, and the white people wouldn´t go anywhere near you. Rachel: The Lord would make us a family. Brett Butler: Yes, in this new church. My name is Brett Butler, I´ve been in the Baptist church since I was 28, and before being at the church I didn´t have a relationship with Aboriginal people really much, even though I was born in Alice Springs. Also being in Alice Springs you see a lot of the bad influences of Aboriginals who people just see as making a mess and making a ruckus and making it bad for Alice Springs and giving Alice Springs a bad name. So since I´ve come to know them personally by going bush tucker hunting with them, basically when I first got a real relationship with them, and singing with them at church and that sort of stuff, and singing with them, driving them back to their communities around Alice Springs, I have really got such a beautiful relationship with them. I got a different side to them rather than what everyone and what I myself perceived Aboriginals to be; these people with no hope and no character. There´s such a rich character and life in them, family life mainly. Bill Bunbury: That´s an interesting comment, isn´t it, because so much of the recent criticism has been about mismanagement of family life and you obviously see another side of it. Brett Butler: It´s hard to really nail that either way because being brought up in Alice Springs you see the political side of it but you also see a people who have been totally pulled out of what they´re used to, and now the new generation coming through don´t even know what they stand for anymore. And whether it´s white, whether it´s black, alcohol has destroyed all families but it has definitely to a bigger extent destroyed the Aboriginal culture and families, which is a real shame to see. Bill Bunbury: So the scene we´re witnessing now where the women have been cooking kangaroo tails and I saw you making damper and sharing it, is that a helpful process in the situation? Brett Butler: Well, it´s good to get out of town and it´s good just to be out where they are comfortable in their country and enjoying being a family together, preparing a meal and it´s really exciting also to see them just look at a certain tree or whatever and pick up a honey ant track or something in there and just go, `Wow, how did they do that?´ And you can look and look and look but you can´t see it yourself until one day you just, bang, you do see it. Pamela Sampson: You feel much better when you´re out in the bush, you don´t have to think about the noise around you, you know? How we like it to be out here, nice and quiet and peaceful. They show them around, what sort of a thing we learn from our families, and then we learn all this Baptist church mob as a family group to know about the bush tucker. Brett Butler: You gain as much as you give in the Aboriginal culture, which is a big drawcard of why we want to spend time around them, I suppose. If they had means to they´d get you bush tucker hunting every day because this is their way of life, this is who they are, but I, as a person who´s been born and brought up in Alice Springs, I also feel that when I come into this town and into the country, less the rat race, and I look at those hills and it´s home. It´s a draw thing that you just don´t want to get away from, and I feel I connect with them when we come out in here in the countryside away from all that in that it´s something in common that we all have. Bill Bunbury: It´s a spiritual bond then? Brett Butler: Oh, to the land, to being together. When I wasn´t a Christian I found that I had no idea that the Aborigines have such a respect (because of their culture, I guess) for spiritual side of things, and I wasn´t spiritual myself. The one thing that blew me away with the Aboriginal people is people would be frightened of them because they don´t understand them or something like that, but they way I can relate to them is just to share God with them and they share God with me mutually the same way, whereas if I did that to the white fella down the street you´d be mocked and being an idiot, whereas with the Yapa people it´s second nature to them. And this, nature, is all fact, they know it, and that´s something that I really hold onto and cherish with the Aboriginal people. Bill Bunbury: It´s interesting, isn´t it, to have such a long, strong culture fused with Christianity. Is that an easy situation for them as you see it? Amyas Lennie: I think the inherent awareness of other beings, which is inherent in Indigenous people, more so than non-Indigenous people in my experience...their ability to understand the spiritual realm, to understand the things that are non-visible, which are very, very much out there, very much affecting people daily, their knowledge of spirituality and the way that they express their life as it is in Christ teaches me a lot. Their grace and their understanding of grace and forgiveness and moving forward from places of damage to places of healing, and their process of healing is very, very rich. Bill Bunbury: Is it a humbling experience? Amyas Lennie: Oh indeed, it is, it´s a beautiful experience. Bill Bunbury: Has it been enriching for you? John Huigen: I´ve enjoyed it a lot. It has been enriching because it goes to the very heart of what I believe a faith community should be, which is egalitarian and inclusive and safe for everyone who is there, and accessible for everyone there. The reality is our basically Western church is perhaps a little more accessible to the Yapa now because they have some friends who will help translate some of the weird things that we do, I suppose. And I think for many people in the church, Aboriginal people are people rather than a group, and I think that ultimately we´re called to love and to serve each other and you can´t do that unless you know each other. Father Asaeli Raass: Coming here to Central Australia I´ve been challenged a lot, whether what I´m saying and what I´m preaching on Sunday makes any sense at all. I want to put myself in their world now. I´m slowly learning how to speak in their language and learn their culture so that I can understand better. Many things have changed since the seminary days. Bill Bunbury: Father Raass, originally from Fiji, he´s also worked in Africa and is now with the Catholic church in Alice Springs. We talked in company with two nuns, Sister Claire-Marcelle, originally from Switzerland, and Sister Magali from France. They are known in Alice Springs as the `Little Sisters´. One of Alice Springs´ many town camps is named after them. Both Sisters have worked in Central Australia for more than 50 years but have spent most of the last 20 with the Yuendumu community, almost four hours drive from Alice Springs. And both Sisters have seen the effects of the 2007 intervention (for them a very recent story) on the community at Yuendumu. They are less certain about the purpose. Sister Claire-Marcelle: Well, it´s not very clear. They put it on the report on the `Sacred Children´ but I think there are many, many other reasons behind; political, economical. I´m not clear about it but I feel all what the intervention done, they didn´t do much for the children so far. Sister Magali: Like Claire I have been 19 years in Yuendumu, and 50 years around town. I have seen sometime much improving, especially after the referendum that gave possibility to Aboriginal people to be in control of their own life, but with the intervention once again they go back to the time of early settlement where government was doing everything for them and they had no say in what was happening. Father Asaeli Raass: Like any church group, we´re here to accompany the people, we are here not to judge, but also to be a voice, a voice for the ones who are unable to speak up. Bill Bunbury: It´s inevitable, isn´t it, that this intervention has raised queries. There were concerns, presumably genuine, about child health, about the allegations of sexual abuse and so on, and that´s certainly what we read in the newspapers. Are those concerns justified? Father Asaeli Raass: I have not heard of any of the people that I work with of sexually abusing children. I know it has been published a lot. Maybe because people are not strong enough to open up. So whether it is being justified, that´s a big question. Sister Magali: I think violence on the whole is more a problem than the actual child abuse. Bill Bunbury: And why do we see violence in homes? Sister Magali: One of the reasons is traditional society in Aboriginal community was very strict on relation and is still very, very strong on the relations, and non-Aboriginal society has confused completely because of the law and rules of relationship are so totally different that they can´t fit the two together. There is also an influence of the media because everybody sees a lot of violence on the TV and they don´t see that it´s a film and not reality in life, and that´s a problem too. Some families are strong, and usually you´ve got, I would say, a matriarch or a patriarch figure in a family group that are really holding together the group. We also see families that are extremely religious. Where we are, most groups are Baptist, but the families that have a strong religious belief are usually coping much better because it is a common thing now to hear, `As Christians, we can´t fight and we shouldn´t fight,´ and it´s something that didn´t exist 50 years ago. Father Asaeli Raass: And if I may comment on that, I think it´s also the fact that we cannot compare the 16,000-year-old tradition with us just coming in into their country. There´s bound to be clashes, there´s bound to be tensions when two strong religious traditions, world views, come together. People are finding it hard now to cope. The world is becoming fast for the elders and the pressure to be part of the mainstream is much greater than before. I think the intervention, generally speaking, has undermined the capacity of indigenous people to do something for themselves and to own their problems. I´ve seen some positive effects of the intervention and negative as well. I´ve seen more food in the trolley, people are buying clothes. However, the negative side of...talking about the current thing of the social welfare income, it´s too general and it´s affecting everybody. There are a lot of families that are struggling to do what is right but then because of these specific proposals from the government, it´s making things worse. Bill Bunbury: Father Raass, together with Sister Claire-Marcelle and Sister Magali. We talked also about the effect of strangers arriving in a remote community like Yuendumu, like, for example, the presence of soldiers. Sister Magali: Well, I know that some people have told the kids, `Keep away from the soldiers, don´t go anywhere near them.´ So obviously there was something in them that was having the same effect. Bill Bunbury: This is unfortunate, isn´t it, because my experience of the Australian army is that the soldiers are very decent and would not in any way want to hurt anybody, so this makes interaction then very difficult, doesn´t it? Father Asaeli Raass: Yes. It´s not the soldiers, it´s the fact that they´re there and no one has told them about their presence. Decent soldiers of course. They are now in the community, and people suddenly ask us why they are here. Sister Magali: They were told somebody was coming but they had no vision, actual vision of what it was. We heard a lot ourself of duplication where a doctor and two or three nurses turn up in Yuendumu when actually we have two doctors on the spot, a working clinic and all the kids were checked up in school, all the ones in school had been checked up already. So people were a bit puzzled. But some community, it was very positive because they never see a doctor. So I think there was a lack of preparation of the movement of things. Bill Bunbury: Sister Magali and the Commonwealth intervention in the Northern Territory, now into its second year. But its problems and their effects remain and they now fall to a new government. Tracy Spencer. Tracy Spencer: My hope is that this government (and you hear it in their rhetoric) will take consultation seriously and follow through on what the people themselves are asking for. I´m hoping that they will put the time and the effort into that, and perhaps this review of the intervention is a very good place for them to start to show that they are going to hold consultations about that in a way that enables relationships to be built, in the first instance, and then these very difficult issues to be teased out in the coming months. It´s not a `fly in, fly out´ operation, that´s not how you consult, and particularly not how you consult across cultures. Adye Viney: Some of the solutions...at least some of the solutions lie in the restoration of hope, dignity and self-respect for people, and when you think about the history of our nation in the last 200 years or so, most of that is what´s been stripped away from Aboriginal people and that has enormous implications on health, morale, all of those things, and the whole thing spirals downwards. So I think if you look at the whole problem, it´s too big and there´s no answer that you can see, but if you work on individual lives and help people to gain their own self-worth and dignity again, we see glimmers of hope by doing that. Tony Liddle: For those people that want the intervention there, good, but for other people that have lived all their lives and are educated, why drag them in and have them under the intervention laws? I´ve worked all my life, retired now and it seems like everything has gone back another 50 years or more. Barbara Shaw: Back in the old days, you know, a lot of people they lived with ration days so they were delivered rations and they were moved off their country. And now what we´ve been hearing is they´re gong to be doing that again. And with this income management stuff, a lot of communities in remote areas, they´re getting food delivered to them...yeah, they´re getting food delivered to them but that means that my great-grandmothers and great-grandfathers that are living out in these remote communities are living through their ration days, getting food delivered to them twice in their lifetime. Bill Bunbury: History repeating itself? Barbara Shaw: Yes. Adye Viney: We need to make people feel that they are of some worth to society and that they have something to contribute. And some of the ways that we´ve seen that begin to work is through art. We have a painting program at our centre and people are able to come and paint on canvas. We can provide the paint and the canvases for them. So it´s when people begin to find some purpose and meaning for their own existence and their own life that some of those other bigger issues begin to be addressed. Some of the best results we´ve had is when a non-Aboriginal person and an Aboriginal person...working together, it´s often that the non-Aboriginal person is considered the expert, the one with all the answers, and it´s when you can reverse that situation so that the Indigenous person actually becomes the expert and the non-Aboriginal person becomes the one who is learning, that is very empowering for people. It´s good to be in a situation where the Aboriginal person becomes the teacher or the expert and we become the students or the learners. Sister Magali: If it comes from themselves it works. If it´s imposed from somebody else, it fails. Father Asaeli Raass: When Pope John Paul II came here 21 years ago he spoke strongly, not only to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait people but to all Australian people, and he asked that we learn from one another. He challenged also the Aboriginal people of this land to contribute, not only to the church but to the welfare of society because there is a strong belief that they have so much, so much to give. And the challenge of course is for us in the mainstream or people who come from outside, is to accept their contribution. So it will get better, it will get better. If we give the Indigenous people an opportunity to affect change, to take responsibilities, and I know they can. I know it. Bill Bunbury: You´ve been with Encounter on ABC Radio National and staying with the different stories of Alice Springs in recent months. My thanks to the church groups and the Indigenous people of the Centre who gave their time for this Encounter and for permission to use sound excerpts from A Changing Race, as seen on Storywall nights in Alice Springs. Technical production today, David Lemay. And don´t forget to visit the Encounter website: go to abc.net.au/rn, choose Encounter from the program list, and there you´ll find a full transcript of this week´s program and more information about what we´ve shared today in Encounter. There´s also a streaming audio link so you can listen again on your computer, and a podcast link so you can download and listen anywhere you like. I´m Bill Bunbury and thanks for listening. read less
2008-08-10 Bells and Whistles
Sat August 09 2008
With the Olympics this month, Encounter asks what religion has got to do with sport? There are many religious, spiritual and superstitious practices that sports people believe assist their performance, so we´ll explore where sport and religion have common ground and where they clash. And we´ll tap the creative ways people are making a difference to sporting hooliganism as players from different faiths tie up their boots and run onto the field together. This program is especially important for serious fans, because we also answer the question: Can sport be a religion? TRANSCRIPT: TRANSCRIPT Athens Olympics Commentator: Now they´ve been called onto their marks again, the Men´s 4 x 100 metres relay. Crawford, rather resplendent golden shoes he´s wearing by the looks of things, they stand out. Or the soles do, anyway. They glitter! Kerry Stewart: Hello, I´m Kerry Stewart and yes, you are listening to Encounter on ABC Radio National. With the Olympics just started, in this program I´ve called `Bells and Whistles´, we´re going to explore the relationship between sport and spirituality. Athens Olympics Commentator: (STARTER´S GUN) And Crawford got away well, so did Garner for Great Britain and Basil´s running a good leg for Australia in the early stages. Crawford is motoring ... Kerry Stewart: So what has religion and spirituality got to do with sport? Well at the Athens Olympics, Crawford, wearing those golden shoes, may have been calling on the ancient Greek God Hermes, whose golden winged sandals, it´s said, `bore him swift as a breath of air over sea and earth´. Just a few days ago, on the 8th of the 8th, 08, the Beijing Olympics began. For the Chinese hosts this is a most auspicious date bringing, they hope, blessings for all and lots of Gold Medals for them. And the Olympic Hymn was played at the Opening Ceremony, calling on God to assist all the athletes. So as you can see there are many religious, spiritual and superstitious practices that sports people believe assist their performance. So we´ll explore where sport and religion have common ground and where they clash. And for the serious sports fans we´ll also answer the question: Is sport, as some people believe, a religion? But first, let´s go back in time to the Ancient Greeks to find out about the religious roots of the first Olympic Games. And who better to tell us about that than Richard Pengelly, an Anglican priest who represented Australia in water polo at the Los Angeles and Seoul Olympics and teaches a course called `Sport and Spirituality´ at the University of Western Australia. Richard Pengelly: Ancient cultures wherever they developed sport, it had a religious aspect because everything did. We´ve only compartmentalised religion in the West sort of post Industrial Revolution, Enlightenment, if you like. But the Greeks formed four types of games, one of which was the Olympics which came to be the predominant one. The athletes went into training for a month or so before the Games which had very little to do with physical activity and a lot to do with ethics and theology and oratory and all the sort of purer aspects of Greek culture, and they went through this extraordinary, basically month-long ritual. The men originally competed naked, they competed for a wreath and the honour of their people. There weren´t many events, in fact the first real Olympics there was only one, the Stade, or the straight sort of 200-yard dash. But then came along other sports, and it got more and more political, and in fact more and more secularised when their heroes had statues built in their honour and were given money and kudos. Kerry Stewart: And then the Christian church closed it down. Richard Pengelly: Yes. What happened was the Romans aspired after the best elements of Greek culture, and they built gymnasia in their cities and they borrowed from the Olympics, but they prostituted them in a way, and they turned physical activity into very violent activity, hence the Coliseum and all the stuff we´re familiar with. So Theodosius who was about 80 or 90 years after Constantine, looked at all this and he and his advisers said Well, it´s become a Pagan festival, it´s become incredibly violent and gory, it goes contrary to the notions particularly in St Paul´s writings in the New Testament, of the supremacy of the soul over the flesh, which is inherently in decay and corrupt, and they said, That´s it. The Olympics are all over. OLYMPIC HYMN Kerry Stewart: The first modern Olympic Games was in Athens in 1896 and it opened with this hymn. Ancient immortal Spirit, pure father Of beauty, of greatness and of truth, Descend, reveal yourself as lightning here Within the glory of your own earth and sky. So after the closure of the Games in Ancient Rome, who decided that they needed to be revived, and did religion have anything to do with it? Richard Pengelly again. Richard Pengelly: A Frenchman called Baron Pierre de Coubertin, a rather wealthy Frenchman who was a Catholic of sorts, he was a bit of a lapsed Catholic, but he had a very strong Catholic upbringing and spirituality, was deeply influenced by some writings of a chap called Rousseau in the 18th century, with a book called `Emile´ I think it was called, that talked about the power of sport to inculcate values. And then he went across to England and went to the school called Rugby, which had a legendary headmaster called Thomas Arnold in the 1850s and `60s. He was influenced by the book, Thomas Hughes´ book `Tom Brown´s Schooldays´ a semi-autobiographical account of his time at Rugby, where Arnold and his Chaplain, Cotton, really reached an ethic of building Christian manliness through many things, including sport, and they and others developed the games of Rugby and Cricket as great examples of this. So de Coubertin was influenced by this movement and in 1896 after many years of hard work and fundraising and trying, he launched the modern Olympic Games with an ethic known as Olympism which he wanted to be a form of kind of secular religion. And he knew, his genius was, to include a very ritualistic experience for people that in those days included sermons by bishops, going to church, singing hymns, because all of the early Olympic teams were white Anglo Saxon Christian nations. So it was logical to have this strong Christian input. So, up until about probably 1924, 1928, the Olympic Games had a very, very strong Christian influence. OLYMPIC HYMN ENDS/APPLAUSE Kerry Stewart: Like the Olympics, sport in Australia is no longer strongly influenced by Christianity. But religious challenges are starting to emerge in sport as people from different faiths tie up their boots and run on the field together. One of the best places to see this grassroots change is in the multicultural suburb of Lakemba, in Sydney. Soccer coach, Sam Nguyen. Sam Nguyen: As a young person growing up I went to a Buddhist school, so I spent a lot of my time from early childhood until primary school I actually lived in a temple in Vietnam in Hoi An. Sport was not important for me when I first arrived in Sydney or even in Vietnam. As I grew up in Vietnam my family reinforced the values of education, not sport. When I arrived here in Sydney in February, 1977, I then experienced some difficulty with family issues with my older brother, so I had to go and live in Blacktown Youth Refuge. That´s where I met my foster-mother, and I was living with my foster-family and they were Catholic. And they actually told me then, it´s good for me to play sport and mix with other young people. So that´s how I got involved in playing sport. GONG Sam Nguyen: And you can see here is my family altar, or my ancestor altar. I have both of my grandparents, my two older brothers, and one niece. And this older brother here and the niece, that´s the father and daughter, they drowned when we escaped Vietnam. But the ritual here is this: Every day, in the morning, we burn the incense, bow three times, one, two, three: one for the heaven, two for the earth, and three for the spirits of this land and all the people that pass away that are not living in this land, to give us permission for their spirit to come to our house. And I say to my children if I die, they can talk to me any time they want to by just burning incense and when they see the smoke going up from the incense, it means I´m here with them. For the previous three years I coached the Lakemba sports under 10, 11, and 12 soccer teams. This year I coached the National Sports, Under 13, Division one, soccer team. BALL BEING KICKED Sam Nguyen: OK. Sam is a ChrisMus, he´s half Muslim, half Christian, and this is Gom. Gom is - you are from North Sudan aren´t you? And you´re a Christian aren´t you? Yes. This boy is from Jordan, isn´t it? Half Jordan, half Lebanese? Kerry Stewart: What´s your name? Mohamed Nurjaman: Mohamed. Sam Nguyen: And this is Sam James, my son. Sam James: Hi. Kerry Stewart: And you´re a Buddhist? Sam James: I´m Christian. Sam Nguyen: Half Christian, half Buddhist. Kerry Stewart: And do you enjoy playing together? All : Yes. Kerry Stewart: What do you learn from this team do you think? Martin Houdek: How to work with other people and respect them as individuals. And for their religions and their differences. And to accept people for like, who they are. Like my friend is Muslim but I don´t talk about it very often because it could be like a touchy issue and he´s kind of sensitive, so I don´t want to like offend him in any way, like accidental or direct. Kerry Stewart: So you just have fun with him on the soccer field, is that right? Sam James: Yes. I just have fun and just play soccer. Kerry Stewart: And what do you learn from soccer itself? Gom Akol: Sportsmanship and making new friends. Mohammed Nurjaman: Care. Care for each other, you know, help each other. Yes, because we all like come from different countries, we can all play soccer so we become friends through that process. Kerry Stewart: Mixed religious teams like this one could be the way the Socceroos or the Matildas look in the future. But the history of sporting teams in Australia is very different. Most players were Christian, but teams were divided along Catholic and Protestant lines. So when did the Church embrace the idea that sport would promote physical and spiritual health for young people? Richard Pengelly. Richard Pengelly: Muscular Christianity was a movement that really got going in England in the mid-19th century and there were many factors behind this. Primarily the Industrial Revolution was well under way, and young men were flocking to the cities with time and money on their hands and they were getting involved in prostitution and gambling and drinking. And the Christian church that had been so suspicious of sport for so long, began to have some prominent thinkers like Charles Kingsley, and across the channel in the US, Dwight L. Moody, C.T. Stubbs, the great English cricket Captain, who started to say Well look, if we begin to see sport as a healthy pastime for these young men, as a way of teaching them the predominant values of their culture: working hard, self-sacrifice, in working for the team, and staying fit and healthy and out of the pubs and out of the brothels, then we can really promote a healthy society. So it becomes very, very organised in Church schools, you get the growth of the YMCA movement in the late 19th century, you get the Scouting movement beginning in the early 20th century and you then start to get Sports Chaplains emerging. Kerry Stewart: Many religious schools have been interested in sport haven´t they? I mean there are the GPS schools in New South Wales and Queensland that battle it out on the field in Rugby still. Richard Pengelly: Indeed. Schools with a religious background have really cottoned on to sport, and there´s a humorous side to this of course, which is meant to control their sexual urges, particularly homosexuality and masturbation and that´s written about in the 19th century. But really if you look at the Mission and Value Statements of any of these big schools, or if you were to ask people in leadership why they do so much sport, and spend so much time and money in very competitive sport, they would argue, and this is a hangover of Muscular Christianity, that this promotes the best values and ethics of our society, of working for the team, of giving of your best, of hardening the body and bringing it under subjection, as Paul would write, in 1 Corinthians. So it´s got a very strong influence on the way our schools do sport today. Kerry Stewart: Do you think though, there was an element of battling out old religious rivalries on the field? Richard Pengelly: There certainly has been, and in this country I suppose there´s been an element of it in Australian Rules Football which of course was Victorian Football League in those days. Between the wars particularly at the time of Archbishop Mannix in Melbourne there were influential figures in, say, Collingwood, who were a very strongly Catholic club and Essendon, they had a number of Protestant leadership figures, including one very prominent Baptist Minister, and there was a time when it was certainly an advantage if not essential, to be a Catholic to get anywhere in the Collingwood Club, or to be a Protestant to get anywhere in the Essendon Club. Soccer has always had ethnic roots here in Australia, but of course that´s influenced by religion, so in my city, Perth, we had Floreat Athena and Perth Azzuri and Spearwood Dalmatinac, until the government intervened and said, `You´ve got to remove those names´, and they had undertones of Orthodoxy or Catholicism or Protestantism, so yes, it´s been very strong in this country. Kerry Stewart: In Sam Nguyen´s team Christians and Muslims play side by side, even if they have been enemies in their homeland. So how does he cope with potential animosity? Sam Nguyen: Two of my players in the team, one is from North Sudan, one from South Sudan. The issue with North Sudan and South Sudan is the war, and often one is Christian, one is Muslim. To work through the issue is we focus on the soccer and I take social work, group work, to my soccer. And I have games just like any function, we´ll have team building. I use some of those strategies to work with the young people and I encourage families every year at the start of the season after two or three games, I invite the parents to come to the park, bring their food and have a picnic after the game. And often this is how we mend some of that language, funny language of rivalry, becomes `Look, your son´s doing good, you know, they´re good boys, they´re doing this good, and I hope this transfers to their behaviour good at home, and their study good at school´, and that kind of stuff. So in that way the parents know when their children are with me, I treat them like my own children. Kerry Stewart: And how do they function together? Sam Nguyen: I think as the coach, it is my responsibility to have basic rules, and those basic rules are I expect absolutely no swearing, no teasing, and no fighting at all whatsoever, and it works well and all the parents respect that. Kerry Stewart: So when they first came into the team, did the children swear, and not respect? Sam Nguyen: Yes. Look, I come from a refugee background. It took me some years to understand violence doesn´t work. You know look, I went through three years of college in Wagga Wagga and then four years of university at New South Wales University going through social work, and learned about social behaviour and human behaviours. It took me seven years to understand me, you know. And I was not a violent person. For some of these young people who´ve just recently arrived, and they´ve been through extreme, witnessed extreme violence, what I ask them to do is change their language when they speak to me, change their language when they speak to other people. If I change their behaviour that´s too hard, I can´t do that. I just change the way they speak to each other. And that way we focus on the language of the behaviour, not the behaviour to the language. Kerry Stewart: Teaching the members of an Under 13s team to curb their bad language and respect each other´s religious beliefs is one thing, but how does Hazem el Masri, the only Muslim in the NRL team, the Canterbury-Bankstown Bulldogs, respond when insensitive things are said to him by his team mates? Hazem el Masri: It just reminds me a lot of schooldays, that you know, everyone´s trying to sort of make fun of someone else, or just have a bit of a laugh, and they´ve all sort of got some great sense of humour as well, and there´s no shortage of comedians there now I tell you that,. But look, there´s always limits to things, and sometimes one of the boys will say something that it´s funny in a way but it might be sort of offensive to the religion or whatever. But I make sure I don´t make a big fuss about it, you know, in front of everyone else, and that, I make sure I sort of take them aside by themselves and then just say, `Listen, look, it´s funny, I know it is, but please just don´t say that again because it´s a little bit offensive´, and they´re also sort of quick to jump in, apologise straight away, `Oh, I didn´t mean it´, I say, `No, no, I know how you meant it, don´t get me wrong, but just be careful next time, I don´t mind you saying such-and-such, that way, but just don´t go sort of that direction.´ Kerry Stewart: Hazem el Masri talking to Australian Story on ABC-TV recently. We hear a lot about aggression, racism and hooliganism on and off the field, but in this program we´re tapping into the creative ways people are making a difference to sport and community. Male sports stars and male teams get the most financial support, the most media coverage and have the largest fan base in Australia. So what´s happening to encourage the most unlikely girls to run hard and kick a soccer ball with skill? Fatima Kourouche. Fatima Kourouche: Sport is something that I really like, love actually. When I first came to Australia I remember coming from the airport home and all I could see is grass, grass, grass, it´s just everywhere, every house had grass and that´s something that it´s just not in abundance when you come from Beirut, it´s all high rise apartments. My current job is with Australian Sports Commission as a State adviser and in All Australian Sporting Initiative which is part of the National Action Plan to use sport for social cohesion, community harmony and also to increase participation in sport among people in culturally diverse communities. I´m also a member of Lakemba Sports Club, managing the girls team and also supporting the girls teams. And what we´re trying to do, because we have a very high culturally diverse area here, predominantly Muslim, and they are actually one of the groups that are very low participation, so I guess the reason that we´re attracting a lot of girls here is because we are very culturally sensitive, like in our activities. So with myself being Muslim, wearing the hijab I think it helps the girls feel more comfortable and we also have female coaches and managers for all our female teams because we believe that makes the girls more attracted to coming in and joining, and it´s also the parents are more likely to allow their daughters to participate in sport knowing that they´re being looked after by other females. Girls do have different needs and when girls are playing sports and male coaches tend to be competition driven and pushing the girls you know, win, win, win, and girls have different needs, a lot of the girls participate because to socialise with other girls. You know, biologically women are different and you could have in one game you have three or four girls have cramp problems and don´t want to play so you really can´t push them to play and you have to understand that some won´t turn up. I guess they have more family obligations as well, seen as having to stay home and help Mum. I mean when schools have camps, even sport, girls just voluntarily say No, they don´t want to participate, because they don´t feel comfortable with an environment with being maybe with other cultures that they haven´t normally mixed with. Even the camps that we have, we have girls who say Well this is the first time I´ve ever been on a camp, never slept away from home. So it´s an experience for the girls. Kerry Stewart: Every year the number of Muslim women competing in the Olympic Games is growing. In 2004 there were about 50, including a sprinter and a judo champion who were the first women ever to compete for Afghanistan. Iraq sent one teenage markswoman, because the sport of pistol shooting allowed her to wear the hijab and a long coat. Iraqi women love playing football, and although they don´t compete at the Olympics, they´ve been winning games at a rival event, The Women´s Islamic Games where they compete with no male spectators and no televising of the event. The next Games, in 2009 will be held in Tehran in a new 40,000 seat stadium, for women only, which is under construction now. Back here, at Parry Park, some of the girls in the Lakembaroos team are wearing hijabs, leggings and long-sleeved T-shirts under their uniforms. Zahra Hijazi: Hello, my name is Zahra Hijazi. Today we´re watching the under-13 girls in the Canterbury district. The Lakembaroos, versus Enfield today. At the moment, the score is 1-nil, the Lakembaroos are up. We´re still in the first half though. Kerry Stewart: So tell me the history of the Lakembaroos, girls´ team. Zahra Hijazi: Well this team came together last year. It was a group of girls who wanted to make a team, most of which who had never played soccer but wanted the fun of it. And last year they came together, we trained very well, it was a lot of bonding and a lot of friendships formed and things like that, all those skills were developed. And for a team who started off not really knowing how to play soccer, they went through to win the Grand Final at the end of the season. And so that was just such a huge success for the girls. And now they´ve moved up a division this year and they´re going strong and confident. Now they´re doing so well and you just see the change in their approaches. All of them, their personalities as well as their approach to soccer, they´re more confident as girls, and becoming women, and things like that. Kerry Stewart: Do you think it´s got to do with the physicality of the game? You know, actually using their bodies in a strong way? Zahra Hijazi: I think so, and I think it then represents that inner strength as well, being able to hold strong in the field, or kick a ball further than what they could have the previous week, it then represents something else like it´s that can do attitude that they need to have in their lives. Kerry Stewart: For Anglican priest and former Olympian, Richard Pengelly, the human body is closely linked to his understanding of God. Richard Pengelly: Well I see the body as a gift and I see the most powerful expressions of the deity as incarnate. We talk in Christianity of God becoming one of us, in the person of Jesus, but also in every person and every creature. So incarnation in bodily form is an absolutely crucial theological concept. I also believe in a God who is inherently playful and has a great sense of humour, and wants us to enjoy life and enjoy activity with each other, and there´s a simple biological fact that the body is designed to be exercised, it is at its best when it uses its muscles and hearts and lungs and brain and so I see it working at many levels. Kerry Stewart: There´s a stereotypical view that Muslim girls don´t engage very physically with their bodies. Is that real and do you have to overcome that? Fatima Kourouche: That´s a definite stereotype. It´s definitely not true because Muslim women, because they wear the hijab doesn´t mean they have a disability. The hijab is just a fabric that we wear over our head as a religious obligation but it´s by no means a hindrance to us doing activities. What we do need is opportunities and for people to understand that by having Muslim girls in their team it´s not actually going to be any issues apart from being allowed to dress the way they need to dress. Kerry Stewart: Modesty is an issue and the soccer girls and soccer teams have particular uniforms. How about when they go swimming? Fatima Kourouche: Well that is the biggest challenge for Muslim women: swimming. And it was for a while until recently a wonderful lady, Aheda (Zanetti), started designing Muslim women´s swimwear. Kerry Stewart: Because swimming is quite important in Australia isn´t it, being able to swim is a safety issue. Fatima Kourouche: Actually swimming is also one of the Islamic mandatory skills that you need to learn. Swimming, horse riding and archery, because they are considered survival skills. You know swimming, we´re surrounded by 70% water so it´s really important to know how to swim and you know I guess archery or in these days it would be being able to get food and things like that support, and transport like for horse riding, which is now driving. Kerry Stewart: And Lakemba Sports Club colours are green and gold? Zahra Hijazi: Yes, and they´re called the Lakembaroos. When the club started taking on soccer teams quite a few years ago now, I think one of the things was to help with the culture and developing their identity and especially in this area you´ve got a big population of people migrating from Lebanon and there´s quite a few from I think Vietnam and a few other countries, and I think helping them take on the Australian identity as well as maintaining a balanced cultural background as well. And I think that was one of the things that this club wanted to do, like they cater for girls who do wear the scarf, this is how you then wear your uniform and things like that, and I think it helps them develop their own sense of identity. Kerry Stewart: With more Muslims, Buddhists and people from other faiths coming to this country, do you think the way we play the games, or think about sport might change? Richard Pengelly: I´d like to think so. I mean, there´s two issues aren´t there. Do they have to become like us and become acculturated and adopt our methods even though their faith may be different, do they have to play sport our way? Or can they bring a different approach? It´s quite interesting. To my knowledge, from my reading, it´s only Christianity and Islam who tend to use sport as an evangelical tool, so they want their athletes to be focused and successful and competitive and winners, and then to use that as a forum to share the faith. With regard to the Eastern religions and perhaps Judaism, there´s much more of a less competitive approach and more of a living and dwelling in the moment and doing the best that you possibly can in the moment, with less regard for the results, less looking to the end result which actually is an important sports psychological method. But I´d like to think that there might be some influence, particularly from Eastern religions where perhaps we´re a bit less competitive and a bit more playful. Kerry Stewart: And maybe the AFL is in the lead in that regard, certainly if the Sydney Swans dressing sheds a couple of months ago is any indication. Six Tibetan monks who were accompanying the Dalai Lama dropped in on fellow Buddhist Brett Kirk, and regular meditators Bolton, Goodes and the captain, Paul Roos. Apparently the monks are big Aussie Rules fans and the Swans were very impressed by the chanting and silk scarves the monks offered them after the game. So what is that space that sports psychologists call the Zone? Perhaps it´s a bit like the focus of meditation, or prayer. Hazem el Masri is known to be one of the NRL´s best kickers, so what does he do when the pressure´s on, just before he kicks the ball for a conversion? Hazem el Masri: When I´m standing behind the ball ready to kick it, it´s sort of similar to when I´m praying because I have to be in total concentration. When I´m praying I´m in total concentration, you know, I don´t want anything sort of affecting me, it´s pretty much a connection between me and God, and in saying that I always finish it off as well with a prayer, I always sort of ask God for the extra sort of help that I always need. I´ve always been a big believer of I guess preparing myself and then be able to sort of do it on the field. So God always states to that, you know, if you strive, I´ll strive with you. STATE OF ORIGIN COMMENTATOR: Here´s the great man, the greatest goal kicker I´ve ever seen. From the sideline, Hazem el Masri on debut at origin level in front of 52,000 people, and a lot of people watching on TV around the nation, and the world, from 22 out, many of them praying for this to go over. People of all religions, they want this over. There goes Hazem, there he goes. He´s got it! Kerry Stewart: Sports people raise their eyes to the heavens before they throw the shot putt or after they win a game. Is it common for athletes to believe God´s on their side? Richard Pengelly: Yes, it is, and in the course that I teach at the University of W.A. we talk about athletes assuming God is going to be on their side, and we look at it in terms of religion, spirituality, magic, fetish, superstition, and some of the superstitions are extraordinary. I mean Australians will be probably aware, Australians of a certain age, of Steve Waugh´s little red hanky that he always had hanging out of his pocket and people who don´t shave or don´t change their underwear or wear 17 lucky charms, athletes are incredibly superstitious, and if something works in their mind, they will never change it, even if fails 100 times and works once, they´ll keep that superstition going. With regard to really believing God is on your side, I think some of the literature in this area is quite funny, it says, `Is it performance-enhancing to pray to God if you really believe God is going to help you win?´ I think anyone with a healthy grasp of religion is going to ask questions like, `With 50,000 children starving in the world today, does God care who wins this game of football?´ Or, `Does God want the United States to beat China in this table tennis match?´ I mean these are important questions. I think those people with a healthy spirituality will probably pray for two reasons: one is as a form of mental rehearsal, just to calm themselves and go through what they´ve got to do, and the other is the desire to do the best they can with their God-given abilities. I think in that sense, prayer is legitimate, and also perhaps a notion of sort of protection from injury, but that´s starting to get a bit superstitious as well. Kerry Stewart: We´ve spoken about prayer, but what other spiritual practices do people employ before they go onto the field, or run a race? Richard Pengelly: Well meditation and hypnosis are very common and any hypnotist will tell you athletes are the best people to hypnotise because they do it to themselves all the time. You can´t do a triple somersault with three backflips off a 10 metre diving tower if you can´t hypnotise yourself into visualising it first. You just can´t do it. So they´re common practices. Of course there´s some group activities in many American sports and this has been controversial in the last few years. They gather for a group huddle, they might say the Lord´s Prayer, they might even in some schools and some places chant something in Latin, so it becomes a kind of mantra, which is very common to spirituality. SOPRANO SINGS `JERUSALEM´ Richard Pengelly: With regard to sport as a kind of secular religion, there´s been lots of studies done particularly in the United States, sociological studies where they compare Easter Sunday with the World Series Baseball Final or the Gridiron Superbowl where they look at a stadium as a house of worship where people go for a time to use their imaginations to see this as a sacred event where coaches are compared to priests and administrators compared to bishops, and journalists compared to scribes and keepers of the sacred record and so on and so forth. So there´s no question through both the Olympic Games and through highly professional and televised and commercialised sport. People pin a lot of identity and a lot of hope and a lot of meaning to that sport, both as competitors and as spectators. But when you really read the literature and analyse it at more depth, sport of course can never really answer the questions of meaning and fulfilment and purpose and life after death etc. So sport can function every effectively like a secular religion, but most of the experts and commentators say it can´t be a religion. Kerry Stewart: Even if sport can´t be a religion, its players at the top end of the game are still treated as gods. So who do the boys in the Lakemba Under 13s team idolise? Boy: Tim Cahill. Boy: Harry Kewell. Kerry Stewart: And how about some of the players that might be of your own religion, does that make a difference, or not? Boy: No. Mohammed Nurjaman: Zinedine Zidane, Yes, he´s Muslim and he plays wonderful football. Kerry Stewart: How about Hazem el Masri. Boys: Yes, he´s footy, best kicker in the world. Kerry Stewart: Is he impressive, do you think? Boys: Yes, yes. Kerry Stewart: Why? Mohammed Nurjaman: Because if you can get religion into the way of his other play, like he´s the only Muslim in the NRL, and he´s a good player, and he´s not there to show them that he´s Muslim, he shows that he plays good football. Kerry Stewart: But I think he brings his religion to the game. Boy: He brings religion to the game, yes. Mohammed Nurjaman: You never see him in punch-ups. Yes, he always keeps it to himself. That´s what Muslims learn from their religion. Hazem el Masri: Well look, I didn´t choose to be a role model. To me, I don´t like to sort of call that as a role model, I prefer to just to go out there and let my actions do the talking. I try to live a wholesome lifestyle. Early on, I had to take that stance of making sure this is what I´m about you know, the fasting, the praying, the eating Halal food for example, not drinking alcohol, the temptation of ladies, you name it, I try to have fun as well but everything within the limits. I love socialising with my friends and I love going out and I love spending time with my family and all that. But at the end of the day I´m my own person, I try to as you say, set the right example for these kids and hope that they can follow the same footsteps. And it´s a matter of as well, because all the misleading coverage and the generalising out there especially of the Muslim and the Lebanese community, that I´ve taken that stance to show everyone pretty much, that we´re not all the same, everybody´s got their bad and good in them. Kerry Stewart: Do you think people of different faiths on the same team will develop an empathy towards each other, an understanding of each other through the game? Richard Pengelly: I´d like to think that athletes from other faiths on the same team will develop an empathy and want to know more about each other, but I do know as a Christian athlete, that it is still very tough if you declare yourself as a religious person in Australia´s particularly secular culture, we are really unique in that regard in the world, you do set yourself up for some jest and jokes and criticism. And if you´re a teenager, that´s tough. If you´re a fairly well-rounded adult who´s coming to know themselves, well then that´s OK. Hazem el Masri: The respect is there between me and my team-mates, they know what I´m like. I don´t judge them upon what they do, and they don´t judge me. They´re more than happy to ask me questions and I´m always happy to answer them. As I said early on in my career I didn´t have all the answers, but I always seek knowledge. I always went out there and tried to learn about my religion, learn about myself, so that when someone asks me, I´m not reluctant or hesitant to answer. What I believe in, I will tell you, and then it´s up to you to make your own judgement. Kerry Stewart: The boys in the soccer team mentioned how Hazem el Masri doesn´t get involved in punch-ups on the field. But every contact sports player knows that the physical battle they´re engaged in can very easily explode. So do the rules of the game allow men, in particular, to expend their aggression in a contained way on the field, rather than on the streets with weapons? Former Olympian and Anglican priest, Richard Pengelly. Richard Pengelly: Certainly. I don´t think there´s any doubt that we live in a culture that doesn´t know how to initiate our young men. We don´t separate them from the mother, from the feminine, we don´t take them out in the bush, we don´t wound them, we don´t teach them the dangers and limits of violence, and we don´t teach them their place in the universe. So what we see I think in our streets and in our cities at the moment is young men running around trying to initiate themselves, and that´s always dangerous. If you then pay them $1-million to kick a football and tell them they´re gods, and teach them to hunt in packs on a football field, you have a recipe for disaster. But if you teach young men and women, the limits of their abilities, how to obey the rule-keepers, how to empathise with team-mates and opposition, how to win and lose gracefully, I mean I think sport has many, many advantages, but as you said, probably as much as anything else is the healthy outpouring of aggression within contained limits, with very clearly delineated rules and punishments. THE HAKA Kerry Stewart: So that brings us to ethics. I mean what sporting ethics do you think parallel spiritual ones? And which ones clash? Richard Pengelly: Interesting that you mention ethics. There´s been a number of sociological studies, psychological studies, ethical studies, on the journey of ethics through sport, and some researchers a few years back called Bredemeyer and Shields traced the journey of a young person playing sport, and they talk about a 5-tier sort of progression in ethics from (and they use religious terms) from an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth through to love your enemies, empathy for your opponents. When sport becomes a highly paid entertainment industry, you drop back to an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. If you´re playing a highly professional physical sport, if a team-mate gets hit or hurt, it is your obligation to even up and to make sure that team knows that they can´t do that. It´s quite disturbing really, but we´ve got to let go of any notion, they talk about `the spirit of cricket´, well the cricketers are paid $1-million don´t expect the spirit of 19th century muscular Christianity to be overly prominent; they´re there to win. But the particular ethics that I think are spiritual, are things like the notion of belonging, the sense of belonging to a team or a tribe, the notion of discipline, which is the same word of course as disciple, you must be disciplined to be a good athlete. The notion of putting your body on the line, giving of your very best, going beyond your comfort zone, putting out for the team, the notion of self-sacrifice. But also of course obeying the rules and learning to win and lose with grace. Kerry Stewart: Were there ever any conflicts between your faith as a Christian and competing at such a high level in sport in the Olympics? Richard Pengelly: Yes, there was. Firstly the competitive aspect, and how that sits with some of the better-known and oft-quoted Christian scriptures like `turn the other cheek´ and `put the other person first´, `love your enemies´, etc., but also because water polo is an extremely physical sport. If you´ve ever seen those highlights from the Olympics, there´s lots of things going on under the water that referees can only guess about. So yes, there has always been an element of conflict. I think as a younger man, I probably was able to almost gloss over those at times. As I get older, I must say it gets a bit harder. I think my spirituality is changing. However, I think it´s crucial that we have religious people in all aspects of life, and I don´t regret my sporting days, but there´s often been a little element of conflict if I´m honest. Kerry Stewart: Let´s go back to the kids´ soccer game in Lakemba with Buddhist coach, Sam Nguyen. Sam Nguyen: A lot of people place too much value on winning, and that spoils a lot of good things that sport ought to be, and the values of the sport disappear when people just reinforce winning values and not enjoyment and each other´s company. And that´s not the children, not the players, but the adults. The adults, not the kids. Us adults have a lot to learn from the kids. If you go onto a sports field watching the under-5s, under-6s, under-7s, under-8s, they score the goals for the other side and they´re still happy. All of the adults on the side are screaming, the kids are not. Kerry Stewart: Excuse me, I´m with ABC Radio, I´m just wondering if I can ask you a few questions. Phillip: Absolutely, what would you like to know? Kerry Stewart: You´re the dads, obviously, of the Saints players. So who are you playing today? Phillip: Lakembaroos, and they beat us before, but we´re doing all right today because it´s nil-all at half-time. Kerry Stewart: I´m doing a program about religion and sport. So when you come to Lakemba it looks very different here, the kids look different. Phillip: Yes, it looks like a lot of religious kids here, but as long as we beat them at soccer we don´t really mind. I think the thing is, when you look at soccer, if you go back a few thousand years, instead of sending a few lions on to kill the Christians, it´s pretty much the same as we´re all standing here going, `Yeah! Get `em, get `em!´ So it hasn´t really changed much in a few thousand years, except we don´t have any more lions. Kerry Stewart: So you think the boys and the girls get out their aggression on the field? Phillip: We encourage our children not to be aggressive on the field. Our children. We see some people in some cultures seem to be a bit more aggressive than others. Mark: Mind you, that said, we do see teams that are clearly taught to play a harder, more physical game whereas I know that for most of us, we very actively encourage our kids not to play a hard physical game, although I think as they get older, it´s changing, because soccer these days in the modern world is a pretty physical, it is a contact sport. And it´s not like it used to be, it´s not polite, you know, and I certainly don´t think by any stretch though, you could put that down to religion really, it´s a lot to do with teams. Phillip: Now the Saints have just scored a goal. Fantastic. Against the lions. Oh no, against the other team. Kerry Stewart: Perhaps losing is the important part here, learning to lose, not win at all costs. Is that the answer, do you think? Richard Pengelly: It´s interesting. There was a time in the ancient Olympics where the wreath and certainly there were events where the wreath didn´t necessarily go to the winner. There was a team of judges who might award the wreath to the person who competed with best ethic, who may have come last. Which is a fundamentally different notion to the one we have today. If you go to the Olympics, when I talk to a bunch of schoolkids, and they discover I´ve been to the Olympics, the first question they ask is `Did you win a Gold Medal?´ and if I say, `No´, they´re decidedly less interested in me, as though going to the Olympics pales into insignificance. We´re very much a win-lose culture, and that goes for politics and every aspect of life, it´s win or lose, it´s competitive, and that´s a shame. Zahra Hijazi: They got another goal! And there were my two nieces with that one, one passed it to the other, who put it in. Three-all, I can´t believe they keep chasing each other like this one puts one in, and the other team responds straight away. They actually deserve a draw today because both teams have just been spectacular. (Whistle) Time´s up, full time, it´s a draw, that´s lovely. I always love this part at the end, the shaking of hands and it´s a good thing to acknowledge all of that at the end. And not to come off thinking `Oh, we lost´, or Yes, we won, we´re better than the other team´. Kerry Stewart: In the end it´s just a game. Zahra Hijazi: Exactly. Kerry Stewart: As the girls shake hands, we come to the end of this Encounter, called `Bells and Whistles´. My thanks to all the sports players and fans who invited me onto their pitch, ABC-TV´s `Australian Story´ for their interview with Hazem el Masri and the IOC. Production today was by Michelle Goldsworthy. I´m Kerry Stewart and thanks for keeping me company on the sidelines. read less
2008-08-03 The Cost of Food
Sat August 02 2008
With food prices rising around the world, millions are threatened with deprivation and starvation. In a complex web of causes - fuel prices, climate change and commodity speculation - how to respond to the challenge of feeding those who have trouble feeding themselves? Extra Audio Download Audio [33.09 - 15.4MB] Download an extended interview with Steve de Gruchy, Professor of Theology and Development at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Download Audio [36.06 - 16.4MB] Download an extended interview with James E. Hug, President, Center of Concern, Washington DC, USA. TRANSCRIPT: David Rutledge: On ABC Radio National, hello from David Rutledge and welcome to Encounter This week: hard times at home and abroad, with the rising cost of food. MUSIC David Rutledge: Do you find food´s getting more expensive? Shopper: Oh yes, yes, very much expensive than before. But what can we do? Even if it´s very expensive, we have to buy. Shopper: Yes, like for example vegetarian food price, and the chicken and stuff in the markets. I work at Cole´s at Gladesville; every day like the prices are going higher and higher, because of the petrol, you know. Shopper: Because we are pensioners, you know, we are more cooking, you know. David Rutledge: What do you cook? Shopper: All sorts of things, you know. Some soups and some chicken and that things, you know, noodles, spaghetti. Before, we was more eating out, you know. But food prices now, really too much. RIOT David Rutledge: The price of food is going up around the globe, causing financial stress for consumers, severe hardship for the poor, and the past few months have seen food riots from Haiti to Bangladesh to Egypt. The reasons behind the price rises are complex: climate change has affected crop production, the rising price of oil is being passed on through transportation costs, investment in commodities markets is putting upward pressure on prices, and then there´s the rise of biofuels, which take a lot of grain to produce and divert land from food production. In today´s Encounter, we´re looking at how religious and community groups are responding to the food price crisis, both practically and theologically. Hunger has been around for a long time, and religious institutions have always had mechanisms in place for feeding the hungry. But is the current crisis just another hunger outbreak, or has it come about through a new set of circumstances that require new ways of thinking and acting? Jim Hug: It is a new world. These are not just cyclical downturns in the amount of food that are available to people around the world. David Rutledge: The Center of Concern is a Washington-based Catholic organisation working to challenge economic injustice through education and advocacy. Its President is Jim Hug. Jim Hug: We´re in a stage of globalisation in which the global economy has become integrated. The global government structures that support that had begun to be put in place, but the values that our global government system (as it is right now) are promoting is economic efficiency. That´s the number one value. And the institutions that are there to support human rights, environmental protections and so on, do not have the same kind of power, and as a result the policies and legal frameworks that are being set up, are not protecting those. So we´re at a stage of global development where we need to re-think just what it is we´re putting into place, in terms of global government structures. David Rutledge: What about national governments and the spirit of co-operation there? The Food Summit in Rome in June seemed to indicate that we´re a long way from co-operation and self-sacrifice on the part of governments. Everybody turned up and immediately tried to advance their own interests. Jim Hug: That´s right. And that´s been going on for some time on the global level. And part of the problem is that the larger industrial wealthy nations have hung on to this vision of how development has to happen around the world: that we have to free up all trade, we have to let the corporations move freely, and that that will be best for everybody - and they´re not willing to let go of that. The power of money has too big a control on them. So yes, we´re a ways from international collaboration - but maybe the best thing in the world is that people in wealthy nations are struggling from the same problems, because we begin to see that the system doesn´t work for us either. You know, it´s not as though we´re doing it right and the rest of the world is failing and should live up to what we´re promoting. It doesn´t work for us either. David Rutledge: Jim Hug, President of Center of Concern - and we´ll be hearing more from him later in the program. SONG - How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live David Rutledge: Have you noticed food prices going up? Shopper: Oh yes. Shopper: Everything, every week. In the 70s when we came here, it was only twenty dollars you get the whole shopping for one month, you know. David Rutledge: Twenty dollars a month for your groceries? Shopper: Yes, yes, mostly, yes. David Rutledge: What about now? How much are you spending on groceries a month now? Shopper: One hundred and fifty. David Rutledge: Have you noticed food prices going up in the last six to twelve months? Shopper: Yes, definitely. You pay about a dollar for one little cutlet. David Rutledge: So you´re not buying much meat? Shopper: No. David Rutledge: What are you buying? What´s in your shopping bag today? Shopper: Well, doughnuts, as you can see [laughs]. Shopper: I buy all those cheap brands and stuff - try to, anyway. I mean I like my coffee with milk in it, and it´s pretty expensive, but I buy like Sunshine milk to stretch it, so yes. David Rutledge: Are you feeding a family? Shopper: No, just me and my partner. Still hard, but. Shopper: I bought some soup bones, to make some soup - and mince, there´s lots of things you can do with mince. David Rutledge: We know that the leaders of the G8 nations have been meeting to discuss - among other things - the high food prices. If you could send a message to those international leaders, what would you say to them? Shopper: To get out into the shopping markets themselves, and see the price of things, not just sit down to it already cooked. Shopper: Put them down, and keep them, yes - David Rutledge: Sort it out? Shopper: Yeah, sort it out, sort your shit out [laughs]. David Rutledge: Legal frameworks and government restrictions are something of a thorn in the side of free market advocates, for whom money is supposed to be allowed to travel and accumulate wherever the economic conditions dictate. But as the price of food continues to climb, there are growing calls for restrictions on the market, particularly coming from religious organisations, who understand perhaps better than economists, that the pursuit of wealth and the pursuit of human life and dignity don´t always go hand in hand. Steve de Gruchy is Professor of Theology and Development at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa. Steve de Gruchy: I do think that the resources of the three Abrahamic faiths - Judaism, Christianity and Islam - are that we´ve always understood the importance of a rule-based economy. Everyone looks for example at the Old Testament, and some of the stuff in the Qur´an, there´s a sense in which the economic responsibility of human beings is not a carte blanche laissez-faire do-whatever-you-want and just allow the market to kind of ameliorate what you want to do. There´s a set of rules there about how you live your life, and a recognition that human beings are - I suppose, in classic theological language - are sinful. They´re going to try and use available opportunities to their own benefit, and to the loss of their neighbour. And part of the rule-based system is to say "hang on a second, in the long run, that´s going to affect all of us". And if we´re going to live together, in some sense that reflects a wider vision of what humanity can be, and should be - we´ve got to have some rules in place. One of the things that happened in the rise of the nation-state in Europe, and certainly in the United States in the 1700s and 1800s, was a recognition of precisely that. That widespread poverty, say, around the time of the French Revolution, that there was a problem with the rules. We needed rules. And part of what we call democracy - constitutions, Bill of Human Rights - all emerged out of that struggle, that ordinary people wanted the rules to control those who used the laissez-faire economic system to get their own way. What I´m thinking needs to emerge in the next fifty years is we need a global - just like what happened with the nation-states - I think as we recognise more and more that we have a global economy, and that we don´t have those rules in place, and that we have a laissez-faire global economic system that enables people to get away with whatever they want economically, part of the global religious response is going to have to be some vision of global rules. And I think the hunger and food insecurity issue is tied into that. Quite a lot of the recent literature suggests the sort of lack of rules around commodity trading, around foods, is part of what´s driving up the food prices. Jim Hug: Trade policy that´s focused on economic efficiency; the trade agreements - whether through the World Trade Organisation, or the regional trade agreements in the last twenty-five, thirty years - have all been focused on opening markets and freeing up trade, without attention to what that does locally. And when you get into those trade negotiations, then it´s the larger and the wealthier nations that have the most leverage to get things into the agreements the way they want them - and as a result, they´re serving the needs of large corporate agriculture in places like the United States, Europe, Japan and Australia, rather than focusing upon what is necessary for local food security and for national food sovereignty. The large corporations are making huge profits in oil and in food, and speculators are profiting on that. The planet is getting warmer, and there´s greater danger (because of the change in weather patterns) to our ability to produce and even to survive on the planet. So the whole thing is beginning to fall apart. This is not sustainable environmentally, and it´s not sustainable socially. And there has to be a dramatic change in our thinking. David Rutledge: And as yet, we´re seeing, as always, countries in the developing world bearing the brunt of these changes. Our response in the West has traditionally been food aid - and yet Kofi Annan recently announced that "the era of food aid is over, there is no more sending food from America to Africa". What do you think of that? Jim Hug: Well, I support that. You know, any of the kind of absolute statements "there is no more...." probably need to be nuanced and modified, and you say "well, in an extreme case..." But what has happened, for example, in the US, I can speak from our experience: we have very large subsidies for our farm sector, as I´m sure your listeners know. Those have led to over-production, and so we have these huge stocks of grain that we then give around the world in times of food crisis. What we´ve begun to see is that when you dump a huge amount of subsidised food into the market of a poor country that does not subsidise its small farmers, they can´t compete with the price, and so that´s when they begin to lose their farms. So what we found is that a great deal of that kind of direct food aid, while it may have reduced our surpluses, and made us feel generous, at the same time it´s undermining the ability to produce their own food in poor nations. Once those people are off the land, once those people have lost their skills and knowledge about how to do farming in that area, those are major losses that make the countries dependent on importing food, and therefore vulnerable to price hikes like this - in a way that they wouldn´t be, if the food had not been dumped there in the first place. David Rutledge: Jim Hug. And on ABC Radio National you´re listening to Encounter, and a program looking at causes, effects and responses to the rising cost of food. MUSIC David Rutledge: In much of Africa, food availability is a chronic problem, and has been for many years. IN countries such as Zambia, the recent spiralling food prices represent just another twist in a very old story of issues around development, education, health and human capital. Miniva Chibuye is Co-ordinator of the Social Conditions Program at the Jesuit Centre for Theological Reflection in Lusaka, Zambia. Miniva Chibuye: We´ve been having a recurring food crisis in Zambia. Most of the households are experiencing difficulties, like fresh food items. Actually just mentioning that, Zambia has a population of ten million people and sixty per cent of these are in rural areas. The latest statistics actually reveal that about eighty per cent of those in rural areas are poor. So what happens is that most of them cannot afford to even grow enough to eat, therefore they have to rely on food aid. David Rutledge: When you say that the mainstay in rural areas is agriculture, why are people not growing their own food? Miniva Chibuye: Well that´s a very good question. But what happens is that most of those in rural areas are small-scale farmers. David Rutledge: Small-scale farmers you say? Miniva Chibuye: Yes, most of them are small-scale farmers with landholdings of maybe one acre or so. They depend so much on the government, the subsidised fertiliser, but then because not everybody has access to that subsidised fertiliser, most of them are not working. And also they do not have the technology that would ensure that they produce enough to eat within one year. David Rutledge: Could it be the case that if you have higher food prices, this is something that could make it more profitable to run a farm, in spite of the difficulties that farmers are having with fertiliser and access to water - if they were able to grow even a small amount of food, then the fact that they could sell that food at a much higher price, would that be any sort of benefit? Miniva Chibuye: Well yes, it is a benefit, we´ve realised that. But I think what should be realised is that first of all, do the people see it in that way? They need to get the information, and most of the people in rural areas do not have access to that kind of information. And the other thing is that to lure them back to the rural areas would require that first of all they have access to the land, enough land in order for them to produce - but secondly, they need the capital to start producing on a large scale or even on a medium scale. So we need a support system - maybe access to credit facilities, to getting very modest technology in order for them to kick-start the process of producing. But it´s not just the poor people now, but it´s also those that are in the middle class - and the issue also to highlight is that the cost of the essential non-food items, such as housing, are quite expensive, and therefore you need to make a choice of whether to pay for your house or to sacrifice on your food. And usually most of the households are not having enough to eat, because they have to pay for the other essential non-food items. David Rutledge: Miniva, can I ask you personally, how this is affecting you? What sorts of decisions are you having to make because of the high food prices? Miniva Chibuye: Well OK, with the Zambian set-up what I´d say is that even if you work, it´s not just your money, so you don´t have the freedom to spend the money on yourself. You also have to look at the welfare of the extended family, and therefore even when you´re earning enough to support yourself, you are drawn back, because you have to help out your extended family. And therefore I feel the strain in that effort, because the salary in other words is not just yours but also for the extended family. So it´s becoming worse; transport costs are increasing and food costs are rising, and food costs are rising, so it´s getting worse. David Rutledge: Miniva Chibuye, of the Jesuit Centre for Theological Reflection in Zambia. In South Africa, we see similar connections between hunger and other issues such as education, land, infrastructure, and the HIV/AIDS crisis. And while the current food price rises are a recent development, they tie in with other problems that have their roots in colonial history. Steve de Gruchy. Steve de Gruchy: Food is such an important crux area that brings together a range of threads. One of them, of course, is the political question of land. South Africa, much like Zimbabwe, has a colonial pattern of land ownership that´s been inherited over the last hundred or two hundred years. So the question of access to land is the ability to farm, and part of the contest there is that commercial agriculture feels under pressure from current initiatives within government to redistribute land - so farmers are bailing out, commercial farmers, farmers who provided food for markets, are in a sense bailing out. David Rutledge: Why are commercial farmers bailing out? Is this because it´s not as profitable for them to farm as it has been? Steve de Gruchy: No, it´s politically awkward in this sense: that the figure that´s bandied about is something like thirteen per cent of the population owned eighty five per cent of the land - and clearly that´s an untenable situation going forward. And part of the political platform of a number of the liberation movements was around land, and giving land back. So what´s happening, for example, is that white farmers are feeling emotionally uncertain as to whether they should stay on in the land; people are selling out to government schemes to hand the land back to black farmers, so you have the loss of an institutional memory of farming capacities - which is not to say that people who are going to take over the land won´t be able to farm as well, but it will take a bit of time to step up the capacity to do that. David Rutledge: And what other social problems do you see food availability as being caught up in? Steve de Gruchy: Well, you mentioned the HIV and AIDS crisis, and I think that´s a crucial issue too. I think as the labour force becomes weaker through deaths, due to HIV and AIDS or sickness, so people can´t produce enough food. That´s not so much a scenario in South Africa, but certainly in places like Zambia and Malawi and Tanzania; we certainly have seen that as the able-bodied people are the ones who are feeling the impact of the epidemic. But secondly, of course, good food and good nutrition are crucial in terms of the anti-retroviral therapies that are needed to respond to AIDS, and you can´t take those drugs on a bad diet. And so access to good food is crucial. David Rutledge: Well, if you take your information from the mainstream Western media, you could almost be forgiven for thinking that suffering and hunger are simply part of the African way of life - and I wonder if there´s a similar perception, a kind of fatalism, among the middle classes or the wealthier classes in South Africa. You know, this idea that "people have always gone hungry in Africa; it´s terrible, but what can you do?" Is that a prevailing attitude? Steve de Gruchy: Well, one does have to take a historical perspective on this. Africa didn´t know hunger in this kind of sustained, endemic way, until the late 1800s, when the real impact of the colonial economies started having an effect on Africa. Without being romantic about "Africans lived in a beautiful, peaceful coexistence, eating wonderful foods" - I mean, clearly that kind of romanticism isn´t going to help. But, for example, some of the laws that were passed in South Africa in the late 1800s were precisely designed to undercut African farmers´ ability to feed the growing needs in South Africa - because of the mining economy, and to privilege white farmers. There was a systematic attempt to undermine African self-sufficiency around food, precisely to produce labourers for the mining economy, but also to parcel out decent land to settlers who wanted to farm. I think secondly, in the way that India, for example ,embraced the green revolution in the 1970s, Africa has not done that. David Rutledge: Why didn´t Africa embrace the green revolution? Steve de Gruchy: Well, I think because food is dependent on a range of other factors, particularly the question of transport. You know, it´s one thing to be self-sufficient, to produce your own food on your own farm and to feed yourself, but if you´re going to feed the big cities - the Nairobis, the Kinshasas, the Lusakas, the Johannesburgs - you´ve got to have a developed transport network. Now, that´s a major crisis in the African context. A lot of the communicative networks around road and rail were left after the colonial period in the 1950s and 1960s, and you´ve got two problems with that. No.1 is that they were designed for extraction. In other words, if you look at the railway lines and the road lines in many African countries, they flow from the hinterland to the ports, and end there. But they never connect one African country to another, because the one might have been a Portuguese colony, the other one a German, and the other one a French, or an English. And the idea wasn´t to put African countries in connection with each other, but in fact to extract raw materials out of the hinterland, bring it to the port, and track it out to Europe. David Rutledge: So Steve, what role can churches and religious communities play in addressing some of these problems in the 21st century? Steve de Gruchy: I do think local community initiatives are crucial, and I think this is where the church in Africa, for example, has a huge head-start over many other institutions. But it´s a head-start that hasn´t got out of the starting blocks, because we haven´t quite realised it yet. And it´s quite amazing, actually, how religious institutions - which in sub-Saharan Africa tend to be Christian, and in as one moves further north, tend to be Muslim - the amount of resources and assets that are held by the religious communities in far-flung places, that are being used and could be better used, I would think that that´s a moral responsibility that faces religious leaders in the African continent. How do we use the networks, the social capital, the sheer physical resources - the land, for example - that missions own in many parts of Africa still? The buildings; in many places churches are the only institution with a telephone, with access to a vehicle, with access to an educated leader. How do those things get turned, and how do people see the production of food as part of their life? David Rutledge: Steve de Gruchy. CONVERSATION - small crowd In Australia, the rising cost of food represents a challenge for religious and community groups that feed the homeless. It´s Thursday night in the inner Sydney suburb of Darlinghurst and I´m at St John´s Anglican Church. Within about a square mile of here, you can find million-dollar studio apartments, and Ferrari dealerships and upmarket restaurants - and the kind of poverty and deprivation that most inner-city areas experience. On Thursday nights, St John´s hosts a drop-in centre called Rough Edges, where people can come and get a meal if they´re having trouble feeding themselves. Man: Homeless people come here and eat, just like a family. Food´s getting really expensive, because the government, through the petrol prices and all that. David Rutledge: What do you eat normally, what´s your usual diet like? Man: Sandwiches, I like eating chicken, I like anything that I like that´s got that soft taste. James: Hi, my name´s James, and I´ve just come here tonight to get something to eat. David Rutledge: Do you come here often to get something to eat? James: Yes, I do actually. I come here probably four to five times a week. David Rutledge: What do you like about it? James: Free food. Another great point is its atmosphere, where you can come and relax and meet new people, and meet people in the same situation as yourself. David Rutledge: What situation is that, tell me about your situation? James: My situation, without going into too much depth, is basically I´m not homeless, but at risk of homelessness, I´m pretty close and have been homeless previously. So there´s big money issues, I´m only on Centrelink at the moment, and gaining employment´s pretty hard - just because of the simple fact that my accommodation is not stable, and trying to find a job, and trying to look after that stuff, plus go to counselling and look after my mental illness problem is pretty hard. David Rutledge: As you know, food prices are going up all over the world; what about here in Darlinghurst in Sydney? How does that affect you? James: For myself, I get $295 off Centrelink which consists of $250 of that for rent. David Rutledge: Per fortnight? James: Per fortnight. And $50, it´s just not livable grocerywise to have breakfast, lunch and dinner. David Rutledge: You´ve got $25 a week to spend on food? James: Pretty much, yes. Man: Sometimes I get short on a pension. I´ve had to - I´ve paid my rent and I´ve really overspent in areas. I can go without a little bit of money now and again, but it´s just living on the pension, it´s a little bit tight sometimes. James: What about food? Do you go without food sometimes? Man: Oh yes, yes. Like today, I went without a meal for probably eight hours, yes. And it´s sometimes - I´ve gone without a meal probably two days. But I´m drinking, I´ll drink water, and it´s sort of a religious fast sort of thing, you know. Laurie Besant: Tonight we provide food, we provide tea, coffee, drinks, stuff like that. David Rutledge: Laurie Besant is a community outreach worker, and manager of Rough Edges. Laurie Besant: We get our food from many different places. We have a bread shop up the road that we get our bread from at times; we have a restaurant up the road which is the Hare Krishna restaurant. They have leftover food, vegetarian food, stuff like that, that they over-cook a bit, so they know they can give us some. David Rutledge: So you end up with all sorts of food? Laurie Besant: Yes we do, we end up with things from cakes to hot food, pies, sausage rolls, stews, fruit salad. So quite expensive food, some things you´d see in a café that would cost eight dollars, seven dollar sandwiches that just get given to us, yes. Man: The food here is pretty good variety, like lasagnes, curries and stuff. So I am considerably reliant on charities and like just once or twice a year Mum and Dad who are better off than I, they shout me a meal at a sailing club or something, but apart from that I cook for myself during the weekend. But otherwise I´m dependent on the services that the City of Sydney provides, like the Mary Macdonald Activity Centre you might get a free meal and stuff, yes. David Rutledge: What do you eat? Man: Well, what I like is not what I get very frequently. I really like ham and pineapple, but that´s an extraordinary rarity. My delight is real when there´s a special meal like we have, like Rough Edges have a Christmas party and stuff, there´s really good tucker then. And like we´re really blessed with both with Govindas down the road, and OzHarvest who gather food from expensive restaurants and pass it us to us, yes. David Rutledge: Even in a relatively wealthy suburb like Darlinghurst, there´s not as much food available to charities as there was before prices started climbing. Sandra Patton is a parishioner at St John´s and she´s active in a number of local community initiatives, tackling homelessness and related concerns. She says that for programs like Rough Edges, the economics surrounding food prices are starting to hurt. Sandra Patton: We are basically reliant on what we here at St John´s can actually raise ourselves. We are an established charity, but we´re not that well known, so each month is basically, you know, we´ve got more month than money. And obviously as the economic situation kicks in more and more, with higher petrol prices, higher food prices, higher mortgages, and everything else that goes with that - we´re actually finding people have got less and less of their charity dollar to give to us. David Rutledge: So let´s talk about the food price crisis that we´re seeing at the moment, or recently: how is that affecting the ability of Rough Edges to do what it does? Sandra Patton: Well we´re constantly struggling, and it´s probably getting tighter. And at this moment in time, in terms of the offertories by the church, we´re down $3500 in a six-month period. Now that doesn´t sound like a lot of money, but if you think about the amount of shopping you can actually buy with $3500, that´s a lot. David Rutledge: And what about the food that´s coming from restaurants, donations, that kind of thing, is that less than it has been? Sandra Patton: Well, we used to rely on three restaurants. We actually had two pull out of the program, so that´s why we went to OzHarvest, because they actually have a bigger reach around restaurants throughout the whole of the metropolitan area. David Rutledge: Why did those restaurants pull out of the program? Sandra Patton: Basically they weren´t getting the clientele going to their places. They were cutting back in terms of what they were actually buying. I think there´s a great fallacy about the Eastern Suburbs going around at the moment that it´s wealthy, because of obviously Double Bay, Vaucluse, and all those areas - but in fact, a lot of people around here actually do have things like mortgage stress, and petrol stress, and so consequently they´re not going out. And if they´re not going out, they´re not going to restaurants, and restaurants are a great provider of employment for people, because that´s what they rely on as human resources. And if they´re not getting those people coming through, they´re buying less, which means they´ve got less to give us. David Rutledge: What about donations of food to the church? Sandra Patton: I think they´re actually falling as well. Every Sunday we have a basket in the church that we have to give non-perishable foods, and I´ve actually noticed the last couple of weeks it´s not as big as what it used to be. David Rutledge: I had one guest on the program who made an interesting point: he was saying that - as you´ve been suggesting yourself - that this particular food price problem is something which is being felt by everybody, not just the poor. It´s the middle classes, the people with mortgages and this kind of thing, who are feeling it as well. And he had sort of a positive angle on it. He said that as people in the middle and upper strata of society are feeling the pinch, then this is going to bring to their attention - in a way that maybe hasn´t been the case before - the predicament of poorer people. And somehow this may result in a situation where people are more sympathetic, more sensitive to the plight of the poor, and perhaps more ready to give. Do you think that there´s something in that? Sandra Patton: Possibly. But I´m not really quite sure, because I think at the moment with mortgages having gone up, with petrol prices having gone up, with food prices having gone up, there has been a trend recently, as b