Out of sight out of mind: towards a final solution
My first Australian grandson will be born in Brisbane as I write. The kind of Australian society he will grow up in, influencing the young man he will become, matters to me. One day he'll learn that both his grandmothers were born in different countries, myself in England and Grandma Jan in Uganda.
In fact, I will show him on the map — everybody started in Africa. My mitrochondrial DNA came from the cradle of agriculture in Syria. It's taken 10,000 years for me to become an Australian!
I'll be his grandmother, one of his teachers, preparing the way for the child to learn and cope with the realities of living in the world. The cooperation, civility and respect for other members of our Australian family will, I hope, transfer to the extended human family and wider body politic.
Scientific researchers are beginning to show how important grandmothers are to the evolutionary survival and thriving of the young. For our young nation of Australia I hope the fascist mentality of controlling borders by human rights violations is a trend we can reverse.
In 20 years the processing of refugees would be made less harmful by allowing us empty-nester baby-boomers to offer a spare room and vegie patch until life moves on for them. Melburnians hosted international visitors in 1956 without any worries.
Australia's obligation to share in alleviating the world's refugee problems won't have ceased. Millions of human beings have been forcibly displaced due to conflicts and persecution. The situation is not going away fast.
It is overwhelming but it is not made easy when many Australians hold a historic fear of invasion, and fear that all our prosperity will be taken from us. If my grandson's mates start expressing complaints about certain races of people taking over all the local shops I hope he will have no fear in informing them that this kind of prejudice against other human beings led to the Nazi genocide of 6 million European Jews, including one million children, during World War II.
While talking about a visit to Europe, I asked my psychiatrist how can Israel do to the Palestinians what the Germans did to them — the persecution, the stealing of houses and land, and the world letting them get away with it? It was perplexing and tragic. She replied it was a fact of life that the victims