I bet Agriculture Minister Warren Truss is not much given to poetry, but he struck an uncharacteristic note of gloomy lyricism the other day when he told the ABC that Australia’s 50 thousand refugee sheep would be leaving Kuwait that morning to begin ‘their long journey down the Gulf’.
The unfolding affair of the floating sheep would move most people, even someone named Truss, to poetry, because it is full of echoes, paradoxes and drama. For one thing, the ship itself is called the Cormo Express. This is obviously someone’s elaborate joke because it is anything but ‘express’. On the contrary, it’s pottering around the exotic landfalls of the strife-torn Middle East like a romantic tramp steamer.
It’s a bit hard on the sheep, because they are behaving, as far as I can see, with a good deal more dignity than the bureaucrats and governments responsible for their marine dilemma, but you can’t help thinking of Hieronymus Bosch’s ‘Ship of Fools’. There, a particularly loathsome group of people are carousing, vomiting, fornicating and being generally futile while their ridiculous craft drifts aimlessly on, symbolic of a mad, debased world.
The sheep’s plight invites a comparable symbolism, but only Warren Truss, of all people, has come close to recognising the metaphoric possibilities in the strange voyage of the Cormo Express, though he rapidly resumed the argot of Canberra when under pressure. ‘We are still examining the options of unloading the sheep at an offshore island,’ he told a reporter. ‘We haven’t ruled an offshore island out of the equation,’ he added, nailing it down. No-one seems to have pointed out the extreme difficulty, if not the impossibility, of finding an onshore island but probably that dawned on him later.
Certainly the Prime Minister is in no position to give rein to any metaphoric insights he might be glimpsing as he tries to cope with the ramifying problems of the ‘sheep ship’ (as an extraordinarily courageous, sure-tongued ABC reporter referred to it). Mr Howard has had many trials associated with ships on strange, illicit, dangerous or otherwise noteworthy voyages and probably he does not wish to remind either himself or ‘the Australian people’ of past maritime adventures. One of the remedies traditionally available on ships at sea, for example, is to chuck the offending item/person/animal/rubbish overboard. But Mr Howard has good reasons for not wanting us to dwell on what might be called the ‘defenestration