Page 45 - Week 01 - Tuesday, 12 February 1991
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men of us". That sort of attitude still has some place in Australian mythology; but it is time that community leaders stood up and made some sense of this sort of conflict. They should genuinely look for peace instead of looking for their own political popularity at the polls. The sort of involvement that Australia has in this war is totally inappropriate and we ought not be there. I certainly oppose this motion.
DR KINLOCH (4.40): At 4.00 pm this afternoon at Ursula College our Quaker delegates to the Seventh Assembly of the World Council of Churches began a vigil. That vigil will continue from now until 10.00 pm. All through the World Council of Churches meetings during these two weeks there are different groups holding vigils at different times. It is just a coincidence that the particular vigil for which the Society of Friends is responsible is on right now, from 4.00 pm to 10.00 pm. I said to one of our representatives that I would try to be there when I could.
I am in a very great sense of anxiety about what we are doing today. I ask for the patience and, in a way, the indulgence of all members as I speak on this issue. Just in case there should be any feeling that somehow I am some kind of wimp, I say for the record that in September 1939, as a schoolboy in Sussex, I was at a school where gas masks were issued. I remember carrying one of those gas masks. I remember going to the shelters. There was one bomb attempt on a nearby factory in which people were killed. My headmaster's house was damaged. We spent many days picking up the pieces. My mother was a nurse in the base hospital in Horsham, Sussex, looking after the Canadians coming back in 1944 and 1945. My cousin, Charles Hellard, was killed as a young flying officer in that war. My father was working in shipyards all around the coast of Great Britain repairing ships.
In 1944, the year I did the School Certificate - it is called the Oxford School Certificate - the Germans began using buzz-bombs. I am never going to forget the noise of those bombs. I will never forget them. You could hear them. They were the first in the line of descent that has led to the kinds of missiles that are now being fired on both sides in the Gulf war. There were also silent missiles, the V2 rockets. People would not know that they were coming. I assure you that you knew about the buzz-bombs in 1944.
I wish to say, therefore, that I am not talking about war from second or third hand. During the Korean war I was RA12324742 for approximately three years in the United States Army. During the Vietnam war - some of us here were associated with the moratorium movement - I began my move towards an approach to pacifism and my first association with the Society of Friends. I think, with great honour, of David Hodgkin, a man whom I enormously revere. During that time I formally renounced my United States citizenship and formally became a subject and citizen of the
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