Saturday, April 6, 2013


Dawn of War

It flies, a solitary black crow
Above the debris of damaged homes
Abandoned in fear and dread
Beyond the parched and barren lands
Fields untended and forsaken.



The echoes of children at play,
Of flopping cows on roads and farms
Of women preparing an evening meal,
Dogs and chickens, cats and bats,
Are now but figments of the past.

For now it is a land of death
That wails and weeps of lives unsaved
Parched from the the stream of blood that flowed
Mute to the cries and welts of battle
Numb to the scorching summer heat.

Oh yes it weeps but still it glides
As it aims at the distant single tree
To rest its wings and heal its heart
To gain its strength to guard the land
Until that seeds of freedom sprout.

(Manja, Mar. 31, 2013, Sri Lanka)

Friday, April 5, 2013


What’s on the Road Ahead[1]
(By Wilson Cadiogan)[2]

T
 hree months ago the decision was simple – well, not so simple. Starting a new life in Australia as a lowly paid factory worker with a family of five to depend on that pay, and after only 48 hours in the country was not necessarily an act of desperation. I could easily have opted for unemployment benefits, considerably higher than the factory job paid, while looking for something more appropriate to my training and experience. But I did not want to lose a moment to find out, in order to find myself in a relation to the land of OZ, whether Australia was the proud and clever country that its politicians say it is.
        
The factory, the heart and soul of the industrial religion, was my second choice as a first step in the journey ahead. I wanted a job with the garbage collection department – an almost impossible aim, being new and non-union and from the wrong part of the globe. It would have been perfect to discover the biggest former penal colony in the world through its backside.

         My decision was a conscious act of commitment to a new way of life. I am a migrant, an Oriental from a non-English-speaking background. The young fair woman at the Commonwealth Employment Office asked me if I could speak English. I said yes. She looked at my job qualifications as we talked. She was a nice person. But slowly I began to understand from her other ‘employment officer’ person, that by some weird logic of the system my extensive university studies and teaching experience were nothing, nothing more than figments of my imagination. Why? Simple, because they were obtained from a non-English-speaking background and therefore non-existent, or at most, inferior.

         She apologized. Equal employment opportunity is government policy and there is no racial discrimination in Australia. “But what can I do? That is the rule. By the way, there is a factory demand for a general hand at Kirrawee, if you are interested”. We stared at each other for a moment. We both laughed. She arranged an interview for me with the factory. I got the job on the spot.

         A master’s degree in philosophy, ten years teaching in the academy, and being 46 years old, are not exactly the right training for a factory peon. The first month was hell. But I soon became intimate with every fibre in my body and sharpened my knowledge of human anatomy. Nightly, I could name the several hundred muscles and bones in my body by the same number of aches and pains. By the second month I was fully enjoying the job.

         The factory building was a formless and ugly prefabricated structure, like all the plants sprouting like pimples around Sydney. Inside was dusty, noisy and unhealthy: freezing in winter and boiling hot in summer. The name of the game was profit, fuelled by cheap migrant labour. The company produced speakers for stereos and public sound systems.

         In two months I was a good factory hand. I could assemble the components with my eyes closed, spray paind the wooden castings, pack them into cardboard boxes and load them onto big trucks while humming ‘Waltzing Matild’ and not miss a beat.

         It was by the end of the third month that I paid more attention to what I was handling. As I worked on the assembly line I noticed disturbing signs of the state of the Australian dream. The woofers and tweeters were made in Taiwan, the amplifiers made in Hongkong, the screws and drivers made in the People’s Republic of China, and the big plant machines bore instructions in Nippongo. Only the wood and the labour were Australian. It dawned slowly on my unbelieving mind that the ‘clever’ country was a myth. Australia was going down the Argentinian road, a fetcher of water and a hewer of wood for the industrialised nations of Asia. The signs are there in that factory.

         It was Friday. It was payday, always my favourite day these last three months. I drew my pay. I walked leisurely from the factory through the main street of Kirrawee, part the ugly factories, the shops pregnant with goods, the banks and their sharp-eyed moneylenders, the bottle shop doing its usual Friday double time, the silent apartment houses, the concrete steps down to the railway station. It then occurred to me that this was the last time I would walk this familiar road. I had made up my mind that moment that there was nothing more to learn in the factory.

         The station. The train arrives. The hard seat. The train moves. I continue to ponder over my three months spent in the factory earning my daily bread and a beginning that they were also spent looking forward to its end and the start of something new. Now jobless, I grew uneasy that I have done nothing to make the new life more real. Only my walking out of the factory had reality. I felt cheated and betrayed. Three months lead to the myth and a seat on this train. Were it possible for me to fix this train on its tracks, to extend its present rails to eternity, to defy space and gravity, I would have done so. I would then stay rooted on my hard seat, close my eyes, drain my strength and passion, my mind empty as my idiotic grin, and I would stay there, timeless and unnumbered, unregistered and unknown, bothering no one and no one to bother me, travelling forever and ever between my past and my future.
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[1] Patti Miller (ed), Writing Your Life: A Journey of Discovery (1994), Allen & Unwin Pty. Ltd. Australia, pp. 120-124.
[2] Editor’s Note: Wilson C. wrote the following piece about his first job in Australia after he arrived here from the Philippines with his wife and three children. He writes with his characteristic sharp observation and skeptical, wry voice.