The Idea of Home Read Online Free PDF Page B

for the sake of heaven. Australia has gained many things in the last thirty years, and I’m not for a moment belittling those gains. But some things have been lost, or misplaced, along the way. Maybe we can come to a new consensus thatretrieves some of the best elements of the old one, that fair, visionary, daring and idealistic view that once defined us.
    Maybe, once again, it will be time.

THREE
AT HOME IN THE WORLD
    I n the year 2000, I participated in the Sydney Olympic Games. I’ll never forget the feeling, walking out into the unearthly roar of the crowd in Stadium Australia, watching the twinkle of camera flashes light up the night like thousands of fireflies.
    I wish I could tell you I was an athlete, part of the higher, stronger, faster youth of the world. But I’m not fast — in fact I couldn’t win a race if I started the night before. As for strength, I couldn’t knock the skin off a rice pudding. And since I turned forty-five the day before the Sydney Olympicsbegan, youth could only be described as a distant memory.
    I was there as a pixel. A speck of highly costumed colour in the extravaganza of the Olympic opening ceremony. My job was to be part of the moving human grid that directed the athletes in the parade of nations, making sure that all 10,500 bodies wound up in a pleasing arrangement on the field of play. It was a bit like being a sheep dog, only with choreography. The athletes marched onto the field in alphabetical order by nation, and we costumed Kelpies artfully nudged them into position.
    The parade of nations is one of the ceremonial grace notes required at each Olympic Games. Others include the torch, the Olympic flag and the release of peace doves. These were always real birds, until the Seoul Olympics. In Seoul, the live doves decided that the Olympic cauldron looked like a lovely place to perch, and became dead doves. So the Sydney ceremonies office decided to rethink the doves.
    After the athletes were all assembled, something unexpected happened. A huge white flag fluttered outabove our heads, covering the entire field of play. I was underneath it, with the athletes of 199 nations — more countries than had ever come together at an Olympics. Suddenly, we were in a very intimate, strangely luminous space. And onto that flag, billowing over all of us, was projected the image of doves made of light: bright, fluttering symbols of peace.
    Underneath the flag, I looked around me at all the young athletes’ faces. They were turned upward in surprise and wonderment. I was standing right near the nations beginning with the letter I. The athletes of Iraq were there, and right beside them were the athletes of Iran. Last time I’d seen young people their age from those two nations, more than half of them had been dead. They had been bloated, stinking corpses, littering the sands of the Faw peninsula on the Iran–Iraq border after a brutal battle in the eight-year conflict between the two countries. Now they stood — alive, joyful — together. Not far away, athletes from Eritrea lined up right by the team from Ethiopia. A few years earlier, during the thirty-five-year civil war between those nations, I’d visited the site of a massacre where all that remained of the victims was a trophy pile of bleached skulls.
    I took a deep breath of the spring air that night, and I thought to myself, this really is the new millennium, and the world really is at peace. It seemed, at that moment, that we had done it at last. Perhaps we really would study war no more. It was a sweet moment, and so bitterly brief. Before the closing ceremony of those millennium Games, word arrived in the press pavilion of trouble on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. The Associated Press reporter was packing her desk, called away from covering the Games to cover the new outbreak of violence. Within days, the second intifada was in full eruption, the smoke of suicide bombs and the sour reek