"Two Brothers" and SIEV X : thoughts about fact and fiction, provoked by Hannie Rayson’s play

- commentary by Tony Kevin, 5 May 2005 ( and four supporting recent articles and letters, with thanks to The Age)

Hannie Rayson’s latest play "Two Brothers" is playing well in Melbourne and has attracted a range of interesting media reviews – see Google. Sydney and Canberra runs will follow and I look forward to seeing it in Canberra in June.

This commentary is written on the basis of reading the reviews. It goes to the question of the respective roles of exact historical scholarship and artistic creative imagination, in drawing public attention to the fact of great crimes that have yet to be brought to justice.

Dickens’ novels about abuse of the poor in Victorian England are an obviously famous example of the latter – novels like Oliver Twist had a huge impact in driving social and political reform. John Le Carre’s novels, though works of creative imagination set in realistic contexts, have informed how many of us interpret both the later Cold War years and the present post-Cold War world of the United States global imperium and relentless "war on terror".

Writing my factual history A Certain Maritime Incident: the Sinking of SIEV X ((Scribe Books, Melbourne, 2004), and discussing the above general question with various colleagues interested in strengthening the public appreciation of the significance for Australia of the SIEV X tragedy, has given me a particular perspective on Rayson’s play and its reception by reviewers.

As so often happens in Australian public writing, much of the commentary on the play has been ideologically polarised. For some, what you think of Rayson’s play as a work of art is heavily influenced by whether or not you share her bleak view of contemporary Australian politics and society.

The SIEV X history, on which my book tried to represent the facts insofar as they are so far publicly known, outraged some commentators: in particular, Senator George Brandis, Gerard Henderson, Dr Tom Frame, and Jennifer Clarke, who could not accept my proposition that any accountable Australian government agency involved in protecting the security of Australia’s borders in 2000-2004 might have instigated or helped to cover up official policies and actions that may have contributed to the death by drowning of 353 asylum-seekers.

Such writers take refuge in rationalisations, denials, selectivity in reviewing the record, and personal abuse of a writer who sets out the evidence for this culturally challenging proposition about our nation’s present governance.

Hannie Rayson’s play takes a different route – it draws attention to the profound cruelty of the Australian Government’s suite of border protection policies, and the corrosive effect of those policies on the moral decency of our society, through an obviously imaginary plot. The story mixes up factual elements in Australia’s recent political history – the fact of Philip Ruddock’s cruel policies towards asylum-seekers leading to his estrangement with his daughter, the facts of the different public career paths of brothers Peter and Tim Costello, the facts that a refugee boat sank on 19 October 2001 on its way to Christmas Island drowning 353 people and that the Australian Government, Australian Defence Force ( ADF) and Australian Federal Police (AFP) have all in sworn Senate testimony officially denied any responsibility in this tragedy, the fact that Prime Minister John Howard has been repeatedly seen by the Australian public to be a practiced liar and dissembler.

Out of such fertile material, Rayson has created a work of the imagination that transposes all of these elements – and, I am sure, many more elements - into an exciting and topical work of the imagination – a political thriller.

I found the critical commentary by a national news editor at The Age, Tom Hyland, particularly interesting. As I understood it, Hyland – clearly a man of liberal-humanitarian views - takes Rayson to task for creating a fanciful, inherently unbelievable story based on a proposition that, he says, has been proven to be not true – the suggestion that the Howard Government is in some way accountable for the sinking of SIEV X.. He writes:

"There are plenty of unsettling and unanswered questions about Australia's role in the SIEV X disaster. But despite her purported research, Rayson has overlooked much of what is on the public record. A Senate committee that reported in October 2002 found no evidence the RAN knew about the sinking and failed to act. Labor senator John Faulkner, who had doggedly pursued the Government on the "children overboard" affair, said any suggestion the navy had abandoned the SIEV X survivors was "very unfair". Instead, Faulkner said he and his colleagues were confident the navy "acted appropriately in relation to a safety of life at sea issue"."

Why, he asks, did Rayson go over the top with this obviously fanciful story theme based on SIEV X, when there were so many other "real" incidents of abuse of asylum-seekers during the Tampa crisis and the subsequent ADF Operation Relex.(to deter and expel asylum-seeker vessels from Australian waters).

The trouble is, Hyland’s article makes incorrect claims about the facts on SIEV X. Perhaps he did not know that the Senate has, since publishing its Committee Report into a Certain Maritime Incident in 2002 which pretty much exonerated the ADF, passed three motions over three years calling for a full powers independent judicial inquiry into the sinking of SIEV X and the Australian Government’s people smuggling disruption program?. And that Senators John Faulkner (Labor) and Andrew Bartlett ( Democrat) have continued strongly to advocate the need for this judicial enquiry? Nor, apparently, is he aware of the 2002 CMI Report’s individual chapters, and the interventions during the tabling debate, which show the extreme dissension of Senators Cook, Faulkner, Collins and Bartlett (the most active opposition members on the CMI Committee) from the agreed report’s findings on SIEV X and the disruption program.

In other words, senators of conscience were dissociating themselves from the whitewash in the SIEV X report, even as it was being offered to the Senate. All this is detailed in my book. I do not know if Hyland has read it.

Hyland’s article evoked noteworthy responses in The Age from Rayson herself, from New Matilda editor Hilary McPhee, and from me. I attach these below (with Hyland’s article). All are worth reading, as source documents into the current state of public debate about integrity of governance in Australia.

I made the point that perhaps, in the currently desensitised state of our society, to present factual evidence suggesting that a great crime may have been committed, the evidence of which is still being covered up by our government agencies, is not enough. We may first need imaginative creative work, like Hannie Rayson’s (or, in his day, Charles Dickens’ novels ) to re-sensitise our consciences, so that as a society we can confront the possibility of serious official wrongdoing, and not deny or run away from it.

For example, while I do not for a moment suggest that Peter Costello had anything to do with SIEV X – I have no reason to believe that he did – Rayson’s play may have stimulated his thinking about the significance of what was done to asylum-seekers by the Australian Government under his party leader, the present prime minister. I hope so.

There is a role for both factually accurate and creative kinds of literature inspired by the SIEV X event. There is a role for paintings like Dierk Schmidt’s in Germany, and Kate Durham’s and Fatima Killeen’s, and for creative writing like Eva Sallis’s and Arnold Zable’s and Tom Keneally’s and Morris Gleitzman’s and Tessa Morris-Suzuki’s, and for folksong and music and dance.

My only problem is if creative work – valid and useful in its own right - might run the risk of blurring boundaries between recording facts and the exercise of creative imagination, thereby turning real history into contestable myth. We need to hang onto history, as something that is concrete and verifiable.

When we saw The Sydney-based play " A Certain Maritime Incident", we knew that we were watching a wildly funny creative work that used the instrument of the Senate CMI Hansard transcipts and videotapes to create a Swiftian black comedy: Their play is amusingly reminiscent of dramatic moments in the Committee, and of some tendencies in the way evidence was being presented by witnesses and received by Senators, but we know we were not watching history as such. We were watching history re-created as farce. (The same company, Version 1.0, is about to do similar things with a new play drawing on public record material, on how Australia went to war in Iraq). Such plays produce artistic truth, but do not claim to be exact historical scholarship.

Tahir Cambis’ and Helen Newman’s acclaimed recent film Anthem is a different kind of work: a creative documentary, that mixes and shapes newsreel footage, live interviews and personal reflections, to portray a documentary reality. Anthem does for recent Australian national security history what Cambis’s award-winning Return to Sarajevo (1997, produced by Tom Zubrycki) did for the Bosnian Serb insurgency in Bosnia..

The acclaimed television documentaries by Ross Coulthart ( Channel Nine Sunday) , Geoff Parish ( SBS) , Debbie Whitmont (ABC) and Ghassan Nakhoul (SBS Arabic program) in 2002 were exercises in exact historical documentary film-making about the Australian Government’s people smuggling disruption program, the ADF’s government-ordered border protection operations, and the sinking of SIEV X .

I hope that there will be more SIEV X documentary books and films and I also hope that there will be more works of creative imagination, based on or inspired by the SIEV X event. The theme of Western governments’ covert acts of disruption, using a variety of at times lethal methods, of the desperate efforts by displaced groups of people from Third World countries to find safety and new lives in Western countries, would be a theme worthy of the creative talent and moral sensitivity of a John Le Carre.

My thanks to The Age for providing a home for this kind of public discussion.

 

Tony Kevin, Canberra, 5 May 2005

 

 

Cited writings:

(1) "Drowning in propaganda", Tom Hyland, The Age , Opinion, April 16 2005"

http://www.theage.com.au/text/articles/2005/04/15/1113509926416.html

A new play that puts prejudice before facts does a disservice to an important debate.

It's an old truism of Australian politics: when the choice, in seeking to explain an event, is between a conspiracy and a stuff-up, go for the stuff-up every time.

The lines are repeated by Garry McDonald, who plays the unspeakable Minister for Home Security in Hannie Rayson's latest play, Two Brothers, which opened in Melbourne this week.

It's a pity, then, that Rayson, in what she insists is an attempt to examine the complex moral issues thrown up by Australia's treatment of asylum seekers, ignores the truism and opts for the comforting certainty of the conspiracy theory. Instead of examining those complex moral issues, she has produced a piece of propaganda that deals in stereotypes, preaches to the converted and panders to prejudice. In the process, she does a disservice to the cause she seeks to espouse.

This is not to say that Two Brothers is not a compelling, provocative and entertaining dramatic thriller. It is all that. It centres on the ruthlessly ambitious James "Eggs" Benedict, a conservative Home Security Minister prepared to do whatever it takes to become prime minister. This includes ordering the navy to leave asylum seekers to drown when their boat sinks on its way to Australia. His son is a naval officer on the ship that turns away, leaving the asylum seekers to their deaths.

Two Brothers cannot be judged simply as a fictitious work of art, because it purports to be more than that. Theatre-goers are left in no doubt as to the play's polemic purpose. The printed program includes chapters on the Tampa scandal, mandatory detention, an appeal from Baxter detainees, the "living nightmare" of temporary protection visas, and so on.

The program also includes an interview with Rayson that stresses the importance of research in her work. We are told that as part of her research she made "scouting expeditions into the conservative heartland" so she could explode the myth that the asylum seeker issue divides on party lines. But the play shows that she returned from her research "expeditions" with that myth intact, the divisions unambiguous. The Home Security Minister (we are left in no doubt he is based loosely on Philip Ruddock) is a stereotype, a wine-swilling, adulterous, Grammar-educated, bigoted bully - and cold-hearted killer to boot. The central Labor figure is a compassionate, selfless defender of human rights. No moral complexities there, no blurring of the party lines, just prejudices reinforced.

The plot of what Rayson says is a "completely fictitious" play draws on the tragedy of the SIEV X, the overcrowded Indonesian fishing boat that sank on October 19, 2001, with the loss off 353 lives, most of them Iraqis.

In the play's version of events, we are told of a sinking witnessed by the Australian Navy; survivors close enough to see the Australian flag on RAN ships; RAN crews seeing asylum seekers struggling in the water; the Government ordering the Australian ships to turn away; and that order being carried out by a supine navy.

There are plenty of unsettling and unanswered questions about Australia's role in the SIEV X disaster. But despite her purported research, Rayson has overlooked much of what is on the public record. A Senate committee that reported in October 2002 found no evidence the RAN knew about the sinking and failed to act. Labor senator John Faulkner, who had doggedly pursued the Government on the "children overboard" affair, said any suggestion the navy had abandoned the SIEV X survivors was "very unfair". Instead, Faulkner said he and his colleagues were confident the navy "acted appropriately in relation to a safety of life at sea issue".

Rayson comes close to examining moral complexities through the character of Lachlan Benedict, the young naval officer son of the Home Security Minister. At times he is tormented when the dictates of military discipline go against his instinctive humanity. But in the end he is like a mute tin soldier, refusing to speak out about what he has seen. Ultimately he comes across as a stereotypical military boofhead, simply obeying orders.

Again Rayson's research has ignored the inconvenient evidence on the public record. Sailors dived into the water to rescue asylum seekers. A number of naval officers spoke out during the Tampa "crisis". After service on the Arunta, a navy psychiatrist wrote to the press condemning the "morally wrong and despicable" action against boat people. An officer from the Tobruk gave an interview in which he said he was sickened by what the Government had asked him to do. And the chief of the navy ultimately confirmed the truth about the children overboard lies.

The trouble with Rayson's one-dimensional story is that the truth about what we have done to asylum seekers is bad enough. In carrying out Government policy, the navy fired machine-guns across the bows of leaking boats overcrowded with frightened, desperate, traumatised people. Armed boarding parties forced boats around and towed then towards Indonesia. Agitated, hysterical people were hit with capsicum spray. Asylum seekers were forced onto the troopships Kanimbla and Manoora where some alleged they were subjected to humiliating and degrading treatment. Some claimed that, in an attempt to pacify them, sailors said they were being taken to Australia, when their real destination was detention in Nauru. In turn, some distraught asylum seekers pelted sailors with excrement.

All of this, of course, is overlooked by the Government's defenders - and here is another tragedy in Rayson's play, as it can be dismissed as bleeding-heart propaganda. Already the media ranters in the Government cheer squad have gone on the attack, accusing the play of pandering to the left and besmirching the honour of the navy.

Two Brothers ends with "Eggs" Benedict becoming Prime Minister. As he gives a jingoistic acceptance speech, the Star Spangled Banner plays in the background. Why does Rayson play an American anthem, if not to pander to leftist sentiment? This is a cop-out. Our asylum-seeker policy is uniquely Australian, conceived in Canberra and exploiting distinctly Australian fears and prejudices. It's as dinky-di as a gum tree. Uncle Sam didn't tell us what to do with unwanted foreigners.

It's a pity Rayson has ignored another political truism: truth is the best propaganda.

Tom Hyland is national news editor.

 

(2) "The fiction and fact of Two Brothers", by Hannie Rayson, The Age, April 19 2005

http://theage.com.au/text/articles/2005/04/18/1113676698910.html

The play is right in raising issues about our treatment of refugees.

Writing a play is different from writing a piece of investigative journalism. In Tom Hyland's attack on my play (Opinion, 15/4) he writes that Two Brothers is "a compelling, provocative and entertaining dramatic thriller". But apparently, that is not enough. According to Hyland, I've written a terrific play - but it fails because it is not a factual account of what happened to the SIEV X, the refugee boat that sank on its way to Australia on October 19, 2001.

I am painfully aware of the inconsistencies and obfuscations that make it impossible to know what happened to the SIEV X. Why 353 people drowned when the boat went down in a heavily watched area of ocean is not at all transparent. The dimensions of this tragedy - and the unnerving sense that we are not being told the whole truth - is compounded by our cruel treatment of asylum seekers, by the inhumanity of the "Pacific Solution" and by mandatory detention.

To me, there aren't too many shades of grey in these events. The suffering we are inflicting on these people is wrong. And that cruelty needs to be named. But if I had wanted to write an account of the sinking of the SIEV X, I would have called my boat the SIEV X. Had I been writing a documentary I would have been meticulous about the facts.

But I chose to write a political thriller - a form of entertainment that looks cruelty, ambition and injustice in the face. The play opens on a dark and stormy night with a cabinet minister stabbing a man to death, in self-defence. That clearly signals to an audience that we have leapt into fiction.

The story is set in the future where the lies, the cruelty and the indifference have continued to fester. An ambitious politician named Eggs Benedict seizes the moment and makes his bid to be the next prime minister.

But he has made a terrible miscalculation. A refugee ship named the Kelepasan has sunk. A navy frigate was at the scene and was about to rescue the refugees from the ocean. But Eggs (who is the Minister for Home Security) orders it to turn about. Let's say that a decent, Aussie sailor was on that naval frigate. He's passionate about the navy, determined to do his duty and to maintain the integrity of our borders. Let's make him Egg's own son. What if he had to face the choice between being a whistleblower and betraying his own father? This is dense moral territory. Just the stuff of theatre.

The naval officer is the moral heart of this play. This is not an attack on the navy. It is a portrait of what we are asking our servicemen and women to do. There are many accounts on the public record of what our navy personnel went through in boarding overcrowded fishing boats and towing them back to Indonesia. It makes for poignant reading. It also makes it clear that this is some of the worst work they have been required to carry out.

We are living in times when debate is not encouraged. Andrew Bolt, the relentless fulminator, is screaming at me in page after page of vitriol: "Shut up. Just shut up. You are a witch who has no right to speak." In this climate, what is called for is bold provocation. Now is not the time for timidity in our drama.

Hyland accuses me of producing a play that preaches to the converted. Nine hundred people see this play every night. They are not required to fill in a questionnaire before they are permitted entry. How does Hyland know who these people are, how they vote, what their views are? I don't. I just know that they keep coming. And I have never heard audiences be so vocal: gasping, chiding, laughing and clapping spontaneously mid-scene.

Others say this is anti-Liberal Party propaganda - as if the theatre is no place for interrogating the government of the day about its fundamental values. But the greatest political indictment in the play is surely directed against the Labor Party. You set out to write a political play about one of the defining issues of our times and the Labor Party is not present. What does that say? In my play, the defender of human rights is a refugee advocate. Not a Labor politician. This recalls the joke: Who is the leader of the Opposition? Julian Burnside.

This play is a thriller about power and evil. And yes, I do hope that it energises the audience to ask questions about the real world. Three-and-a-half years after Tampa, 54 people are still incarcerated on Nauru. The misery and human damage our policies have inflicted on some people will never be undone. The future must be different. My play is a vision of what that future may be like if people of goodwill - whatever their politics - do not win the day.

 

(3) "Why we need courageous theatre", letter from Hilary McPhee, Letters, The Age, 19 April 2005:

http://www.theage.com.au/text/articles/2005/04/18/1113676700974.html

Writing about Hannie Rayson's play Two Brothers, Tom Hyland (Opinion, 16/4) takes her to task for not limiting herself to verifiable historical events. More destructively, he accuses her of doing "a disservice to the cause she seeks to espouse". It is the job of journalists to probe events, get to the verifiable facts and hold governments to account. But writing a play is an act of imagination. As Age critic Helen Thomson observed, Rayson has turned a national narrative into a family drama, making the political intensely personal.

I suspect that there's the rub. Rayson's play does what so often the media cannot, or simply fails to do. Her play is about driven, compromised, destructive men from the same family but opposite sides of the ideological divide who, wittingly or unwittingly, do great harm to other people, including their own children.

This imaginary family inhabits a world where facts are concealed, the public is duped and lied to, the navy is turned into an instrument of government policy, and desperate people are demonised by politicians. We know these things happen. We need to understand why they do and what leads people to do them in our name. Two Brothers is the kind of courageous theatre we need more of. It is fundamentally a study of power, which is bound to enrage and disturb those with their own agendas.

Hilary McPhee, Fitzroy

 

4. "Facing the truth", letter from Tony Kevin, The Age, 19 April 2005

http://www.theage.com.au/text/articles/2005/04/18/1113676700974.html

Tom Hyland claimed that "truth is the best propaganda" and upbraided Hannie Rayson for parting from the truth in her play, loosely based on the history of SIEV X. But Hyland is guilty of the same failing. The Senate has not, as he misleadingly claims, exonerated the Government's unexplained role in the sinking of SIEV X. On the contrary, it has continued for three years to demand a full-powers independent judicial inquiry - a demand the Government has ignored.

As to truth being the best propaganda, my experience leads me to doubt that Australians are ready to face the full truth about the huge cruelties our Government inflicted on asylum seekers since 2000 - including the deaths of 353 innocent people on SIEV X on October 19, 2001. I wrote the whole truth - to the extent that it has so far broken through the Government's studied cover-up of truth in sworn official testimony before Senate investigative committees - about the history of SIEV X in my factual book, A Certain Maritime Incident: the Sinking of SIEV X. But where is the public outcry? The public support for the Senate's proper demands for judicial accountability? Nothing has happened.

Maybe we need writers such as Rayson to dramatise unpalatable truths and turn life into art before we can take those truths on board and act on them. And we need critics to do their homework about the history, before accusing creative writers of parting from it.

Tony Kevin, Forrest, ACT

6 May 2005