There's a long timber dining table in Theodore Ell's home that's scattered with dark little nicks amongst the grain. Subscribe now for unlimited access . Login or signup to continue reading All articles from our website & app The digital version of Today's Paper Breaking news alerts direct to your inbox Interactive Crosswords, Sudoku and Trivia All articles from the other regional websites in your area Continue They're from the shards of glass that embedded themselves in the surface during the 2020 Beirut explosion.
Ell and his wife Caitlin, then a diplomat with the Department of Foreign Affairs, were inside their apartment at the time, and found themselves thrown against walls, battered by falling glass and debris, and just centimetres away from death. When they returned to Australia the following year, in the midst of COVID, they brought with them a smattering of things that survived the explosion. The table has since been smoothed over by a furniture restorer; the nicks are visible, but don't snag on your palm.
Similarly, Ell has been able to separate himself from the blast in the four years since it happened. "I can recall every detail of it now, even as we speak," he says. "But it's as though it's separate from me.
It's like it's happening on a television screen." Theodore Ell with Jazzy - both survived the 2020 Beirut explosion. Picture by Karleen Minney We're in the living room of his tranquil Narrabundah house on a street lined with blossoming trees.
The setting emphasises the surreal horror of what he and Caitlin found themselves caught up in four years ago, and took some time to completely recover from. Lebanon is in the news most days - Hezbollah is under attack from Israel, via explosions in communication devices, of all things - and here, life goes on. Leaping nervously around the room is a striking tawny cat, Jazzy.
She also survived the blast; a friend found her howling in fear in a bathroom when he and Ell returned to the apartment to inspect the damage. Today, Ell still finds himself musing on the randomness of what survives a blast and what doesn't. Looking out from the apartment at the blasted Beirut port in 2020.
Picture supplied Their Beirut home was blasted to shreds; doors were blown inwards and down the hallway, glass shards scattered everywhere. The ceilings were completely collapsed, door frames twisted, canvases caved off the walls. But many things, randomly, remained.
The patterned rug that now covers the floor here in Canberra, and a traditional Aboriginal painting on the wall, also undamaged. A glass-fronted cabinet filled with glass and fine china survived; the cabinet had barely moved an inch. "It's like when a tornado strikes a town and destroys three houses but then skips one, or a bushfire can do the same.
The patterns of destruction, the patterns of force, eddy around something you don't expect," Ell says. He himself had glass shards embedded in his foot, and could barely hear for days. Today, his hearing is still affected, and he still jumps at loud noises.
Looking at photos of the apartment from the days after is difficult. And he can't forget how close he and Caitlin came to death. Ell went to Lebanon in 2018 as the proverbial trailing spouse.
Not permitted to work, he spent his days wandering the streets, learning the country's history, and writing poetry and translation. He didn't know it at the time, but he was witnessing the end of what he would later call the good times, in which the country was relatively stable, with enough food and resources for everyday people to live everyday lives without peril. The explosion happened at the tail end of a failed revolution, sparked in 2019 by new proposed taxes and the plummeting value of the Lebanese lira.
The ensuing social meltdown lasted for months. By the time COVID hit, in 2020, and the country shut down with the rest of the world, it was all but over. Scenes of destruction in Theodore Ell's Beirut apartment following the 2020 blast.
Picture supplied But Ell says the revolution was a kind of crack in the country's long, inevitable and hopeless march into more and perpetual conflict. "For 15 years, the whole country was shooting at itself, and people killed each other and killed each other's families, and it was really just the most incredibly complex feud that is still going on," he says. "These feuds and hatreds and grudges still exist.
And so this translates into a city that doesn't really have an obvious central point or an obvious civic square where people naturally congregate." That changed during the 2019 revolution, with people of all faiths united, briefly, in outrage. "You discovered that there is a burning desire for the common good and for a civic culture among people who feel exploited," he said.
"One million people marched into [Martyrs Square] demanding an unexploited way of living. They didn't get it, but they tried. "I think it's obvious to everyone that the revolution failed politically.
I think it succeeded historically ...
It won't be a footnote." The blast, on the other hand, will be remembered as a major event only in the fact that it was "the most glaring example of everything that the Lebanese people who rose up ..
. were really fighting against". "If the explosion is remembered as an historic event, it won't be as something that tipped Lebanon over the edge because Lebanon was already on the edge.
It made everything worse, dramatically. But it wasn't the cause of the decline. That was already there.
" The explosion had, ultimately, a horrifically mundane cause that made it seem almost inevitable. Near where Theodore Ell was standing when Beirut's port exploded in 2020. Picture supplied It came as the result of a large amount of ammonium nitrate, confiscated from an abandoned ship six years before and stored at the port over several years without proper safety measures, exploding.
A fire in the warehouse had already been burning, and there were also fireworks stored nearby. Ell recalls that he had been working at his desk all day, only vaguely aware of a column of smoke down by the port. The resulting explosion tore through the port in a blast so powerful that it physically shook the entire country of Lebanon, and was felt in Turkey, Syria, Palestine, Jordan and Israel, as well as parts of Europe.
It is considered one of the most powerful non-nuclear explosions on record. It caused more than 200 deaths and 7000 injuries, and left around 300,000 homeless. And it was watched, just hours later, from several angles, by people all over the world as survivors posted footage on social media for all the world to see.
But down on the ground and in real time, Ell, Caitlin and many of their friends were shocked, wounded and hugely traumatised. "In the morning after, or most of the day after the explosion, I was still stunned," he says. "I felt like a ghost because I had almost died.
I was partially deaf. My hearing was as though I had two hands clamped over my ears, and [I was] absolutely physically exhausted. "But I was offered the chance to leave, and I thought, No, I don't want to do that.
I want to pick myself up. I want to contribute the way everyone else is contributing." Back in Canberra, Ell is now a diplomat himself, and Caitlin has moved over to emergency management.
And despite feeling largely recovered psychologically, he will never be the same. "The explosion has made me acutely conscious of mortality, and I was this close to being blown away," he says. "I can hardly believe I'm alive.
"I'm not a religious person. I am an agnostic. One change that has happened thanks to the explosion and thanks to being this close to dying, is something my doctor said to me .
.. maybe something was watching over you.
Theodore Ell, glad to be home and alive. Picture by Karleen Minney "I don't know about that, but suddenly I was willing to ask the question." His new book, Lebanon Days (Allen & Unwin, $34.
99), shifts the explosion "out of the centre of view", rather than as a climax of history. It explores the modern history of Lebanon, and the things he observed while living there, in the days before the revolution. "Paying tribute was absolutely something I want to do, because it's it's a place where the beauty is in the detail," he says.
"Beirut is a noisy, often quite brutalistically ugly concrete jungle, but it's full of hidden gems, beautiful back lanes and old buildings and beautiful interiors. It's a city of small rooms and lamplit firesides. "The tragedy of it is that it's a beautiful country, inside and out.
It's geographically stunning. Nobody really tells you that. If Lebanon comes up in the news in Australia at all, it's usually as a place of strife and disaster, but it's beautiful.
And above all, the people are beautiful. "I still almost tear up thinking of it, just because they were just so kind. They're good people.
I'm by no means the only writer to have written about Lebanon - the good, the beautiful and the terrible. "And I don't pretend to be a definitive voice about Lebanon at all, but it was extremely important to me to convey the beauty." Theodore Ell will be speaking about Lebanon Days at the Canberra Writers Festival.
canberrawritersfestival.com.au Share Facebook Twitter Whatsapp Email Copy Sally Pryor Features Editor As features editor at The Canberra Times, I love telling people things they didn't know - or even things they've always known - about the city we live in.
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