Memorial is also hope for humanity - SMH 30/08/07

On October 20, 2001, at the height of an election John Howard seemed doomed to lose, Indonesian fishermen drawing near Christmas Island came across a horrific sight. Across four kilometres of gleaming ocean surface bobbed the bodies of almost 300 women and children, and several dozen men. They drifted in their flowing clothes, among them one young mother still attached to her newborn baby by an umbilical cord. The infant had been born in the nightmare of the sinking. This was the human disaster hidden within the brief naval acronym SIEVX: suspected illegal entry vessel X.

The event was quickly forgotten, the election won, and mortgages and petrol prices took centre stage. Only a few people were willing to say: Hang on, this matters.

The national network called Rural Australians for Refugees - several thousands of people, rural and urban, who were campaigning against the mistreatment of boat people in detention - joined with others in the Uniting Church to create a memorial to something most people did not even know about, let alone want to remember. A national schools competition was held, and a design by a Brisbane schoolboy, Mitchell Donaldson, was chosen by popular acclaim.

This weekend, 353 intricately painted wooden poles will be erected on the shore of Lake Burley Griffin, humanising the numbers, giving the kind of respect in death that refugees are usually denied. Each pole has two small plaques on its side, with a Middle Eastern name on one and the name of an Australian school or church on the other. Geelong Grammar is there, as is Christmas Island School. Tiny primary schools, huge secondary schools. Every faith, or no faith at all.

One Australian newspaper editorialised about the memorial builders, calling them conspiracy theorists, exploiting the grief of survivors who should be allowed to get on with their lives. The writers seemed to overlook Anzac Day or the lavish attention heaped on the Bali bombings. It was clear that only some approved griefs suited the national agenda. Those who campaigned for decades for a Vietnam veterans' memorial know about this kind of selective history.

The opponents of the memorial showed a convenient misunderstanding of how grief works - it is the communal sharing and memorialising of loss that helps with the otherwise unbearable burden of losing one's wife and young children, and in some instances, one's whole extended family of several dozen people. These men are living here now but their lives are far from easy, and peace comes only gradually to their sleep. The survivors, in Australia and in the more welcoming countries of Norway, Finland, New Zealand and Canada, and relatives left behind in Iraq, have been deeply moved to learn of the memorial to their loved ones. And that it was largely created by Australian school students. And Christian ones at that.

Is the memorial political? It is much more than that. There are larger things than politics, and our failure to grasp this has endangered our country more than any other issue in the past decade. It is about morality, about absolute standards of right and wrong. It is about the sacredness of human life and about how humanity must transcend politics in times of emergency and need. If we don't stand for ultimate human values, if we lose our moral compass, then we are a country doomed to fatal division and decline. Who would even care about us?

Too few Australians know about SIEVX. Fewer still that it was a boat overwhelmingly full of women and children. We had their husbands, and left in terrible vulnerability, what else could these young mothers have done?

There are dark shadows around the sinking beyond mere tragedy. Australia funded a people-smuggling disruption program in Indonesia, quickly and cheaply cobbled together as treating boat people harshly suddenly became a vote winner among a frightened electorate. Indonesian police and armed forces, enmeshed in the people-smuggling industry, now at Australia's request, had a stake in its failure as well as its success. The SIEVX passengers were assembled at a hotel in Lampung, southern Sumatra. Armed police supervised the loading of the derelict and terrifyingly crowded vessel. One man attempting to disembark with his family was reportedly pistol-whipped and made to stay.

Most chilling of all, the 40 or so survivors who endured more than 20 hours in the water all reported an astonishing thing. Two military vessels, presumably Indonesian, with guns and spotlights, came in the night searching the wreck site. The people in the water cried out; many started to swim to the lights. How could this not mean rescue? But the boats sailed away.

The 300 schools and churches and individuals building the SIEVX memorial do not accuse anyone of anything. We are ordinary Australians with no way of knowing the facts. But we believe we have a responsibility as citizens to know. Remembering the SIEVX victims, standing with their families and sharing their loss, is the first step, the decent thing to do. Finding out why this happened, and how it can be prevented from ever happening again, are essential sequels.

Steve Biddulph is a psychologist and author. He has been part of the SIEVX Memorial Project since its inception in 2002.