September 10.
The news that the Queen is to receive a visit at Balmoral this weekend
from Mr Paul Keating, Australia's current Prime Minister and would-be
president of a republic of Australia, puts me in mind of the English
monarch, Henry II, who got rid of one of his most persistent critics
merely by murmuring in the hearing of the right people: ''Oh, who will
not rid me of this turbulent priest?''
One would wish the Australian Prime Minister no real harm, of course,
but it must be tiresome for HM having to entertain someone who is doing
his level best to ditch her and, worse, obviously patronises her.
I remind myself that the true Australian is an Aboriginal, whose land
Australia was long, long before even Mr Keating's forebears appeared on
it. They are a simple people with an ethos, a lifestyle all their own
that has been ruthlessly exploited, their watering places poisoned and
their lands wrested from them.
The true natives of Australia, like the red Indians of America, are
people that ''decent'' Australians like Paul Keating distance themselves
from because their conscience troubles them.
Civis Romana sum was St Paul's lifeline and that of many a Roman. If
the would-be president of Australia were to have his way Civis Britannia
sum, the Aboriginal's last lifeline to HM the Queen via the Privy
Council will have gone for good.
It is no thanks to the Keatings of Australia that the Aborigines
continue to be able to live, move, and have their being at all.
''There's a track winding back/To an old-fashioned shack/Along the road
to Gondagai . . .'' -- Mr Keating should take it.
David Rowan Henderson,
Cnoc-Ard,
Ardfern,
Lochgilphead.
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