Lindsey Dawson – Turning Wheels

Courtesy of Lindsey Dawson.

I’ve been delving back into the 1990s. An editor asked me to write a story about that decade and so I spent days ploughing back through pages of the mags I edited during those years – More, Next and Grace.

Talk about “back to the future”! It made me realise that times then were like times now – only worse. In 1991 I was writing editorials about “these troubled times we live in”. I’d forgotten that our economy was pretty dire back then. Real estate was so sluggish that it was taking three months to sell a house. Mortgage interest rates were at about 14.5 percent (and they’d been even higher than that). All the talk was of redundancies and cutbacks and slashed welfare payments. Of course, it was only a few years after the 1987 share market crash and so there was still much licking of wounds going on.

There were casualties. I remember seeing unwanted BMWs parked on the verge outside people’s houses then, all sporting cut-price FOR SALE signs. But I barely remember those crippling mortgage rates, though we were struggling to pay them. And then of course, the new millennium arrived and in the current decade everything’s been so ticketyboo it’s been hard for anyone under 40 to realise that economies can go flat – which is what we seem to be heading for now.

My own 90s featured some terrific travel experiences. I woke up in my 40s and realised I’d had hardly any adventures and so off I went to places like Titicaca and Tibet. And now the wheel’s gone round again – I’m thinking of Tibet all over again.

In the mid-90s I took a rattling, jolting, five-day van ride from Kathmandu to Lhasa. The country haunted me so much that I went on to write a novel set in that landscape (Lipstick in the Dust, Random House). I saw run-down monasteries where once-brilliant walls had been covered with grey-green paint to wipe out the vivid Buddhist paintings. Some monasteries weren’t there at all – they were just piles of bricks. I saw silent places like the place where 700 monks had once lived, reduced to a small crew of grizzled old men. We heard stories of beatings, deaths and imprisonment. In one lonely temple I saw a treasured, framed magazine cover starring the Dalai Lama. He once featured on the cover of French Vogue. But that was rare. Pictures of his face were (and still are) banned. The red flag snapped in the chilly breeze over even the remotest of mountain villages.

Even then, though, back in the 90s, Tibetans told us they were in some ways grateful for the technology and advances brought by the Chinese. They knew their country could never go back to its old feudal ways. And the Dalai Lama does not ask for that. All Tibetans want is a say in their own affairs. But last week a Chinese official called the Dalai Lama “a devil with a human face, but the heart of a beast”. Oh, puh-lease.

As I watched the Dalai Lama on TV threatening to resign if the violence did not stop, I thought he seemed as surprised as anyone by the sudden street struggles in Lhasa. It was the first time I’d seen him look flustered.

All those years ago in Lhasa my tour group was taken to see the Dalai Lama’s “library”. The library turned out to be a warehouse-style building stuffed to the ceiling with jumbled piles of treasure – artworks, Buddha statues, manuscripts, gongs, prayer wheels, rugs and fabrics – all stacked higgledy-piggledy and looked after by one lone, red-robed monk. He showed us a scroll of Tibetan scriptures, penned in gold ink. It was, he said, about 700 years old. In the Western world such an item would be kept in an air-conditioned space, handled, if at all, by careful experts wearing gloves. The monk re-rolled it with bare hands and returned it to the leaning stacks of Tibetan history.

The famed Potala Palace, restored by the Chinese for the tourist trade, had rooms and temples carefully preserved for our viewing pleasure but the place had no spirit. It was just a big museum – impressive but soulless. At the Summer Palace we wandered rooms where the Dalai Lama sometimes lived as a boy, still stocked with items like the radiogram given to him in the late 1940s by Heinrich Harrer, author of Seven Years in Tibet.

Apparently the boy with the big future was thrilled to bits with that radiogram. It was one of his first glimpses of Western technology. It was, of course, left behind when he left his homeland in 1959. These days he, or one of his assistants, is no doubt Blackberry-equipped. Technology may change but still the Tibetan-Chinese standoff does not.

As the Olympic flame gets carried to Beijing, we’ll no doubt be reminded of that, over and over again.

By Lindsey Dawson