The ghost of Egon Erwin KischThe ghost of Egon Erwin Kisch
For months I've been hankering to name drop. All I needed was an excuse. Now, thanks to this country's immigration policies, my patience has been vindicated and I can mention my fancy with all due accord to the many demands of pertinence and topicality.
Egon Erwin Kisch1 may no longer be with us, but for all lovers of the form, Kisch's leap into the annals of historical footnotes2 really put Australia on the map in that regard.
Dave a Chara.
Well I'll be — Kisch!
Not so loud, man. I'm incognito.
And dead.
Yes, dead — and don't I know it.
Tell me, Egon: what's with this "a Chara" business?
I'm learning Gaelic.
Gaelic is it! Well, they won't be able to pull that trick on you again.3
I'm dead, Dave. The dead are beyond that sort of thing.
Oh, sorry.
Tell me this, Davey me mate: what does one have to do to get into your country? I had two perfectly good legs and when I landed ...
I know, I know, Egon. When you landed on the wharf in Melbourne, you broke both of them.4
It was a long way down.
In way of further exposition, I mention Lenny Bruce,5 Ernest Mandel,6 Wilfred Burchett,7 Joe Cocker,8 Gerry Adams9 and, most recently, Lorenzo Ervin. In contrast, Vladimir Petrov10 was asked to stay.
Can I go now? Sure, Egon, but what's the rush? Let's go for a beer or something.
No can do, Davey me mate. The Deported and Denied Club of Australasia is putting on a shindig and they want me to deliver the keynote address.
Is that so?
There's quite a few of us, so we get together every now and then. Golly, there's me and the others you've mentioned, but there's also thousands of Kanaks11 and Chinese who come along for old time's sake. Then there's the boat people, of course — there's heaps of them. It's quite a crowd.
Of footnotes?
That's right, Davey me mate — footnotes, the lot of us.
Dave Riley Email:dhell@ozemail.com.au
1. Czech communist journalist, nemesis of the Nazi party, who was taken from us in 1941.
2. See Footnotes to Take Your Fancy (Percival Watson et al) for an excellent anthology and De Selby's standard work — Fossicking Through the Garbage Bin of History — a do-it-yourself guide.
3. In 1934 Kisch was denied a visa to enter Australia by the then attorney general, R.G. Menzies. The criterion used was "fluency in a European language". Since Kisch was multilingual, they forced him to take a language test in Gaelic — one of the few European languages he did not know.
4. Confined to his ship's cabin, when the boat pulled away from the dock, Kisch leapt from the railing to the wharf below, breaking both his legs.
5. Radical US stand-up comedian who was expelled from Australia for talking dirty on stage.
6. Marxist economist denied a visa for years and, when let into the country in 1974, ushered to Canberra to offer advice on the economy — advice which, we can now so easily recognise, was not taken.
7. Burchett was born to poor farmers in Gippsland, Victoria, but later went on to become a renowned international journalist remembered mostly for his coverage of Asia. Denied a re-entry visa to visit his dying father, Burchett secretly landed in a small plane only to be later deported by the Coalition government.
8. Expelled from Australia after a rock concert in Adelaide.
9. Gerry Adams has been denied entrance to Australia because he is supposedly not "of good character". Adams was first denied an entry visa by the ALP.
10. Attaché to the Soviet embassy who, while being escorted out of the country, was apprehended by Australian government officials and then employed through a series of accusations and exposés, to beat up a case for the banning of the Communist Party of Australia.
11. Thousands of Kanaks were deported from Australia in 1906.