What occurred on September 11th was surreal and I don't think anyone could have prepared themselves for what they were seeing at the time. It was shocking watching the buildings collapse on live tv, shocking watching the second aircraft hit, shocking watching the survivors escape with their lives, shocking watching people jumping from the buildings but what was most shocking of all was the backdrop of the pale blue calm sky before it filled with dust and debris. At one point I stood outside. It was a beautiful calm Australian Spring day, sunny with a light breeze and as I looked down toward the coastal plain everything seemed surreal again. I could hear the CNN reporter behind me frantically speaking of the horror and there I stood viewing the scenic beauty that lay before my eyes.

The roads were very quiet in Melbourne during the rush hour that day. Everyone remained glued to their televisions. Here in the office they ran the tv so that people could see what was eventuating. There was a feeling, and still is, of sadness and horror and gloom. No one could quite believe what occurred. Having travelled in the States the previous April, a feeling of sickness swept through me ... as I am sure it did many. Suddenly, air travel was not safe any more. We are not safe any more.

What started as a beautiful week has ended in horror and death and destruction for so many. Each of us felt for the people that died or who suffered and I believe our Prime Minister, John Howard, who was in Washington during the attacks expressed the feelings of the Australian public at large. “We stand united and behind you. We are a friend and if you need help you will receive it.”

Terrorism has been attacked and thrashed though I doubt it will ever be fully destroyed and will continually rise, phoenix like, from whatever ashes are created. It is not something that can be destroyed tomorrow. It will be a long, hard ongoing battle. Many good men will die, many innocents will die in the ensuing conflict but whatever happens, let us hope that those who are responsible or those who will plan such murderous things have taken note of the American response. If such a response has the effect of destroying or frightening off a group then something has been achieved.

I am without any illusions about the depths of barbarity into which a man can descend. The ways of men are often beyond comprehension. We have become witness to the suffering of mankind, so much is caused by conflict and by the human debris disgorged by it. I often wonder what happens to man's reason, tolerance and compassion? Everyday I read the papers, listen to the commentators and the analysts and the news becomes a surreal collage of orchestrated madness. All too often the balance of peace resides in the profitability of terror. It is difficult to find understanding and absolution for the misdeeds of mankind . It goes hand in hand with intrigue, treachery and insane madness. The end never justifies the means. Justice can no longer be rendered under a system that has surrendered its integrity. I know I feel strongly about such things, but I care, care deeply, as we all care. More and more, we can see the random waves of madness, the ever continuing violence of life, the stupidity of it all, the injustice, the pure blind cruelty and the many links in the terrible chain of acts of terrorism and destruction that are so frequent today. I know the world is filled with violence we see is daily beamed into our living rooms. It has become a fact of life. Violence, madness and hatred exists in many walks of life, under many guises.

I guess we will never have an answer as to why God allows such things to happen. But I also guess the answer lays within ourselves. What has been created has been created by ourselves. By decisions made in the past, by conflict and lack of understanding. By man's ability to create evil and to become the dark monster that lurks inside us all.

So my friends, these words are not about the pretty things in life. This words are about sorrow and horror and is also a prayer for those that have suffered. Many dark days may lay ahead but beyond that darkness lays hope and the freedom from the tyranny of terrorism.

It doesn’t seem possible that such a thing has happened here in Australia, but it has. I feel a sadness, which is not my own, as I write these words. It is centuries, millennia old. Death! You think it is elsewhere, but it is suddenly all around you, like a mist, rivulets of blood running like a spring. It was blatant murder and the impact is doubly horrifying. People of all ages, small children, youth, the middle aged and the old shot. What a waste, what a terrible waste of life.

A person can become in an instant an evil thing. It’s beyond belief - in the warmth of an innocent Australian Autumn day a grown man, Martin Bryant, became something that we little understand. He became a demon. A man who has consumed and destroyed himself by erecting a monument to his undying memory. He’s imprisoned himself forever. He’ll live the rest of his life with the burden of those deaths and forgiveness will be forever beyond reach. The remainder of his life will be a slow hell, painful, ugly.

Will his roots reveal an abused, unhappy, turbulent childhood and a youth that gave way to a child-like man? Known locally as someone different and unbalanced. He was loner who led a solitary life. Caught up within a web of dreams and thoughts - something remained stuck, struggling inside him which built into an irresistible scream. The subtle changes, the initial manifestations, the irresistible urges, the love of weapons - favoured collected toys to be stroked and handled - his precious things. What fears persisted in his undermined world; waiting to collapse into the infernal darkness of his soul? What caused the repressed hatred, cold fury and icy calmness that came to end in death? Did he try and outwit mortality? Did he rush spontaneously to embrace death? Was it a cancellation of the self by the self? A pull of the trigger, then it won’t matter any more? Yet he ran from death rather than be consumed by fire. Was his fear of death greater than death itself? Is he not a coward? Calm as he’s ever been, his rampage was thoughtful, almost knowing - a man conscious of his actions as he stalked and chased his prey. Once started, he was unable to stop, as one death led to another. What did his eyes see? Was he filled with a sense of unsurpassed power? Did he do this thing because he wanted to be something other than he was? Did he want all the deathly, death defying recognition and renown? A road to fame, by causing death? .

To dip into someone’s life is heavy going. It’s hard to understand the mind of this man, to know what he was thinking or what led him along this path. He, who tore apart so many lives and who horrifies society. I wonder if we adapt to such horrors as yesterday’s cataclysm becomes today’s absorbed fact and I wonder if it is a reflection of the human condition. To remove the real source of all evils in this world, we need to heal ourselves.

Australia has received a shock which will take time to wear off, a traumatic shock more severe than most realise. In the minds of the young the incident will pass way and will be forgotten, they are too busy growing up to look back, but for many others the horror will always remain. Gone now is our complacency over the availability of automatic and semi automatic weapons. We are no longer talking in the abstract. The problem is with us here and now.

(In May 1996 Martin Bryant shot and killed over 30 people visiting a tourist facility in Tasmania - he was later committed to Life Imprisonment (and will never be released) and is currently held in solitary confinement in Tasmania - the above thoughts were written by myself a day after his atrocity)

Thousands of years have passed and men seem to have learned little in the interim, seem doomed to repeat ancient mistakes. Do we once again mass arms, material and troops? War condemns everyone who fights, win or lose. War leaves behind all the wrong things, pain, dissatisfaction and revenge. What’s war about but killing and dying. Wars are not fought with guts or even with weapons. In the end they are struggles of consciousness. Whatever happens it is a choice that has to be made, made out of a certain consciousness. I ask myself, how do we know if the choice is right or wrong? I tell myself that peace can’t grow out of violence yet it did in Japan after they dropped the atomic bomb. They forced peace on the Japanese by clearing away the underbrush to make space and light but was it morally right?

Sometimes it seems to me that we go over the same arguments. Violence or non-violence, how to struggle, where to draw the lines. Debate after debate, while around us violence continues to rage unchecked. War is a great waster, much in the preparation as in waging it. The end never justifies the means. I’ve come to understand that the means shape the ends. Force seems so clear, so simple, so direct. But meeting force with force produces nothing but what is already known and planned for and expected. It’s what’s already been done over and over before. We become what we do. If we do this, how do we become something better? How can we make them build something together through the force of arms? Will it change things for the future? Or will not the same problems exist?

How do you separate fate from coincidence or chance, or the laws of statistical probability for that matter? I’ve asked myself if the lines of probability spin out like that of the World Wide Web? Do they become similar to the search for information on the Internet where time after time; you go down one road, after another, hunting sometimes finding but most times unable to find what you are looking for in the mass of information available? Some paths lead to promise, other paths lead to darkness, some are filled with goodness, others traffic nothing but evilness.

We are shown the world through superficiality - a montage of images flashing across movie and television screens, seen for a moment in time, then forgotten as other images jostle to make room for tomorrow's. We've become harden to the atrocities we know exist and we switch off our emotions because we don't want to know, not really, because it's not our problem. Life is cruel. It's cruel every where, even in Australia. In some countries the cruelties are less concealed.

The words of Tennyson come to mind

So runs my dream; but what am I?
An infant crying in the night;
An infant crying for the light;
With no language but a cry.

I cry for this world and for what will be ... and pray that in some way, before it's too late, that we'll see the light ...

There’s no doubt in my mind that America spawned a bastard in Saddam in the support of Iraq during the Iran Iraq conflict and now perhaps they are paying the price. A far greater evil has emerged.

Currently, Saddam finds it convenient to present the Americans as the real villains. It is they who cause the stoical Iraqi populace economic hardship and privation. After all, to do so simplifies the picture of the situation. It also justifies Saddam’s stance that an assault on the country by an external power(s)would justify and strengthen his position. It is also convenient giving Saddam the moral cover of martyrdom and suffering in the face of an unjust superior force, to camouflage the comprehensive defeat of his goals. Used previously this approach has had a good measure of success, as the enormous pressures placed on the Iraqi people reinforce its cohesiveness and create a strong sense of shared destiny. The real victims are the Iraqi people who bear the full consequences of Saddam’s leadership.

The US continues to threaten Saddam’s foundations and are now seeking his demise. Is the threat of invasion the latest verbal and active weapon in an ongoing arsenal to remove Saddam from power? The days of knowing may not be a long time away. If the US is going to strike and invade, they are going to have to manage the consequences and bring their promises home. Saddam must be neutered, destroyed or brought to justice – whatever is expedient. Once started this thing could become an avalanche that will rip holes in the fabric of the Middle East. It may only involve a residual if minimal risk; however, the probability of consequent developments will increase tensions significantly in the Gulf region. (The (Gulf) war did not remove the threat but spawned a new and dangerous Middle Eastern arms race, which involved the purchase of long-range missiles by Saudi Arabia, and the development of chemical warfare capabilities by Libya and Syria. This, together with the friction between Israel and the Arab States, could lead to further horrendous risks throughout the region.)

It also raises some extremely difficult questions for the US. What, in fact, are the obligations of the US to the larger community? The responsibility to act lies, in a sense, with the US, but they also have a broader responsibility to influence diplomatically coalition partners. The issue and the way the US deals with the situation is the ultimate challenge of acting in the interests of all.

The invasion, to a certain extent, will be geared to the longer term. Forces, as in Afghanistan, will have to remain in place whilst mopping up operations take place and a new government is installed. Another problem is that with an invasion and air strikes you will be touching every aspect of society and how you avoid that problem is very difficult. You're not in the situation where you can say you'll hurt Saddam only.

High technology and other tools may have given intelligence agencies access to accurate, comprehensive information but I ask myself, has it been able to pinpoint all hidden equipment and weapons of destruction and Saddam’s hideaways or will we yet again be chasing another lingering shadow as we have in bin Laden?

The Iraq regime lacks the power to defend itself and has lost to a certain extent the power to mount an offensive but will Saddam retaliate and if so, will this retaliation take the form of deliberate acts of terrorism ie chemical attacks on population centres and economic targets as a defensive move? We must also be aware that Saddam has channeled all his energies in acquiring weapons of mass destruction – why not the ultimate? Previously he has used them — against his own people and against his Iranian neighbors. And for nearly four years, Iraq has blocked the return of United Nations weapons inspectors. It would be catastrophic whether a nuclear, biological, or chemical detonation/release was carried out from within Iraq or by terrorist attack beyond Iraq’s borders – a frightening scenario indeed! Could this be true? Probably not, but the possibility exists.

Conclusion: The American’s are caught between a rock and a hard place! They will be damned if the do and damned if they don’t. The strategies the US pursues and how those strategies are pursued cross ethical and moral boundaries. It has come down to a choice between two evils and one has to ask, “which is the greater”? The moral ground for the US position is that an all-out attack will finally destroy the threat of Iraq’s capabilities and lessens the risk of such weapons being used against populations internally or externally. They are also playing for mortal stakes in which all our fates are correlated. The issue raises some difficult questions of what is morally right and what is morally wrong. It’s a tough problem and the American’s themselves will have to choose a way to resolve the issue. If they have done all that they can to strike a balance, both morally and practically and attempts at diplomacy failed to work (if you cannot open Saddam’s eyes because he refuses to see, if he refuses to listen to what you are shouting and if he cannot swallow what you are attempting to stuff down his throat then there is no option but to strike him hard). I believe the US has no other choice. It may be painful but it’s absolutely necessary action be taken. If we stand for anything, we must stand for a better world and we must work for a better world.

One thing remains firm, a vicious dog is best watched and can never be trusted, lest it creep up and bite you. There are also times, when it is morally responsible to destroy such a vicious dog for the safety of all!

I guess many things shape us, from our upbringing, to how we were taught, where we have worked and lived. I suppose in everyone's life there are those people we have met who stand out in our minds. Such is a person I met once in the Seychelles (where my husband was working on an overseas contract) in 1981 when I was at a local hotel pool with my son Matthew, who was standing in the children’s pool filling plastic bricks with water, when a man spoke to me. He had been watching Matthew for a while and mentioned the concentrated look on his face. He noticed that I was reading Solzhenitsyn’s ‘Cancer Ward’ and asked me what I thought of the novel. After I had expressed my views (and I cannot remember what I said) he pointed out that Solizhenitsyn only described a part of Russia, the Russia he knew and experienced. He then proceeded to open my eyes to the rich and complex life that abounded, the texture and fabric of the personal lives of Russians as people. We spoke of the “enemy” concept and of “good” guys and “bad” guys.

I remember asking him what Communism had achieved and I recall his irony and cynicism at the facade of communism. He told me that Communism simply didn’t work and even if it did, it worked to no purpose. He mentioned that freedom and human rights were not a part of the Russian psyche. He spoke of the hard line, the propaganda and Party history. It was the first time I had ever heard humour expressed behind Lenin! We spoke of the terror behind Stalin and the repression that existed. He believed in the role and goals of the revolution and what it had achieved but he also told me where and why it had failed. Under his words, he was immensely proud of being Russian and spoke of Russia with love, pride and sadness.

I believe it is hard for an outsider to gauge and generalise about the ideological zeal and fidelity of the Russian people. If anything, this person showed me that ideology, belief, faith and myth are the things that hold a Nation together. It was the first time I actually looked upon a Russian as a ‘person” and not an ‘enemy’. He told me to temper my reading of Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov and Medvedec with other famous Russian writers such as Chekhov, Pushkin and Gogol and that all had something to offer in the understanding of his country and its people.

Now when I contemplate our conversation, his comments and our relatively short though involved discussion, having read the writers he had suggested, I begin to understand what he was attempting to tell me about Russia and of the deep-seated influence history has had on the Russian character. I’ve come to the conclusion that Russia may not evolve into a democracy, as we know it. I believe that they have the ability to adapt without fully surrendering the comfort and stability that order provides and that the strong authoritarian strain in the Russian body politic will remain. I do not believe their society is completely ready for the give and take, political tolerance and compromise and self-restraint that democracy requires. It may take many years if not generations to evolve. I often wonder what happened to this unnamed man, who crossed my path in 1981, who opened my eyes and mind. Did he foresee something of the events to come? I wonder what his thoughts are regarding the changes since 1989?

What can I say ... silence is all I hear. Are people reading this blog? How strange to be typing something and thinking that someone somewhere will be reading what I write. Now, even days after the event, I still find it difficult to understand what it is that was portrayed. My words do not do justice to what was seen. How can I explain what I fully saw? Perhaps my imagination is playing a trick on me, or rather is playing the same trick over and over again. It’s as if what was seen has become arrested at a particular frame. In my imagination I see the light come on again and the images flow on. The script is different each time but not the end towards which the action is flowing and some words come to mind “In my fathers house there are many mansions.” I hope this is true and if it is true that what was seen in the vision will not eventuate ...

Once again, I was thrown into another place. The wall is still broken, still falling but something has changed, the sands have quivered. A shifting of oaths, a new movement of purposes? There was no table only a group of people who stood erect, pallid of face, staring ahead as if alone - each man of himself alone. (Until they are themselves of the soul, they’ll remain strangled by the chains within them.) Scornful and forever grumbling, they will become weakened by their display of nothingness. Their shadows will continue to hover at the cross roads even at noon. Voices raged without purpose, argumentative. Shadowy faces became tense. One face remained impervious, almost menacing, its whiteness not that of goodness though perhaps of fealty. He who will remain undeterred, who will bring death by his faithfulness, will also deceive. Around him blood flows, at first a trickle and then a deep broad river, rushing, tumbling. Chanting heard beneath is depths, echoing, echoing ... Face upon face passed me by. Those that stand alone disappeared within its torrent of bitterness and despair, submerged in a hate of their own making. The four with crowns upon their heads worked frantically, shoring up that which had broken free which threatened to bring death and destruction to surrounding lands but they have also remained solitary and aloof and will become broken. Behind them, huge and immovable, wings outstretched, covering those within its reach, remained the eagle, eyes wide open, unblinking. Head raised it screamed its own anger and agony caught within the brilliant flash of light. Undeterred it remained, scorched, blackened but not broken hovering, and watching.

Time turns, the wind blows, the sands rise and subside, the wheel of time marches forward. Emptiness and desolation remained, nothing seen but white bones scattered across empty landscape. The deads’ flame is blown out and ever more shall be so.