The Beauty of Loneliness

Last week I went to Canberra for a day and a half. I was there for two reasons. I went to interview the Bosnian Ambassador to Australia for my translation project. An amazing woman, Ambassador Kapetanovic was the official translator for the Bosnian contingent at the Dayton Peace Talks and translated the new constitution for Bosnia Herzegovina from English into Bosnian. I also went to visit Kim Rubenstein and her family. Kim is the person who first invited me to Australia, who facilitated my visit at Melbourne Law School, and who, sadly for us, then moved to Canberra.

Because of the rivalry between Sydney and Melbourne, Canberra was created to be Australia's capital. Much like Washington, D.C., Canberra is a highly-designed city placed in the middle of inauspicious physical surroundings. D.C. was built on a swamp and Canberra in the bush. Unlike D.C., however, the architecture of power here doesn't manage to dominate and displace the nature landscape. For all its sweeping vistas and high-modern government buildings, one has the distinct sense in Canberra of being in the country, of being witness to either the disinclination or the inability of urban planners to fully make over the environment. There is something about the clean modernist grandeur of Parliment House (see above) and the High Court coupled with the scarcity of people that makes this quiet, lovely, parched city feel the tiniest bit lonely.

It was odd that while I was in Canberra, staying with Kim and her exceptionally warm and convivial family, I was most struck by two small monuments to loneliness that I came across. One was a monument to the loneliness of loss, and the other an ode to the loneliness of landscape. The first was a monument to the Stolen Generation, which is the term used to describe the Australian government's policy during much of the 20th century of removing aboriginal children from their homes and placing them in state orphanages or with white foster families. It is estimated that between 1910 and 1970 the government took well over 100,000 aboriginal children away from their parents. Between one tenth and one third of all aboriginal children living during that period were forcibly removed without warning and without a legal proceeding of any kind. Most of the children taken were mixed race because the rationale of the policy was to ensure that aboriginal children would assimilate into white society and that the black population would eventually die out. While some of the children ended up among loving caregivers, many of them were subjected to neglect and abuse, and all of them were stripped of their families, their culture and their identity. The grief of the children and especially of their parents is well-documented in Bringing Them Home, the report from the government inquiry begun in 1995. The monument in Canberra is a simple and powerful stone slab from which water falls like tears, where music plays and on which are etched many quotes taken from the inquiry, quotes which capture the heartbreak of the policy and the unutterable loneliness of loss.

The other monument that caught my attention is not really a monument at all, but a small framed quote, tucked into the corner of the foyer of Parliment House, that comes from the preface to a 19th century book of poems by Adam Lindsay Gordon entitled Sea Spray and Drift Smoke. The preface, written by fellow Australian poet Marcus Clarke, captures something of the wilderness which Canberra has only partially transformed. It reads: "In Australia alone is to be found the Grotesque, the Weird, the strange scribblings of nature learning how to write. Some see no beauty in our trees without shade, our flowers without perfume, our birds who cannot fly, and our beasts who have not yet learned to walk on all fours. But the dweller in the wilderness acknowledges the subtle charms of this fantastic land of monstrosities. He becomes familiar with the beauty of loneliness. Whispered to by the myriad tongues of the wilderness, he learns the language of the barren and the uncouth, and can read the heiroglyphs of the haggard gum-trees, blown into odd shapes, distorted with fierce hot winds, or cramped with cold nights, when the Southern Cross freezes in a cloudless sky of icy blue. The phantasmagoria of that wild dreamland termed the Bush interprets itself, and the Poet of our desolation begins to comprehend why free Esau loved his heritage of desert sand better than the bountiful richness of Egypt."