Review of Keith McKenry, 'The Folklore of Terrorism: Songs, Poems and Sketches from a Crazy World': Canberra: Fanged Wombat Productions, 2003. Pp. viii+44. Soft covers. ISBN 1876680059. Cost, posted $20-00.

Abstract

In April of this year Keith McKenry, one of Australia's most admired and incisively moral folk poets and the President of Australia's National Folk Festival, announced the forthcoming of this small book, then issued at Easter, with inevitable Christian symbolism accruing to the book by that timing. The Collection, his first containing largely topical pieces, either written in the last two decades, or reflected on at the time of atrocities, was then penned later. As he tells us in the Preface, "In recent times, terrorism - the fear of it, the touch of it - has become a dimension of our everyday lives. The Government tells us to Be Alert, Not Alarmed, but in truth it wishes us to be both. It wishes us to be grateful it is there, protecting our interests, making the tough decisions necessary to keep Australia secure."The sequence of poems and songs, each with an appendix context note,constitutes a terrible indictment of the way in which epidemic hysteria, hatred of the other and the misuse of power by almost all the 'great' nations has resulted in the sequence of events and repercussions which we chose to call 'terrorism'.