LUNAR REFLECTIONS

Fifty years ago today we crowded into a science classroom at lunchtime. Most of us were around seventeen years old. There was a flickering black and white television showing snowy pictures. We were told later that Australian observatories were instrumental in making the telecast possible. However, on the day of the first moon landing, it was an all-American event.

At the time, an American group's rendition of the theme song from Hair, the anti-war musical, was at the top of the Australian music charts - although the version by Australia's own Doug Parkinson was a much better performance.

Some of us had mixed feelings about the USA on that day. Certainly, the moon landing appeared to be an achievement of a nation at the peak of its powers. But the war in Vietnam seemed wrong and there were alarming divisions in the American polity. Does any of that sound familiar?

As it turned out, the USA was only six years away from a disastrous defeat in Vietnam and a period of further humiliations which culminated in the capture of most of the American diplomats at the Embassy in Tehran by Iranian revolutionaries.

Then, in the 1980s, events started to go America's way again. The Soviet Union made huge mistakes, exemplified by its foolish intervention in Afghanistan. Soon, European Communism was in its death throes - a process that generated terrible wars in parts of Eastern Europe during the 1990s as the nationalist divisions masked by years of totalitarian tyranny were reasserted. The USA, meanwhile, expelled the Iraqi invaders from Kuwait in a short war that showcased America's advances in military technology.

By the turn of the century, the USA seemed, once more, all-powerful. The new optimism would not last. Decades of complacent Western foreign policy failures in the Middle East had nurtured the scourge of Islamism - a deranged perversion of one of the three Abrahamic faiths. After the outrage of 11 September 2001, the global nature of terrorism was finally acknowledged by American leaders - although it was not particularly well understood. Hurting, and in despair, the US took revenge, apparently having learned little from its own experience in Vietnam and the Soviet Union's failures in Afghanistan.

Today, as I remember that lunchtime in the science classroom fifty years ago, I am, like almost everyone else, fearful about what the next fifty years will bring. The state of mind of the current occupant of the White House and the perspectives of his opponents do not bode well. The leaders of other major Western nations, and their allies (including Australia), seem to be mostly inept and self-seeking. Maybe, it will work out all right. I pray it does.

One thing is for sure. I am thankful that I have lived to see this jubilee. Some of my classmates are no longer with us. And I know something else. Governments and political leaders are not the only ones who mess things up from time to time. So, I am sorry for all of my mistakes and what they might have cost others.

Strangely, my most vivid memory of the moon landing is a humorous quip made by a young friend - now, of course, an old friend. As we all stared at the screen, fascinated by the spectacle, he asked me: "Who's holding the camera?"