Rose Galt

Best of 2008

I assume that the election of Barack Obama in the USA and the consequent end of the Bush era is a given: so I offer you my next best thing. On 13 February Kevin Rudd, Prime Minister of Australia, did what his predecessor John Howard stubbornly refused to do. In the following moving words he apologised to the Aborigine people for the government's past treatment of them:
     'For the pain, suffering and hurt of these stolen generations, their descendants and for their families left behind, we say sorry...and for the indignity and degradation thus afflicted on a proud people and a proud culture, we say sorry.'
     Only to the cynical is such a historic apology merely words. Australia has a long way to go to redress the shame of the past, far further than New Zealand, but this was a significant start.
     It was presumably this example which inspired Canada's premier, Stephen Harper, to apologise in June for the policy of taking children of the First Nation's peoples and putting them into Christian boarding schools to be assimilated; some 100,000 children were placed in such schools beginning in the late 19th century and abuse was rampant.
     Rudd is left of centre and Harper is a conservative. Both did the right thing.

Worst of 2008

The worst of 2008 for me has to be the unfolding tragedy in Zimbabwe, continuing right to the end of the year with the malaria epidemic bringing more misery and death.
     When international observers were banned from the March elections, only the most optimistic could have expected a happy outcome. Hopes sank even lower as Mugabe demanded a partial recount in April which led to another disputed 'result'. When he announced in June that he had no intention of ceding power whatever the result of the run-off between himself and Morgan Tsvangarai scheduled for 27 June, Tsvangarai had little choice but to withdraw saying 'We will no longer participate in this violent, illegitimate sham of an election process'. So the descent of Zimbabwe into violence, chaos and despair continues unabated.
     When I think back to the enthusiasm with which Mugabe's election 30 years ago was greeted by those of us on the political left, I want to weep.

Book of 2008

In a year of good reading, I can't decide so I hope you will indulge me. The serendipitous find was Mr Pip by a New Zealand writer hitherto unknown in the UK, Lloyd Jones. Set in the civil war-ridden island of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea, it is a first person account by a young girl, Matilda, of how her life is changed by her attendance, against her mother's wishes, at the village school, run by an eccentric white man and with only one book, Dickens' Great Expectations. It was the difficult third in Waterstone's 3-for-2 offer and it simply blew me away.
     The second is the Orange Prize winner The Road Home by Rose Tremain. Its hero Lev, a grieving widower with a young daughter and a mother to support, takes the horrific 30-hour bus journey from his home in an unnamed eastern European country to London to find work. It is a deeply humane story of exile and loss, fear and hope and in no way a political diatribe. Tremain has a particular gift for characterisation and the people who inhabit Lev's new life as well as his marvellous pal, Rudi, back home, spring to life from her pages. In less skilled hands they could so easily have become clichéd stereotypes. A truly uplifting novel that nevertheless had me in tears. Don't finish it on the bus.

Rose Galt is past president of the Educational Institute of Scotland

Sheila Hetherington [click here]