Dear Brothers and Friends,

I.

It has been six months since coming to Australia. In June I stayed again with the Murrinh-patha community at Wadeye (Port Keats). Some of them visited St. Albert's Priory (Oakland, CA) in 1994 and would love to come again. Wadeye is the aboriginal name for the area which is now supplanting the European name Port Keats--named after an officer on the naturalist Darwin's ship, the Beagle, which passed off the coast sometime in the 1770's. This change of name is itself an indication of a change of attitude as the people look back to their indigenous roots. My frequent visits are helpful because they let me see how the group is adjusting to the technology and the cultural values of modern life. Change is continuous now as possibly always was. Since my first visit in 1986 television has been introduced, phones are used freely, out stations (i.e. housing units for small groups) are being built deeper into the Bush, trucks and cars go in and out of Darwin with ease and computers are used in the schools. Their religious values which are Catholic and aboriginal are deeply embedded, but the Elders are finding it hard to pass them on in the face of so much modern cultural static. On the dark side, technology has meant that activities once run by local aboriginals, like brick making, house building, the gardens, the sewing center, bread making have all been shut down since they could not compete with goods trucked in from Darwin. The consequent unemployment had added to a feeling of debility and galling dependency. Local people want to be empowered to make their own decisions. Some think that removal of all non-indigenous influences (white and Asian)) is the answer, but not all think this way.

There are actually five (at least) groups living at Wadeye. This is the result of the combining of several groups in the 1930's. Each group has its own language and a local land area to which there is a fierce attachment. Although the groups have been living together for two generations using one local aboriginal language, Murrinh-patha, in public, the non local groups now feel that they have imposed on the hospitality of the Murrinh-patha crowd long enough. It is high time for everybody to return to their own proper lands--i.e. to locales about 10 to 40 miles out of Wadeye. There people will be able to speak their own languages and teach their own stories to their own children and in this way a sense of cultural identity will return. We are talking about groups of 60 to 100 people. The government is building houses to serve as out stations to facilitate the move. Whether these housed will actually be used or simply become holiday houses in the Bush while most time is spent in Wadeye is one of those things which only time will tell. How the Church will cope with ministering to these small groups I do not know. The aging priest/s at Wadeye may visit the out stations, to say Mass and to preach from time to time, but they can hardly be a continuous presence. Ecclesiologists say that priests and sisters should come from the local community, but how the type of priest we now expect, one who is celibate and seminary educated, can come from these small groups and return to them is hard to envisage. Some rethinking will have to be done.

In any event, I have been sitting in from time to time with the Linguist who is gathering material to produce a grammar and a dictionary for each of the five groups. This is the last region in Australia where the languages have not been worked through. Each morning the indigenous speakers gather, sit in a circle and begin swapping stories in their own tongues. They explain the context and meaning of words and phrases not only to the professional linguist who thinks of meaning in English terms, but sometimes to each other for these aboriginal languages are also quite different from each other in taxonomical and grammatical senses. The very telling of stories, in addition, helps draw out the friendships which do exist between them. These sessions may very well become important in damping some traditional rivalries and ego involvements it these communities do move out of Wadeye and return to their separate living situations. Each morning the Elders are keen, but young speakers are few. Will all these languages survive outside of books? Probably not. But one or two do have a chance of doing so.

II.

I would have stayed longer in the North at Wadeye (Port Keats), but returned to Canberra to sit in on the Dominican Province's Assembly and its 50 year anniversary as a Province. The Assembly was held immediately before the Provincial Chapter which has just concluded. The overriding issue at the Assembly was vocations--with a big V. A sociologist, Fr. Mike Mason (who has stayed with us in the Western Dominican Province), gave the statistics and analysis which suggests a discontinuity is opening up between the older generation and those in their 20's and 30's. When a discontinuity occurs provinces begin to think of how to close down gracefully. Mike pointed out that the Anglo-Irish population has not been replacing itself for over 25 years (in polite words it is dying out, too). This means that the pool for vocations is very small indeed. It will be necessary to look for vocations more aggressively among Asians and Hispanics (yes, Hispanics have arrived here also). Although the studium (house of formation) in Melbourne is very small, it will be kept up since the Master of the Order has suggested that provinces without their own studium soon become moribund.

Another item before the Assembly was the Province's "Vicariate" which includes the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea (PNG). The Solomon Islands has been a mission for the Province for 25-30 years and is doing quite well. The Vicariate has a number of Solomon Islander priests and about 8 students are in formation at Burmana (Moresby). There are also many Dominican Sisters, almost all Solomon Islanders, who work closely with the Fathers in the Vicariate. Several priests and student observers were at the Assembly and even though it was a scary time for them because tribal fighting could break out at home at any moment. The Solomon Islands were known as the peaceful islands and were thought a quiet place until this past May. The coup which broke out in Fiji where the Prime Minister and his Cabinet were seized and held hostage at gunpoint was imitated in Honiara, the Solomon's capital. Perhaps too a direct comparison should not be made since words like "being detained and being protected" were being used, but the bed rock issue was the same--land and the use of land. Modern commerce and business has drawn people from one island to exploit and run over the land on the island of others. The profits are not distributed fairly--or so it seems to those whose land holdings are being used, and over used.

The ecology of the beloved land is being destroyed by the outsiders. It must be returned! Social pressure and a terror force (the Isatabu Freedom Movement) is used to force the newcomers (here largely Malaitians) to return to their own island. Between 20,000 to 30,000 people have already been forced to return to the home island of Malaitia from Guadacanal. A militia (the Malaitial Eagle Force) is formed to defend those being forcefully dispossessed. They are stronger and can, and do, arrest the members of the government. Fire fights break out and conferences and standoffs become the order of the day. Those on smaller islands as yet unaffected can only stand by and hope that it will not happen to them. Despite all, the Solomon Islanders at the Assembly were calm and collected and planning for a future. Where should the island students be sent, they asked? Should a new house of formation be built in Honiara? The town has been a center of fighting these past few weeks, but there is confidence that the fracas will not last for long. Land has been bought for the house, and that is a sign of hope for the future.

III.

This past week in the Solomon Island's capital of Honiara two men who had been shot in a fire-fight in the undeclared civil war going on in the islands were in hospital recovering. They were Isatabu militia members, local Guadacanalers. They were deliberately killed by the "other side." The report is from an advisor to the Dominican bishop of Gizo, one of the Islands.

IV.

Here's my latest reflection which saddens me to write. What's happened to us? Murder-execution shatters the Establishment. The gang-like execution-murders of two defenseless Isatabu militants lying in their hospital beds has shattered the basic assumptions of the nation's establishment--the political, business, cultural and religious elite--as well as the backbone of the country, the villager. One of the two most respected universal sanctuaries--the church and the hospital--has been outrageously desecrated. Government ministers hastily met in emergency session the same evening (July 10) trying to come to grips with an atrocity that has occurred so soon on their watch.

The Tobruk Peace signing euphoria which occurred on the nation's 22nd anniversary of independence has totally evaporated. The Solomon Star, ordinarily pro-government, didn't carry a single picture of the Tobruk event and had but a single front-page story about the handing over of the $10 million in compensation. To diffuse somewhat the awfulness of the double brutal murder among the Guadalcanal people, however, the government handed over $200,000 today to the Guadacanal Premier, Alebua. But how the murders were carried out has upset the whole nation. The three killers coldly and brazenly walked into the hospital, ordering the staff to open the patients' locked door and when the keys wouldn't be produced (rather courageous of the young nurses to say the least), bashing the door down, standing at the foot of the bed, and leveling the shot gun at point blank range totally destroyed the two youths chest areas.

Hospital as sanctuary was totally blown away by the same shot gun blast as well. Unfortunately the viciousness exercised by both sides in this conflict has been escalating over these past few months. The headless corpse dumped at Honiara's Main Market (May 6) marked the public escalation of the militia fighting. The Eagles have their "Panel Beating Shop" where suspected Isatabu prisoners have been beaten to death. The Isatabu, on their side, capture and execute captives (two young Malaitians killed last week) has been going on without any public outcry by government members, business houses, Church and traditional leaders. The hospital murders, however, could not be ignored; they happened in broad daylight in the center of town. Who now is safe in Honiara?

The city has no functioning police force--the Eagles run a joint security operation with the remnant of police officers but offer only selected security. Hijacking of cars and private vehicles occur daily. Extortion of business premises remains a favorite in-door sport and driving Honiara's roads is an exercise for extreme caution. Fortunately the Eagles, for the most part, still drive on the left side of the road but how long will that last? This ruthless execution has ripped away the mask of normality, of the city's "business as usual" attitude. Decision makers across the board are now digging deeper not only to understand what is happening in this dissolution of the nation and what must be done to save it. Extraordinary measures are required and quickly so. The nation's judiciary should set up an independent investigative body to record our growing rate of human rights abuses: dates, times, names of victims, names of alleged perpetrators, pictures of site, locations and whatever else is needed to document for court proceedings in the future. This would be in line with Amnesty International's call for such a body.