The widespread increase in crime and violence and all forms of suffering throughout all levels of society have become common place occurrences. We live in a world that is uncertain, often meaningless and repugnant. I don't believe you can improve society by forcing social reform. You have to improve the individuals who compose it and this can only be done through education and re-education. As with mental health we often deal with problems upside down. The mentally ill here in Australia, who desperately need our help, are left to fend for themselves in appalling conditions. What we have is the futile shifting of responsibility, and despite all the elaborate theories and structure put forward, we have change without the backup services that are so desperately required and experimentation on those who can least afford to be experimented upon. And they call this, improvement and progress! We have not helped the mentally ill individual to attain his potential in dealing and living effectively in the outside world. Many have been shunted into boarding houses, without proper medical backup, medication or supervision. Many, like those in the States, walk the streets. We are not carrying out our responsibility for equipping those less fortunate than ourselves to cope with the everyday life of society outside the mental institutions. Certainly there is a need to integrate those less fortunate than ourselves into society and it is the legitimate process of Government to do so. From my viewpoint, it would seem that not only the Australian Government but other Government’s worldwide may have failed in their responsibility.

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 ...

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?

Man’s root condition is to stand babbling in terror on the precipice of an abyss into which he cannot see, and into which he knows he eventually and inevitably must leap. That he directs whatever intellect he has to finding palliative ontology and an explanatory theology to ameliorate his condition is small wonder. The chief difficulty is that, as far as I know, God has remained intractably silent on those subjects for all these many centuries. That said, I am told by religious friends that God does indeed speak to us, but that His lectures are extremely difficult to comprehend. However, I know of no reason a priori that God wouldn’t be just as good a lecturer as I am, and so I am left with my original confusions. Perchance it is that God’s assistant professors--the prophets and the Popes--missed a lot of classes during their own graduate days and then necessarily went forth into the great lecture halls of the world proclaiming faulty theory?

Only when someone offers a willingness to put to sword and flame someone else who doesn’t agree with his religious views do I get really uncomfortable. I also once wrote that to kill a man for a political reason is to insult humanity and to kill a man for a religious reason is to insult God. Both are mortal sins, there are those guilty by military order of the former and I can only hope, if the Christians have the right of it, St. Peter understands military law as well as the Pope claims to understand God’s law. St. Peter may be a corporal, for gatekeeping is the level of duty they get in the American army. If he is in fact a corporal he will be familiar with Article 99, Manual for Courts-Martial, United States 1951, para. 8 thereof, which deems it a death-penalty crime to fail do one’s utmost to "encounter, engage, capture, or destroy" enemy personnel, and, if not exonerated, should be able to take a plea in mitigation and get off with less than a Heavenly firing squad. I can say in passing that the "encounter" aspect is easily acquitted, since one rarely can avoid it, and the enemy usually "engages" relieving one of that burden. The capture or destroy part is the rub, and while "destroy" may be immoral, "capture" is mortally dangerous unless the enemy is willing to go along with it.