The woman I pass in the tunnel has seen better times. She's in her 30s, I guess, but haggard. Her sign says she has escaped domestic violence and certainly she looks the part. I want to help but my only cash, excepting a $50, is earmarked for the collection plate. No doubt she needs it more, but then I'd have to deal with not putting in (self-concern, ignominy). Not that anyone would comment – but that makes it worse. Plus I'm late, and the opening moments are breathtakingly lovely, so I scurry off, debating good deeds versus transcendence like some theological white rabbit, accusing myself of cowardice, vowing to find her on my return.
Two hours later she's still there, still miserable. I give her $10 – having broken the $50 note buying sushi for lunch (again, selfish) – but still I feel bad. She needs shelter, not money, and surely to God I could help with that, speak to her, take her home even. Except that's where fear kicks in: self, safety, the nest. So I leave her there on the edge of tears. On the edge of disaster.
I tell you this only because the question of home became the recurrent motif of my week. Home as habitat, refuge and identity is our core humanity, the springing point for hope and purpose and their end. But is it a human right?
Wherever I looked, I saw attack on home. It was Global Climate Change Week, not that you'd notice. The Trump-Clinton circus barely mentioned that small planetary question and, scarcely less ludicrous, Queensland Labor – elected to save the Reef – fast-tracked the massive Adani coal mine that steals native land, belches CO₂ and will nail down the Reef's bleak coffin.
In NSW, meanwhile, Baird backflipped on greyhounds and sharks but retained all the habitat-destruction that defines his regime: the Westconnex juggernaut, tearing through homes and destroying climate, the imminent "biodiversity" legislation that will enable massive land-clearing, decimate already-scarce koala habitat, reduce biodiversity and, again, intensify climate change.
Domestic violence, war and climate change are all forms of habitat destruction. All spring from the domination and entitlement that strengthens its own sense of home by destroying that of others – the myriad reef creatures, countless bush plants and marsupials (including the already-threatened koala), the people of Haberfield, Rozelle and St Peters. Oh, and inhabitants of Earth. That.
Habitat destruction is about control and the fear of losing it, manifest in the will to dominate nature, women, immigration, discourse and, ultimately, death. Of course such control is illusory, and the yearning for it must be educated into wisdom or, to paraphrase the African proverb, the boys will return and burn down the village.
This failure to educate is what we're witnessing. It could yet leave us all, as Greenwich Villager Emily Prager wrote after September 11, "wounded in my sense of home."
Once you look, such wounds are everywhere. Tuesday evening, just before 10pm, I walked home through Hyde Park. On every bench along the glorious fig-lined avenue was someone sleeping, or settling to sleep. It was a cool night and although some had blankets there was no denying their wretched vulnerability, nor my momentary shame in heading home, regardless, to warmth, food and family.
As it happened I'd just come from Parliament, where homelessness was the topic du jour; the Social and Affordable NSW Fund Bill. On the foyer TV Greens MP Jenny Leong gave an impassioned plea to shrink the gap between the 3000 dwellings proposed and the 59,000 people "sleeping homeless on our streets, trying to escape domestic violence [or] on crisis waiting lists".
Leong also noted that, "Serco has an interest in public housing in New South Wales ... [the] same Serco that became infamous for managing Australia's offshore detention centres". Which struck a chord because I was there – in the home of NSW democracy – attending the Diaspora Symposium for refugees. A refugee, remember, is a seeker of refuge, of home.
It was a marvellous evening of music, tales, defiance, poetry, rap and debate, ending with a soliloquy from Nauru, where Mina Taherkhani, a trained accountant, has been in offshore detention for three years.
Mina fled Iran having been raped by her step-sister's son at four, blamed by her family, abused by her father and her arranged husband. After six months on Serco's Christmas Island she now inhabits a flimsy tent on Nauru, listening all night to the heavy boots of the guards. "They're supposed to protect us," she tells the camera, close to tears. "But they torture us and behave like we are their slaves. One of them held his penis in front of me and pretended he was having sex with me."
Go back home, we say. But for people like Mina, home – as refuge and identity – doesn't exist. Home is just a burning hope, sufficiently compelling to put a lone woman on a leaky boat; a hope we choose to deny.
Since Malcolm Turnbull insisted no one from Manus or Nauru will ever set foot in Australia even the "processing" no longer offers hope. However genuine you are, there's no prospect of welcome into Australia. It's not about medical facilities, Jim Molan. The torture is the deliberate removal of hope.
It's not even cheap. Offshore detention has cost a whopping $10 billion over three years. Ending it would net a thousand times, every year, the sale of Blue Poles.
No, it's fear. John Howard's table-thumping "we will decide who comes to this country" was about fear. And I get it. Ask my tunnel-woman. But fear makes us misperceive immigrants – who won all six of the Nobel science prizes awarded to Americans this year – as more burden than gift. It makes us trust rich, confident ones – though they are almost certainly more destructive – over poor and desperate.
Until we see the lie of this, and understand that our true home, being in our hearts, is not threatened by strangers, we'll keep right on burning down the village.
Twitter: @emfarrelly
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