That photograph. It had been on successive mantelpieces over the decades, always central, always inviting comment on both the subject, and its hand-carved, ornate wooden frame. The black and white picture showed a grainy human outline on what could possibly be a footpath. Its location was the stuff of history, never to be forgotten, never to be dismissed and the story explained much of our family’s fierce pacifist ideology.
My uncle carved the picture frame from a broken limb he collected in 1945, off the ground as he wandered, dazed, through the devastation of what had been central Hiroshima. In a strange twist, the wood was from a Eucalyptus bicostata, a Victorian blue gum, one of only about 150 trees that survived that military atrocity.
He was a war correspondent for London’s Daily Express and, towards the end of the war, was embedded with the Allied troops. He was in Japan when journalistic freedoms were suddenly stopped. The press corps knew that whatever had happened in southern Japan, it had brought the Emperor to the peace negotiations. Somehow my uncle wangled a pass and boarded a train from Tokyo down to Hiroshima.
In those first couple of days, he wandered, stunned at the complete obliteration of a city, of 100,000 people ‘evaporated’. That was the word he used in his dispatch to his Editor. He recalled a gentle rain falling, bringing a glutinous residue down upon the devastation.
He interviewed service personnel, survivors, medical staff and he took photographs of the devastation. He came to the attention of the military police, who confiscated film, camera and two notebooks. He was put on a train back to Tokyo, with a warning that any reporting of Hiroshima would incur probable prison or other serious consequences.
He ignored the warning and his Express headline read: “I write this as a warning to the world”. He spent the next seventeen years in exile from Australia, branded a traitor.
In 1975 I sat with my uncle in Paris, another exit-strategy being negotiated and reported. There was quiet laughter as he remembered how those MPs in Hiroshima had failed to find the three rolls of film he had secreted inside the lining of his coat.
Another fifty years pass. Another intractable mess, one side of the table yet again emblazoned with the Stars and Stripes, again an apparent nuclear agenda, another US intervention: another cluster!
The world is reminded that there are serious consequences for inhumane actions. There will be livestreaming, possibly popcorn and hot dogs, as well.
Some media reflect upon Hiroshima. Old footage is found, picked up by all the networks, save the Fox News bulletins. Some talk of hypocrisy, some talk of the opportunities that Artificial Intelligence may offer the world, others hunker down around boardroom tables and project a future, glistening with milk, honey and opportunity.
Around one of those tables there is detailed discussion about intergalactic travel, new horizons, societies out from under bureaucratic restraint, out from under a political class.