Keep Applauding or Else

Keep Applauding or ElseMadam: I read with great interest the article “Unwelcome to Acknowledgments” by Timothy Cootes (March 2025). The account of his visit to Taronga Zoo—the lengthy acknowledgment of country, first in the form of a recorded message, and then by both seal trainers—is a gem. Now, the situation is really not so bad if the person in the crowd who called out “Get on with it” (or “something less polite”) was able to leave the show in one piece.

The fact that the setting was the zoo may have allowed others in the crowd to tell themselves that one of the animals had escaped its enclosure. In a different setting—a university lecture, a conference, a public event—people in the crowd would not be so forgiving. Which in part is why no one is calling out.



They live in fear.I was reminded of a passage in Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago:A district Party conference was under way in Moscow Province. It was presided over by a new secretary of the District Party Committee, replacing one recently arrested.

At the conclusion of the conference, a tribute to Comrade Stalin was called for. Of course, everyone stood up ..

. The small hall echoed with “stormy applause, rising to an ovation”. For three minutes, four minutes, five minutes, the “stormy applause, rising to an ovation” continued.

But palms were getting sore and raised arms were already aching. And the older people were panting from exhaustion. It was becoming insufferably silly even to those who really adored Stalin.

However, who would dare be the first to stop? The secretary of the District Party Committee could have done it. He was standing on the platform, and it was he who had just called for the ovation. But he was a newcomer.

He had taken the place of a man who’d been arrested. He was afraid! After all, NKVD men were standing in the hall applauding and watching to see who quit first! And in that obscure, small hall, unknown to the Leader, the applause went on—six, seven, eight minutes ..

.At the rear of the hall, which was crowded, they could of course cheat a bit, clap less frequently, less vigorously, not so eagerly—but up there with the presidium where everyone could see them? The director of the local paper factory, an independent and strong-minded man, stood with the presidium. Aware of all the falsity and all the impossibility of the situation, he still kept on applauding! Nine minutes! Ten! .

.. With make-believe enthusiasm on their faces, looking at each other with faint hope, the district leaders were just going to go on and on applauding till they fell where they stood, till they were carried out of the hall on stretchers .

.. Then, after eleven minutes, the director of the paper factory assumed a businesslike expression and sat down in his seat.

And, oh, a miracle took place! Where had the universal, uninhibited, indescribable enthusiasm gone? To a man, everyone else stopped dead and sat down. They had been saved! The squirrel had been smart enough to jump off his revolving wheel.That, however, was how they discovered who the independent people were.

And that was how they went about eliminating them. That same night the factory director was arrested. They easily pasted ten years on him on the pretext of something quite different.

But after he had signed Form 206, the final document of the interrogation, his interrogator reminded him:“Don’t ever be the first to stop applauding!”And just what are we supposed to do? How are we supposed to stop? Now that’s what Darwin’s natural selection is. And that’s also how to grind people down with stupidity.I am sorry to dampen Mr Cootes’s optimism by suggesting that things may become even worse, but, to cheer him up, at least we are unlikely to be asked to stand and clap enthusiastically, without faltering.

Isaac Waisberg Communist Union PowerMadam: In the article “Cuckoos in the Democratic Nest” (March 2025), Tom Breen describes extremely well the problems of communist infiltration of trade unions in Australia in the 1940s. However, his conclusion, that the turning point for the decline of communist power was the result of Ben Chifley putting the army into the coalfields, is totally wrong.Communist power only declined because Chifley asked Bob Santamaria to help him defeat the communists in the unions.

The formation of the Movement, which took on the communists in every union, unfortunately caused the Labor Split. With the formation of the DLP and its preferences at federal elections, Robert Menzies was able to remain in power for seventeen years. Without the DLP, there is no way that the Liberal/Country coalition could have remained in power for so long.

Walter Commins Bushfire ManagementMadam: The excellent article by Cameron and Packham (Quadrant Online, 4 February) highlights the need for and benefits from fuel reduction burning in our fire-adapted eucalypt forests.Opposition to fuel reduction burning is not new but appears to be in an expanded and co-ordinated phase by those who argue that we should tolerate high bushfire fuel loads in our forests and then assert that any fires that do start can be rapidly detected and extinguished—a response-only strategy. Under this approach to bushfire management, mild-intensity fuel reduction burning would be dramatically reduced from even the current low levels, supposedly as a conservation strategy.

The response-only strategy relies on emerging new technology for rapid detection (cameras and satellites) that are being adopted by land managers already. It also assumes there will always be sufficient well-equipped firefighting resources close at hand.The recent fires in the Grampians demonstrate that it is not easy to suppress all fires when they are small.

Victoria has one of the biggest firefighting air fleets in Australia. The fires were detected rapidly and firebombing and ground crews were deployed, but they were unsuccessful.Advocates of a response-only strategy overestimate the effectiveness of aerial water and fire retardant dropping as a means of fire suppression.

Aircraft cannot operate in high winds, during electrical storms, at night, or in heavy smoke, as was evident during the recent Los Angeles fires. Once fires reach a certain intensity, aerial suppression becomes ineffective, especially in forests with high dense canopy through which water or retardant drops will not always penetrate. Drones have been proposed as a way of delivering retardant for rapid suppression of small fires, but they have not yet been shown to be effective.

The response-only strategy has been tried in the forests of the western United States, where an aggressive fire suppression strategy was pursued for decades. This policy is now recognised as a failure because of impacts on forest health and the widespread destructive wildfires of the last couple of decades. Low-intensity burning is now being introduced on a broad scale together with mechanical fuel reduction.

A United States ecologist recently described, in the journal Nature, “wildfire suppression (in fire-prone systems) as a deeply misguided and unsustainable conservation strategy”. And that’s before considering all the other trade-offs in fire management.The proponents of the response-only strategy will of course not be held accountable for the costs and consequences of the approach to bushfire management that they advocate in our fire-prone landscapes.

Glen Kile(former Chief of CSIRO Forestry and Forest Products) The Eternal GrievanceMadam: The McEwens were a landed clan at Otter on Loch Fyne. In 1424 the Campbells overran and took our lands, and reportedly confiscated some of the more useful women. Ever since, McEwen descendants have railed, “Always was, always will be”.

My efforts to stem this impossibility have proved futile.Peter McEwen The post Keep Applauding or Else first appeared on Quadrant..