Manali Missives, December 2015/January 2016
From Wagha to Wagga Wagga
Lena and I bid you very belated Christmas and New Year’s greetings! The whole effort of moving continents, and then of me travelling 500km further to take up short term work as a minister in the New South Wales regional centre of Wagga Wagga has exhausted us. Ah well, better late than never, I suppose!
Since we are no longer in Manali, and our placement there has concluded this should really be the last Manali Missive. Instead of boring you and myself with the details of the as yet incomplete move from India back to Australia (Half of our belongings are still in a Delhi office - we hope!) I thought I would compare and contrast my current and previous places of work and living. Here goes…
I’m sitting in the Sturt Mall in the Australian inland city of Wagga Wagga, a context far removed from the one in which Lena wrote the previous entry of Manali Missives over 2 months ago. I’m here conducting a “supply ministry” for a limited time in the Wagga Wagga Uniting Church, while seeking a permanent placement somewhere in the Sydney Basin. Lena has already resumed in her previous position: she’s working 3 days a week in a medical practice in the northern Sydney suburb of Pennant Hills. She’s also living in our home with our children, whereas I’m living in a simple but adequate mobile cabin in a caravan park by the banks of the Murrumbidgee River. Mobile? Yes, it has wheels so that it can be towed above the high water mark of the floods which periodically challenge Wagga’s levee banks.
Wagga is very different from Manali. As Lena said after visiting me, though a city Wagga is still in many ways a typical New South Wales country town. It is largely flat, and contains a number of long, straight, tree-fringed streets that are broader than some of Manali’s laneways are long! Wagga is a service town, servicing a large, surrounding rural area, but also a city that hosts several faculties of Charles Sturt University, and army and air force bases on its outskirts. Manali, a tourist town that caters for India’s new middle class since ongoing security problems in Kashmir have discouraged tourists from going there, also hosts visitors and shorter and longer term residents from all over the world within the confines that steep-sided Kullu valley makes. Both towns are more multicultural and therefore interesting than one might have expected!
Then there’s the stuff that people usually talk about when comparing Australia with India. The roads that I’ve written about repeatedly. Wagga is about the same distance from Sydney as Manali is from Delhi. For a several very good reasons the Sydney - Wagga trip takes me 5 hours and the Delhi - Manali one takes 14.
There is population density. After closing time each day, but particularly on Christmas Day afternoon, you could fire a machine gun down Baylis Street, Wagga’s main shopping precinct, and not hit anyone. Doing that would cause a slaughter on the Manali mall.
There is the conduct of commerce. Although India’s cities are being introduced to the joys and problems of shopping malls it is still predominantly a country of small businesses conducted from tiny premises. Manali, a town whose population, officially about 8,000 people, swells with tourists several times a year to an unofficial number of 100,000, does not yet rate a shopping mall. Wagga, with a stable and growing population of over 60,000, has a number of these. Like most of the rest of Australia, Wagga seems to have moved towards a more American model of commerce, at least in the retail sector.
There is the role of religion: it is a powerful former of cultural identity! A few weeks ago I attended the dedication of a plaque celebrating the sesquicentenary of the occupation by Methodists, one of the Uniting Church’s antecedent denominations, of the site in central Wagga that one of the Uniting Church Parish’s current church buildings was erected on. That raises a raft of theological questions about the relationship of humans with the land in which they live. As is clear from the magnificently towered Catholic Cathedral, and bespired Anglican and Presbyterian churches sitting cheek by the Methodist church’s jowl, however, Australia’s sectarian past and not, say, considerations of the Aborigines’ prior custodianship or the question of whether we belong to the land rather than the land belonging to us, constituted the Methodists’ frame of reference. It was encouraging to learn that this plaque has become one stop in an historical walk through the city that pays attention to the history and culture of the Wiradjuri people upon whose land these churches sit, as well as the “euraustralian” history of which the Methodist movement was a part. Knowing and respecting one’s history is vital for establishing the identity of any individual and group, but it cannot be done properly without paying respectful attention to others who also live or have lived in the same landscape.
A local politician who attended the event was keen to tell me that Australia is a “Christian” country. I think that the post-enlightenment, reductionist, supposedly “rationalist” ideology that drives western countries today bears about as much resemblance to following Jesus as did the second temple Judaism that killed Him. When I asked the politician what exactly he meant by “Christian country” he quickly remembered that he had another engagement. I suspect that his point, unstated but no doubt strongly held, would have been about using the Christian religion to justify Anglo culture taking this land, then denying it to or severely controlling its use by later arrivals of other ethnicities and religions.
Hindu temples serve as “cultural markers” in the same way as do be-towered and be-spired Christian churches. There are a number of them in Manali, and they feature prominently in tourist advertising. And our experience of being denied employment visas by the Indian authorities indicates that Hindus, too, hold to the Christian, former Australian Prime Minister John Howard’s famous statement, “…we will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come”. The form of Hinduism which is driving much of Indian politics today is theologically very different from the thing the Wagga politician calls Christianity but, in a sad irony, they appear to be functionally similar.
There are of course other similarities within the differences (Or is it differences within the similarities?) between Wagga and Manali, and what they represent. The desire to see and be seen, often expressed in the taking of selfies, is more obvious on the Manali Mall than in any Wagga shopping mall, especially where men are concerned. On the other hand, Australians, particularly women, show more skin than their Indian counterparts. One of the first things I did upon returning to Australia was to have a basal cell carcinoma, the result of too much exposure to the sun in my early life, removed. But I returned with very white legs, the consequence of having worn long pants whenever I went out for more than 2 years. Lena tells me that Vitamin D deficiency is common among Indians for this reason. I am confident that vitamin D deficiency is not likely to be a problem among Wagga’s young women, for whom, apart from the occasional Brethren and Muslim, hot pants, mini skirts and t-singlets are de rigeur!
While the current western passion for cafés is being replicated in at least tourist Manali the older Indian love of tea remains (and it’s much cheaper than coffee!). Both Wagga and Manali are ethnically heterogeneous, though the ethnic mixes are both very different and complement each other. Whereas Manali’s population is mainly a mixture of south and east Asian with a strong European minority, in Wagga the reverse applies.
But I’m particularly interested in differences and similarities that are due to geography. Long ago in Sweden I learnt that geography determines destiny. During the last Ice Age a glacier reached as far south as the area the town of Eslöv, in which we much later lived, occupied. As the globe warmed the glacier melted, leaving a deposit of boulders and stones it had carried along. The landscape to the west and south of this vast deposit was made up of soil excellent for farming, but to the north and east the stones and boulders lying on the soil made farming difficult. With farmer friends working both terrains I noticed that the rich farmers who owned property west of the glacier acted like the local nobility, while those who had to struggle with stony ground were poorer, and sometimes felt the differences in class and wealth keenly.
I’m even more interested in the effects of those liquid glaciers we call rivers. It’s no fluke that the world’s three most populous countries, China, India and the U.S., are 3 of the best served by rivers. My academic supervisor once told me a story of flying across the Pacific Ocean, then the U.S., to attend a conference. When he arrived he found the American delegates actually discussing what made their nation so great. “Was it our pioneer spirit, our can do attitude?” someone wondered. Our commitment to democracy? To freedom? Was it the Pilgrim Fathers’ heritage and the influence of the Christian faith? My supervisor remarked that he came from Australia, the world’s driest inhabited continent. As he flew across the U.S. he couldn’t help but notice how many rivers criss-crossed the landscape. “I think your abundance of rivers is the an important reason for your greatness,” he ventured. There’s clearly more to it than that, but rivers are surely a factor.
The rivers that flow through Manali and Wagga are at different stages of their respective courses. In Manali we lived along the upper reaches of the Beas River. Glacier-fed, and with a steep angle of descent, it careens dangerously from rock to rock on its descent to join the Chenab river, which itself eventually joins the mighty Indus River in Pakistan! While taking a circuitous route to avoid roadblocks in the Punjab 3 months ago I crossed the Beas River wandering around within the broad confines of its banks, a much more sedate version of its younger, upstream self. At Wagga Wagga, the idea that the Murrumbidgee River might send its waters into a river in another country is bizarre. Sending them to another state is bad enough! Whether it is being augmented or depleted according to the desires of its irrigators it flows smoothly and slowly enough to drop sediment on the insides of bends, forming sandy beaches big enough to allow visitors and residents to imagine that they can match this matchless advantage of Australia’s coastal cities. There’s even a local urban myth to the effect that at 5pm each day a wave makes its way down the river! But however the rivers flow, this is Australia mate! There are plenty of eucalyptus trees in the Punjab, but nothing like the river red gums that fringe the Murrumbidgee at the caravan park that I currently call home.
And this being Australia, we are so insulated on our “insula” (island) that we really don’t know how fortunate we are. I have been told that Wagga Wagga has its fair share of social problems, and we are constantly told that we face danger from terrorists. But how different is the casual sense of well-being up and down Wagga’s Baylis St from the threat of terrorism emanating from Pakistan that is always present in north-western India! In stark contrast to Indian malls, which one enters only after passing though metal detectors and being frisked, people come and go through Wagga’s Malls as they please. One day an obviously unhappy young man emerged from Sturt Mall shouting obscenities. He caused a momentary disturbance, then moved on. I cannot imagine that behaviour being tolerated in an Indian mall. That is understandable. In terrible acts of genocide over 1 million people were slaughtered during the “Partition” of India and Pakistan in 1947, and since then the two countries have fought 4 wars, largely across “the Radcliffe Line”, an artificial boundary drawn through the rich plain of the Punjab, criss-crossed by its multitude of rivers. Cyril Radcliffe, the Englishman given the impossible task, drew the border such that it intersects the Grand Trunk Road, the great and ancient thoroughfare that runs from north-west to south east, from Kabul in Afghanistan to Chittagong in Bangla Desh. It does so between the cities of Amritsar and Lahore, 40 kilometres apart, and between the even closer villages of Indian Attari and Pakistani Wagha.
Since Partition in 1947, and in the context of the daily threat of terrorism, and the terrible history of well over 1,000 years of savage warfare between Hindus, Muslims and, more recently, Sikhs, a strange, wonderful, daily tradition has developed at the “Wagha border”. Every sundown, watched by thousands of patriotic onlookers, squads of some of the tallest soldiers from both countries march in highly stylised uniforms and wildly exaggerated goose step to their respective sets of gates, close them across the Grand Trunk Road and lower their countries’ flags. The whole show is an exercise in competitive histrionics. The two men who call the moves in these complex dances compete to see who can call longer. The respective MCs lead their crowds in calling “Hindustan/Pakistan zindabad!” (“Long live India/Pakistan!”) A drummer, his kit wildly amplified, sits on a roof on the Indian side belting out the rhythm. When it’s all over the audience goes to the border gate for photos, and walk along the fence to watch the Pakistanis watching us.
From Wagha to Wagga Wagga. Fourteen months later I sat in this Sturt Shopping Mall, named for another Englishman, the explorer Charles Sturt. Nearly 200 years ago Sturt led several expeditions trying to determine whether the westward-flowing rivers of the then British colony of New South Wales emptied into an inland sea. Instead he discovered that they all flowed into a large river which he named the “Murray”, and which itself flowed into the sea via an outflow so cunningly masked that the expeditions led by 2 explorers, Englishman Matthew Flinders and Frenchman Nicholas Baudin, who had circumnavigated Australia in different directions, had both missed it. Sturt began his great trip to the mouth of the Murray and back by hauling his vessels to the upper reaches of the Murrumbidgee River in the Snowy Mountains. Both on the way downstream from there and on the return trip Sturt passed the site of what is Wagga today.
Neither the Murrumbidgee nor the Murray Rivers can compete with the great Indus river. It is double their lengths and its average discharge is about 8 times that of the Murray River, itself fed by the Murrumbidgee. But both are much longer than the Beas, and the Murray’s average discharge is about 50% larger. Nevertheless, the Murray and Murrumbidgee, and numerous other tributaries of the Murray form one of the world’s greatest, if driest catchment areas. With an area of over one million square kilometres the Murray-Darling Basin is the size of Egypt, the world’s 30th largest country, and larger than all of Pakistan. As the Punjab is for India and Pakistan so the Murray-Darling Basin is Australia’s food bowl: 40% of the nation’s agricultural produce is grown within its bounds.
So it is as one might expect. For all their obvious differences Wagha and Wagga Wagga, and Manali and Wagga Wagga, and the countries they represent in this highly personal, tiny sample have much in common, and for all their perhaps surprising commonalities those differences are still obvious! The proper place for me to conclude this weblog is not in the Sturt Shopping Mall or Manali Day coffee shop, nor even at the Wagha border, but by a river. Australia may not be Christian in the sense I understand that word but as Lynn White, the man to whose famous article on ecology and Christianity I responded with a book put it, “Certainly the forms of our thinking and language have largely ceased to be Christian, but to my eye the substance often remains amazingly akin to that of the past.”
Christianity’s main source of information is the Bible, and the Bible starts, finishes and is shot through with the motif, “the river of the water of life”. Similarly, so enamoured of rivers is Hinduism that the world’s largest religious festival, the Kumbh Mela, involves being purified by washing in the Ganges River, most particularly at the confluence of the Ganges, the Yamuna and the mythical Sarasvati rivers. Good grief, we Australians just want our rivers to be in good nick; the Indians are crazy about theirs!
So I sit on the verandah of my cabin by the Murrumbidgee, and muse, and enjoy the raucous Australian birds and the sturdy river Red Gums on a glorious late afternoon in high summer. This is the end of Manali Missives. It grieves me, this ending, just as leaving Manali has grieved us. But perhaps, next month, I’ll start a new blog. Hmmm…”Murrumbidgee Mullings” sounds OK. How about “Riparian Ramblings”? Maybe just “Wagha Wagga”. Or “Musings of a Manali-modified Minister”… God bless you my friends, it’s been fun.
David Reichardt
