CRY FOR OLD CEYLON AND PAKISTAN

The terrorist attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team in Pakistan is another outrage. Unlike Australia, the Sri Lankans had bravely gone to Pakistan to take part in sport , well knowing that it is a dangerous country showing increasing signs of disintegration .

Riven by a long civil war and battered by the tsunami , Sri Lanka is itself in a sorry state . This Little Darwin hoarder once collected a wide range of ephemera- postcards, photographs, travel guides , pamphlets, etc- related to the country when it was the fabulous place known as Ceylon, renowned for its grand old temples, friendly people and sapphires of various colours. Its capital, Colombo, was an exotic and busy port linking Britain with India, the Orient, Australia and New Zealand . One insensitive travel guide said many of the ancient temples needed a coat of modern paint.

In a l908 edition of the Lone Hand magazine there appeared a travel article about Colombo by Australian dramatist Louis Esson . Colombo, he declared, was the most cosmopolitan port in the wide world. Everybody, it seemed, passed through Colombo in those days. “There is a judge returning to Bombay, a French painter on his way to Japan , a mining magnate from Chilligoe (North Queensland ), a dealer in wild animals off to the Indian jungle, a British MP visiting Ceylon...” Australians arriving in Colombo, Esson observed, at first hesitated at being pulled about in a rickshaw , it being contrary to egalitarian principles.

There was a time when the two leaders with the most challenging jobs in the world , both women , were Mrs Indira Gandhi of India and Mrs Sirima Bandaranaike of Ceylon. Mrs Gandhi was assassinated and Mrs Bandaranaike, the world’s first female prime minister , wife of an assassinated politician shot by a Buddhist monk, had a stormy political life during which she changed the name of the country to Sri Lanka . She and her husband were blamed for disregarding the Tamil minority , thus leading to the bitter war that has raged for a quarter of a century , a final bloody shoot out said to be going on right now.