The back page of the New York Times put it well. It was an empty broadsheet page except for the words: ‘This is what happens when you silence journalists.’

But no shortage of advice about what to do in Iraq. The Sun-Herald urges President Obama to ‘stop dithering’ and bomb something. The Daily Telegraph advises that ‘the world needs the US to display strength.’ A cautious pundit in the Lowy Institute for International Policy thinks we can best help with intelligence imagery so that bombers can strike military targets and not civilians. But others like retired Major General Cantwell said we should ‘stay out of it’. One opinion poll — for The Drum — found that 70 per cent of respondents believed Australia should not offer the Americans any military support if they take military action in Iraq. But the Age thinks we cannot just do nothing. We have ‘an abiding moral duty’ to help consolidate democracy in Iraq. The Sydney Morning Herald reminds us that religious wars have been raging in Iraq for 1,500 years. It would help if Iraqis developed ‘a secular unifying vision’. The Australian wants Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to mend his ways.

Australian politicians have been more realistic. Foreign Minister Julie Bishop sees the situation as ‘deeply disturbing’. It has the potential to destabilise the whole Middle East with terrible consequences for Australia and the world. Some 150 Australian citizens are now being trained as terrorists in Iraq and Syria. (Bishop has cancelled ‘quite a few’ passports.) Tony Abbott describes the situation as ‘disastrous’. He would not rule out joining in any military action that the US may decide to take, but we will not send in the troops. We will, he said, protect Australians, Australian interests and Australian values. There are many more players yet to show their hands before Australia commits itself further. Everyone is urging caution. So am I.

When I was a schoolboy, every 12th of July a man on a white horse would spectacularly ride through the streets of Sydney to celebrate King Billy’s legendary victory in the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 and more generally to hammer the Catholics. This was also the time when each week Wally Campbell’s tuppenny tabloid The Rock published lurid tales of immorality and oppression in Catholic institutions. (Years later the novelist Thomas Keneally claimed that it was right in some instances!) Those colourful, sectarian and almost forgotten days were revived last week when Anne Cunningham spoke to the Sydney Institute about her new book The Price of a Wife?, about two sensational divorce trials of 1900-1901 in which Arthur Coningham, a Test cricketer (left-arm medium-fast bowler) petitioned for divorce from his wife Alice on the ground of her adultery in Cathedral precincts with Cardinal Moran’s private secretary, Dr Denis O’Haran — adultery which Alice said she admitted. He sought $5,000 (perhaps $450,000 in today’s money) under section 30 of the NSW Matrimonial Act of 1873 for losses to his conjugal bed. The defence was total denial and the allegation that the Coninghams had corruptly set out to shake down O’Haran and the Church. The case inevitably scandalised Sydney (and delighted the music halls.) After a second trial the jury acquitted O’Haran. But the story did not end there. In her largely archives-based book Dr Cunningham reviews the case in detail and concludes: ‘Money rather than prayer saved O’Haran. O’Haran’s victory was shallow, coming as it did at the expense of truth, justice and… Alice.’ These days churchmen in general are inclined to agree with her (and Alice). There will be no return to the days of the man on the white horse or The Rock.

A few years back the great Polish film director Andrzej Wajda made Katy´n about the Soviet NKVD’s massacre in 1940 of some 22,000 Polish prisoners of war including 8,000 officers. (Wajda’s father was one of those murdered.) Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin admitted the facts. Wajda’s film received worldwide acclaim. Now his latest film, Walesa, Man of Hope, which has just opened the Polish Film Festival in Sydney, tells the story of how Lech Wałesa, trade unionist, electrician of limited education and conservative Catholic, brought down the communist dictatorship in Poland and pointed the way to the end of ‘the Evil Empire’. Told through an interview with the legendary Italian journalist the late Oriana Fallaci, with flashbacks to the main incidents, it begins with the first uprising in the Lenin shipyards in Gdansk in 1970 and ends with his address to a cheering joint sitting of the US Congress in 1989. It is a warts-and-all biopic that shows a certain arrogance in Wałesa’s heroism. It also shows how the Polish secret police trapped him into signing the unread documents which would later be used in attempts to incriminate him as a double agent. A deeply moving film, it will remind Australians of the terrible sacrifices made in many parts of the world for the freedoms which we often hold so cheaply.

Another extraordinary Polish film which has just been released is Ida — about Catholics, Communists and Jews in the Poland of the early 1960s. The Mother Superior instructs a novitiate (once a foundling) to meet her only known relative, ‘Red Wanda’, a free-living, Jewish, disenchanted communist judge. Together the women set out to find what happened to their families in the Nazi years. Shot in black-and-white — as Evan Williams said, it is impossible to imagine it in colour — it is a disturbing but unforgettable masterpiece.