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PREFACE

This book has its origins in the visit to Australia in 1984 by Ahn Jae Woong, then WSCF Asia Pacific Regional Secretary,¹ who asked me to write a book on peace education. This request helped me to decide to apply for study leave from teaching at Melbourne College of Advanced Education in 1986, when the bulk of this book was written; I am grateful for the practical support and encouragement of my colleagues in the granting of this leave and in many other ways. I am also very grateful to Ahn Jae Woong and to Yong Ting Jin for their encouragement to write my own book on this subject.

I have written reflections on my own experience of peace issues, and of peace education, and I invite readers into a conversation in search of adequate answers to the questions that arise. My own questions focus on issues surrounding our perceptions of injustice, our sense of powerlessness to avert global catastrophe and our human capacity for violence. I would expect readers to learn from the differences as well as the similarities in our perceptions of these issues.

I write from a background formed by Christian faith, and continue to find value in this tradition; but I do not expect that all readers will share, or even understand, this faith. I write as an Australian citizen who is privileged to have visited and lived in other societies; I have an awareness of the intractability of global and local conflicts, and of the difficulty as well as the desirability of peacemaking. I do not aspire to a "complete coverage" of these topics, as I do not believe in the availability of complete knowledge while we still have an open and unknown future before us. I do aspire to the articulation of a vision of peace and of peace education that can sustain and transform our personal and collective lives.

It may be useful for readers to know that I wrote each section of this book as a separate and independent essay, once I had found a significant starting-point in my own experience (usually after at least a half-hour of meditation). This then led to the search for a string on which to thread all these beads, and to two major drafts of this book, comprising seven and five chapters respectively. In editing, the current version, I have sought to preserve what I consider to be my more successful raids on the inarticulate, as this is the area where improved perception may make a real difference.

I thank the WSCF Asia-Pacific office for publishing this book. I

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thank my colleagues and former colleagues at Melbourne College of Advanced Education for their practical support in the writing of this book, and for their contributions to my understanding of education. I thank my family, friends and colleagues, too many to name individually, for their interest and support during a protracted project.

I thank Robin Burns for organizing a study group on peace education that prompted me to think more deeply about these issues. I thank Herb Feith, Di Bretherton, Valma Edwards, Diana Pittock, Vanessa Letham and Paul Begley for their tape-recorded conversations in which I was able to make an initial identification of issues. Anne den Houting's cartoons speak for themselves, and I thank her for the thoroughness and skill with which she has produced them. I thank Eva Wynn, Margaret Newton, Hilary Mc Phee, Amanda Apthorpe, Kevin Harris, Ann Ng, Doug Purnell, Elizabeth Wood Ellem and Fay Yule for their very helpful comments on drafts of the manuscript.

Finally, I thank Fay, Rebecca and Martin for their support, particularly during 1986 when, as I am now free to see, I became over-involved in the creative process. While I take sole responsibility for the substance of this book, its production owes much to many others.

I gratefully acknowledge the following permissions for reproduction under copyright: Faber & Faber Ltd., London, and Random House, Inc., New York, for extracts from “Vespers, Horae Canonicae” ; from Collected Poems 1927-1957, by W.H.Auden; SCM Press, London, and Macmillan, New York, for an extract from" Peace" by C.F.Evans, from A Theological Wordbook of the Bible, ed. A. Richardson; Australian Broadcasting Corporation for the recording of the message from the Dalai Lama; and Jack Davis for his poem "A Eulogy for Peace - By an Old Aboriginal" from The Firstborn (Angus & Robertson, 1970).