TheBanyanTree: Introduction, reintroduction, and stepping back inside

[Robin]

You know when something changes in your favourite café and you don’t like it? Maybe the best barista in town moves on; or the management makes some stupid rule about leaving your dog outside; or the chef is replaced and you don’t like the new menu; or the owner says something offensive. So you just stop going there. That was me and The Banyan Tree.

For several years I hung out here with Roger, the Spousal Unit, telling stories and sometimes just shooting the breeze with everyone else. It was a good place and many a good tale spun under its branches.

I’ve been away thinking now for a while, and perhaps I should start here by telling you why I’ve been away so long. 

Roger and I signed up to the forerunner of TBT, a little café just off the internet superhighway called The Spoon, in about 1997. We’d just ventured into this place we know as cyberspace and which has, over the past 16 years become a second home to some of us, and The Spoon seemed like a convivial place to rest up while we caught our breath. We made some great friends and I am forever grateful for those connections. When The Spoon morphed into The Banyan Tree we went with it, as did our cyberfriends, and things cruised along happily until one day in September, 2001, when a Terrible Thing happened.

The Terrible Thing was unlike any other thing any of us had witnessed. News of it reverberated around the world and for days after it people clustered around televisions and computer monitors and shook their heads in disbelief and spoke in hushed tones. I was working in the political science department of a major university in Australia at the time, and many of my colleagues were called upon by domestic and international media to comment and give expert opinion as to why this Terrible Thing had happened, and how governments would/could/should respond.

In the immediate aftermath of the Terrible Thing everyone, regardless of where they were in the world, tried to make some sense of it in their own heads. Why? Who? What next? Did they know anyone among the thousands of dead and missing? Where was cousin Jim who had travelled to that city just three weeks ago for a holiday? That nice girl down the road who had a scholarship to a university in that city, had her parents heard from her? 

The Banyan Tree, too, became an outlet for people’s questions: a conduit for collective grief and outrage. Into the outpouring that day, Roger sent his own thoughts about the Terrible Thing. I don’t recall what it was he wrote, but I was not prepared for the reaction that came from several people: abuse, hostility, and, perhaps most bafflingly, accusations. “I suppose you Australians are probably having a great laugh at this” shot one response. Others suggested we had no idea what anyone was going through and had no right to comment.

I needed to get away and think about this. How could anyone think that just because the Terrible Thing had happened on US soil that we here in another country were having a laugh? When the fence at the US Embassy in Canberra had become a makeshift memorial and we all knew our lives would never be the same? As for what others were going through, everyone was going through something slightly different so did anyone understand enough to be truly empathetic?

On a wider scale, I was saddened and confused to see a great country I admired suddenly slam its shutters and fold in on itself and I realised that what I witnessed in a few individuals, who I had considered friends, was being repeated at a national and global level. Where would it end?

I stepped back to think about it all for a while.

I’ve been thinking about it now for over 10 years and I’m no closer to an answer, except to know that Terrible Things have always happened and will continue to happen and that we all must search for meaning in our own ways, and if that means hurting or alienating others, that's just the way it goes. It, too, will pass.

So my road had led me back to The Banyan Tree. I now work in the political science department of a different university, I write a lot of opinion pieces for various (mostly online) journals, I’m in the final pre-publication stages of a book documenting the history of solar energy research in Australia and starting a new one on the social and political legacy of the ultra-conservative government of one Australian state in the 1970s and 80s.

I like to tell stories, though, and that’s something I hope to do more of around here. If you’ll have me back. But I won’t be leaving my dog outside.

Cheers

Robin




Sent from my iPad