'And, in the dawn, armed with an ardent patience, we shall enter magnificent cities.' (Arthur Rimbaud)
There's something disquieting about quietness imposed from above in the heart of a democracy. Something eerie.
The voices of the people who continue to be oppressed and abandoned are, in many ways, effectively silenced. Often they are like the gentle breeze or the still small voice that represented the presence of God in the story of Elijah. But in nearly all cases these voices, these stories of dispossession and quiet dignity, are neither heard nor heeded.
Recently, I visited Palm Island with other members of the Australian Social Inclusion Board. Palm, everyone reminds me, was established as the ideal place to exile those who were outspoken in the face of the coloniser. An unruly mob, one informant told me, the descendants of political prisoners.
Unruly is an interesting word, especially in light of the new paternalism, or 'close supervision of the poor', as its chief proponent Larry Mead defined it. When Palm was allowed local self-government it was gutted of its economic activity, as is so often the case when the coloniser walks away from its former possession.
I was lucky on Palm. Apart from the powerful and hope-filled story-telling I listened to from the some of the council leaders, I was also able to privately talk with the softly spoken Lex Wotton.
Lex has been instructed not to speak in public as a parole condition following his conviction for inciting a riot in the wake of the well-known death in custody on Palm Island. Eyewitnesses actually attest to Lex's attempts to restrain the angry crowd. Lex, however, continues to be tagged as a troublemaker. As Martin Luther King, another troublemaker, said: a riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.
The unheard are everywhere: the people who have been placed under the yoke of compulsory income management simply because they receive a social security payment (and the Government has the audacity to call this non-discriminatory!), asylum seekers demonised as 'illegal', people with a disability characterised as being too comfortable on a pension, the First Peoples of Australia living with the historical poison of stolen generations, stolen wages, stolen land and the attempted crushing of the spirit.
The stories of the unheard are a call