My Father's Voice

The facade of the electoral office― the windows and doors― is covered in roll -down gates of grey painted corrugated iron. The three of us, me and the little brown dog and old Rocky, are taking a morning walk.

The little dog is shared by my daughter and son and because they cannot always look after her, she comes to stay with us. I have heard both my daughter, and my son tell the little brown dog that we are her Bubba and Zaida – her grandparents.

I am not sure how I feel about this, but I do wonder, when on arrival she demands treats, greets old Rocky with unbridled joy, and moments later wants to sit on Anne’s lap—not so much mine― whether the little brown dog has indeed come to think of us as her grandparents.

The sun is not yet fully risen above the rooftops of the houses along the street that leads to the beach, but already the air is heat- laden and still and I think that the little brown dog, because she is small and close to the heated bitumen footpath, might be better off walking along Acland Street, on the shady side of the street.

That is how we have come to be standing at the shuttered façade of the electoral office. The shutters had come down when the electoral office staff went home last night and will be raised when the staff return to work this morning.

The ritual is a daily one, ever since the electoral office was vandalised in June last year, the vandals scrawling antizionist slogans on the broken windows and doors and painting red horns—that classic antisemitic trope, the Jew as the devil― on the photo of Josh Burns, the Jewish Labor member for Macnamara.

They feel particularly meaningful this morning, these corrugated iron shutters covering the windows and doors of the electoral office which, after all, should offer up a warm welcome to the people of Macnamara.

I try—and often fail because I am a writer―to avoid making everything into some sort of metaphor, but standing here, I cannot help but see the corrugated iron as a metaphor for what has happened to the Jews in Australia—even a member of parliament who happens to be a Jew needs iron shutters on his office to mitigate the threat of violence and hatred that Jews in Australia are being forced to reckon with.

That threat of violence, where does it come from? This morning, on all the news services, you could watch a video of two nurses, a man and a woman in a hijab, in a western Sydney hospital, talking about killing Israeli patients if they came to their hospital. They were so full of pitiless hate, and I did wonder what sort of metaphor they might be these two young people.

I do wonder, standing here on the footpath beside the corrugated shutters whether this sort of hate has anything to do with the explosion of antisemitism in Australia, the increasing violence of it. And which I fear is unlikely to diminish if these two young people of the western suburbs of Sydney are not the only ones as hate-filled as they are, as ready to talk about killing Israelis – what about Jews who they consider Zionists? ― here in Australia, in Sydney, in the city’s western suburbs. And I wonder whether the Labor members of federal parliament who represent the seats where these young people live, are calling out this sort of vileness, doing something about it beyond saying it is terrible and un-Australian?

As I stand here outside Josh’s electoral office—I call him Josh because I have known him a long time, since he was a teenager – I think about his prospects at the federal election which is now only a few months away at most. I think about the Jews of Macnamara— the Jews who live in Caulfield and the surrounding suburbs. It was in one of these suburbs that the synagogue was firebombed late last year.

How will they vote, I wonder? Most of them know Josh. He worked for a while as an aide at Sholem Aleichem College, the small secular Jewish school where my children went, and which is the only day school in the world that teaches Yiddish. He was a leader of SKIF, the secular, left wing Jewish youth organisation where I went when I was young, where I was raised and mostly educated. Will they stick with Josh, the Jews who voted for him last election in significant numbers?

Stick with him despite the fact that so many Jews of the left, are bitterly disappointed with the Labor government’s response to the increasingly violent Jew hatred in Australia?

Standing here in front of the electoral office which feels like it has become some sort of fortress against those who threatened and still threaten violence against Jews, I do wonder how it is even possible that I am wondering what I will do when I go to vote, what I will think and decide as I stand in the booth, pencil in hand, ready to do what so few people in the world can do, a say in who will represent the place where I live, the streets and the homes and the people, in a democratically elected parliament.

I sometimes try to channel my father. He was a working man all his life. A factory worker. A union man. A Labor Party man. He despised Menzies and one of my great regrets was that he did not live to see the end of Menzies.

What would my father tell me, I ask myself. What do you reckon dad I want to ask him, have things reached the point where I will not just abandon Labor, but give up on Josh, use my vote to help defeat him, push him out of parliament, this young man full of promise who I have known since he was a teenager and who might even be a future Labor prime minister?

I have voted Labor all my life except for the 1974 election, when the Socialist Left in Victoria and Bill Hartley ran the Party, Hartley a shill for the Baathists of Iraq and a virulent antizionist and in my view a man hostile to Jews. In that election I put an empty senate ballot paper in the box—I could not vote for the Hartley controlled senate team—but I voted for the Labor candidate for the House of Representatives.

Is this 1974 in any way? History does not repeat itself. There is no Bill Hartley in the Labor Government. There are no Jew haters or even people who are hostile to Jews in Albanese’s cabinet. But there are people who I believe have failed to understand how much pressure Australian Jews are under. People who have been concerned about the possible political fall-out of being too loud and out there about antisemitism.

Still I remain a person of the left, even if many on the left have come to see me as just another right wing Jew who was always just a pretender, a fake leftist, a Zionist at heart, part of the dreadful Israel Lobby. But if I am still on the left, how could I not vote for Josh Burns who I have known since he was a teenager and who was part of the left-wing Jewish movement in which I had grown up and whose values we shared?

The sun is now up above the buildings. The little brown dog is keen to move on from the corrugated iron covering the facade of the electoral office. She wants to go home. Old Rocky is not sure what he wants and so he sits down on the footpath to rest his old and increasingly frail back legs.

I stand there waiting for my father’s voice. Will he respond? I don’t know, but I feel a bit lost without his advice.