“IT’S Wattle Day today, the day on which generations of schoolchildren have sung The Song of the Wattle:

The bush was grey a week today,

Olive green and brown and grey,

But now the Spring has come this way

With blossoms for the Wattle.” (Column8, Sydney Morning Herald, Wattle Day 1990)

What next? Many Webdiarists have emailed complaints about my “mawkish sentimentality” this week, and Webdiary’s failure to consider the future and what is the best way forward. Many have analysed the state of play in Indonesia and ways to deal with that government. Some, on the extremes, have screamed abuse and blame at other Australians, the Americans, whatever.

The face of the man at Bali’s memorial service yesterday, the man seeking and receiving comfort from John Howard – whose leadership this week I’ve found inspiring – is the face of Australia this week. The shock. The grief. The utter surprise that “the other” did this to us.

It’s a terrible truth that one feels what it is to be Australian at times like this. Really feels it. Tears come every day, yet the tears are not only of grief, but of pride. Pride in how the Australians directly effected are handling their grief. Pride in their care for the Balinese victims. Pride in Australian volunteers on the terrible scene. Pride in who we are. Not only pride. Love.

If you’d like to, please write to me about how you spend your Sunday.

After that, I’ll get right into the extremes of opinion and document them through Webdiarists’ emails. I’ll begin publishing expert and lay analysis of the tragedy. And all that. The next hard bit.

Today, three pieces from Australians who’ve appreciated the Webdiary space this week.

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Keith Conley in Canberra

I haven’t hooked into Webdiary for a long time, mainly because much of what I read I found raw and offensive and as combative as anything Parliament throws up, no matter the topic. I stayed out of the kitchen.

Well now that is all in hideous and bloodied perspective. Despite my deep differences with your view of the world, I wanted to say thanks for the sensitive way in which your column is responding to Bali. I couldn’t have chosen a better poem than Henry Lawson’s Freedom on the Wallaby to express my feelings of useless outrage and bitter pride. I guess, like many, the anger has been building all week with no release and I have refused to consider what might have led anyone to commit such a thing. The act is evil, I cannot apply logic or reason to it, whatever the cause. I don’t know how others are so quick to find blame, and so certain of themselves too. The egotism is shameful.

I hope Sunday will help all Australians to find common purpose and strength at this awful point of our history, I hope William Deane can be asked to say some understanding words, and I hope the government finds the men who did this and brings them to a swift and deserved justice.

But above all, I hope that the families and individuals still enduring this agony can find peace and some measure of comfort for their pain. They should be all we worry about for now.

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Greg Carroll in Essendon, Melbourne

New York is distant physically and in the imagination; seen in movies, inhabited by celebrities, unreal to most Australians. The go-it-alone shoot-em-dead response seemed fitting, like something we’ve been conditioned to expect by the same movies on which most of us base our perceptions of New York.

Bali is different. Ordinary people in ordinary suburbs, footy clubs etc. People all over Australia know Bali. Hopefully that knowledge, that reality, will bring a constructive reaction, like Bob Howard urges in Searching for hope, rather than a reaction which can only degenerate into impotent raging.

Maybe I’m a dreamer.

***

Luke Stegemann in Osaka, Japan

I contributed to Webdiary last year post-September 11, and have been a regular follower. Last month I left Brisbane and have been working as a Professor of English at a university in Osaka, so I have been somewhat at a remove from the tragedy of the Bali bombings, nevertheless following opinion, comment and reaction closely through the internet.

I wanted to thank you for two things: firstly, for your suggestion that we adopt Uluru as a symbol of our unity in grief. This simple comment has moved me deeply, and thinking about it today as I walked down a corridor at the university to an undergraduate class, I broke into tears at the very simplicity and beauty of the idea. How central the landscape has always been, not only to indigenous Australians, but later in the formation of the “white” Australian psyche and identity. To adopt this monumental symbol of enduring and eternal strength, so important for our indigenous brothers and sisters, as a symbol now for the grief Australia feels at this unique time strikes me as a marvellously non-partisan and profoundly moving idea.

Secondly, thank you for directing me to the piece by Jennifer Hewett on the horror of the makeshift morgues. Jennifer mentions a grief counsellor from Queensland, Gillian Coorey, who happened to be in Bali on holidays and is helping with identification of victims. Gillian and I met last year when studying for an Education Doctorate together, and she is a wonderful person, full of the type of strength and compassion that would now be required. I can imagine she is doing a tremendous job in what must be indescribable circumstances.