Happy New Year to those kind enough to read or follow this blog. And I genuinely hope it may be a happy year for you, even as I fear I get grumpier as I age.
For those of you not in Australia over Christmas I can assure you that the shopping malls were seriously dangerous to mental health. Constant pre-recorded Christmas songs welcoming Jesus echoed through your brain at the highest volume.
The great irony is that if Jesus really did arrive, as a Middle Eastern man without papers and threatening our way of life with awkward questions about economic equality and ethnic tolerance, he would very quickly be sent off to one of Australia’s concentration camps in the south Pacific.
Still, we did get to see the fireworks over Sydney on television which, while never the same as the real thing, has to be better fighting the crowds to in turn get there, get a view and get back home before dawn. I watched the huge explosions of light and colour, like a Disneyland view of the world for 15 minutes, along with millions in person and millions more on television.
But I wonder how many viewers considered that it was almost 75 years to the day when Japanese submarines entered Sydney Harbour, and against the backdrop of a city blacked out by law to confuse the enemy, the harbour was similarly lit up by explosions and gunfire? Sydney the next morning was deeply afraid, as was the wider Australian nation, and only later did it emerge just how close the Japanese raid came to inflicting catastrophic losses on the allied naval forces in a supposedly safe port. In their attacks the Japanese submariners were assisted by an embarrassing abundance of light in what should have been a blacked out harbour.
In 75 years Sydney has moved from darkness with a fear of the light to light with a fear of the darkness. I wonder what the lights will look like in the Emerald City in another 75 years from now?
The Midnight University 