Articles - Meanjin

Our National Day

2012-05-23T00:00:00Z

I’d always been ambivalent about the celebration of Australia Day. Being of the inner-city, bleeding-heart leftie brigade, for me it conjured images of flag tattoos, Kochie in a Southern Cross barbecue apron and Cronulla on a bad day. But then I was asked to be an Australia Day Ambassador, a program run in New South Wales to send people with some sort of public profile out into the community to help officiate at regional celebrations and give a speech to the new citizens. I have no idea why they picked me—when I arrived in Speers Point it was immediately apparent that no-one had a clue who I was. The local mayor and I did a circuit of the park, and my only consolation was that even fewer people knew who he was.

But the experience, and subsequent ambassadorial trips, left me surprised by the dedication and enthusiasm of the organising committees—conservative, yes, and taking, shall we say, a traditional approach to matters of national identity, so perhaps not the ideal place to deliver a searing address indicting British colonialism or the fallacy of terra nullius. But their engagement with the question of what the day signifies is a lot more constructive than the media’s jingoism and the commercial hijacking of what it is to be Australian. The ‘vision thing’ becomes far more tangible at the grassroots; this is their community and they shape it at the micro level. Here democracy and freedom are built on drains that work, local shops owned by people you know and highway rest areas maintained by the Apex Club.

The citizenship ceremonies were surprisingly moving. These were people who were eager to become Australians—they appreciated the values and opportunities that the rest of us either sneer at or take for granted with the lip-service of platitudes. When did we become a nation of whingers? Why is there a disconnection between our rancorous civic discourse and the effort that I saw in the largely thankless work the committees did to engender some sort of pride and gratitude in an increasingly graceless community?

It struck me that civilisation is but a veneer and no-one knows how long that sort of quiet decency can withstand the dog-whistlers: those in political or commercial power who seize the advantage of playing to people’s baser instincts, who foster the fear and confusion that drains us of goodwill and tolerance. On the one hand we have those exploiting a hollow notion of nationalism to jealously guard what they already have, and on the other, those trying to define what it is to be Australian so they can share the gift and try to build some sort of future. At the moment the former are well ahead on points.

So I thought, I’ll write a play and change the world. Art can be so transformative—think what the dadaists did to stop the rise of Hitler and the outbreak of the Second World War. And I’ve always found committees endlessly fascinating, with their shared evasion of responsibility and pecking orders of who is actually prepared to do the work. They’re the perfect comic metaphor for democracy: occasionally they work brilliantly; more often than not they just muddle through in some sort of semi-stasis with the odd burst of short-lived enthusiasm.

I also wanted to remind my fellow elitists of that frontier land that has yet to be conquered by the soy chai latte. Sadly, they’ll probably be the only ones in the audience, community theatre having failed to make any decent inroads into the national apathy for the performing arts—if only Jersey Boys could pack some sort of worthy political message. But to a city dweller it might seem inconceivable that there are still towns with virtually no Asians, and council chambers with portraits of the Queen in every room; towns where traditional owners are rarely acknowledged and very few people have heard of Mecca, let alone pointed towards it five times a day.

Many of these communities are being confronted by change on multiple fronts. Tree-changers on hobby herb farms (ersatz agriculture) bring their radical green ideas while, in stark contrast, Coles and Woolies crush independence with their cosy duopoly, and the internet, connecting everybody yet no-one, makes it a lot easier to buy things from Walmart.

So how much longer can regional Australia hold fast as the source of our national identity—let’s face it, our cities are about as uniquely Australian as Auckland. I suspect the answer is, for as long as the Australia Day organising committee can find the strength to organise the sausage sizzle, the damper bake and the SES display. For as long as the deputy mayor is willing to hand out native shrubs to welcome new Australians and we can rediscover the self-effacing tolerance that made this country worthwhile in the first place.

Australia Day by Jonathan Biggins premieres at the Melbourne Theatre Company in April and will then be performed by the Sydney Theatre Company from September.

Keats by the Spanish Steps

2012-05-18T00:00:00Z

By evening when the flower sellers have gone,
the tinkle of water from the Bernini fountain drifts
into the room. The air is warm for winter,

yet the wildflowers that Severn filled the carriage with,
bunch after bunch picked on the journey from Naples,
are now dead—the most beautiful pressed between

the leaves of a book. The only roses bloom white and beeless
on the ceiling, the only light is from a candle
that flutters and dips in the breeze,

its odour rancid, unpleasant. On the bedside table
Keats has placed the carnelian egg that Fanny
cooled her hands with, the travelling cap lined with a silk

that scalds his scalp. Five haemorrhages in nine days,
yet he is allowed only a morsel of bread and a single anchovy.
Tomorrow, Clark will bleed him again.

Tonight Keats is alone in the midnight hours,
his thoughts flickering like the candle flame:
this terrible coughing must be what Tom had to endure;

that breath rhymes perfectly with death
is the greatest irony; while money should never
prevent a man from marrying. If only Fanny

had come to Italy with me. Young Severn,
bless his patience, would not give me laudanum today,
but has rigged up—ingenious trick—

a row of candles connected by a thread.
When one candle snuffs out, the next one spits
and crackles into life, then rises

with the hue of marigold, as if a field of oats
is waving in the winnowing wind, this flame
burning on and on, into the posthumous night.

Writing the Self: On Joan Didion

2012-05-16T00:00:00Z

Writing about Joan Didion can seem superfluous; after all, it is Joan Didion who has written most widely about Joan Didion. Perhaps more than with any other author, Didion’s personality is impossible to separate from the pages of her work. In five novels, three memoirs and an expansive collection of essays, Didion’s character drips from each precisely positioned word. This is not only a matter of style—her remarkable sense of rhythm, her incantatory repetitions of phrase, her famed lack of sentimentality—but it is the way readers can sense her world view forming and reforming each time she commits her thoughts to paper, the way her understanding of herself is inextricable from her understanding of her subjects. Her oeuvre has, over time, become a map of her subjectivity, the location of each idea or event subtly repositioned in every piece of prose.

Didion’s writing of the self is far removed from the brand of memoir we are familiar with today. Didion was born long before social media and reality TV began encouraging the masses to narrativise their lives, and her sensibility is at odds with the salacious tell-all or the voyeuristic confessional. Hers is more a brand of emotional honesty: sometimes brutal and always piercing enough to scar. Unlike many of her New Journalism contemporaries, Didion is willing to remain an observer in her essays. Her greatest strength, she has maintained, is that she is ‘so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that [her] presence runs counter to their best interests’. What she offers is an ability to examine the patterns of her own thinking ruthlessly, the intellectual trajectories through which she develops her conception of the world. This technique teeters on solipsism, yet Didion has always retained an uncanny ability to locate herself and her subjects in a narrative of society more broadly.

Such self-interrogation is not surprising for a writer who has often claimed a strange inability to access her own consciousness. Notoriously inarticulate in person, Didion has, throughout her career, professed a kind of psychical blockage that is only dissolved when she communicates on the page. ‘Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write,’ she revealed in her 1976 essay on her craft, ‘Why I Write’. ‘I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.’ (This seems implausible until you see Didion in interviews. She shifts in her chair, moving her elbows from one armrest to the other. She stutters, pauses for extended periods, cuts herself off mid sentence, laughs incongruously, her ‘real life’ persona so far removed from the clarity you find in her written work.)

After her last two memoirs, 2005’s The Year of Magical Thinking and 2011’s Blue Nights (which deal with the deaths of her husband John Gregory Dunne and her adopted daughter Quintana respectively), critics began to question the candour for which Didion had previously been acclaimed, accusing her of voyeurism and even exploitation. One reviewer described having ‘ethical misgivings’ with Didion laying bare her public eulogy in Blue Nights—as if this most unbearable of tragedies is in a sense indescribable, as if the experience of mourning is inherently private and should remain so. In these two works, Didion’s oft-quoted maxim that ‘writers are always selling somebody out’ has been curiously inverted. In sharing what is perhaps life’s greatest tragedy, is Didion now selling out herself?

In December 2003, Didion’s daughter Quintana contracted what seemed like a routine flu. But within days it had spiralled into pneumonia and septic shock, with Quintana comatose in an intensive care unit. Five days later, Didion and Dunne had returned to their apartment in New York after visiting Quintana in the hospital when Dunne dropped dead from a sudden massive coronary event. It is the routine domesticity of the scene that renders it all the more heartbreaking. Didion was in the kitchen making a salad, talking to Dunne from the other room. When she looked up he was slumped, lifeless, at the dining-room table. ‘Life changes in the instant,’ she wrote in the months after his death. ‘You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.’

Quintana experienced a string of ups and downs in the subsequent months. Didion told her of Dunne’s death when she awoke from the coma in mid-January, but she had to be re-informed and re-experience the initial shock again several times in the weeks that followed. They waited until Quintana had recovered sufficiently before holding Dunne’s memorial service. At this time, she seemed to be on the mend and flew with her husband Gerry back to Los Angeles to begin her recovery. But on the walk to the car park she collapsed, the description of her fall much like that of Dunne’s death. One second Quintana was talking, then she wasn’t. She had been struck by a hematoma, the cause of which is still unknown. She was on medication that could have caused the blood clot in high altitudes, but some also suspect she may have been drinking on the plane. (Quintana had experienced problems with alcoholism throughout her adult life.) She required six hours of brain surgery.

Later she seemed again to be recovering, but in August 2005, when Didion was in New York promoting The Year of Magical Thinking, Quintana died from acute pancreatitis. She was only thirty-nine. ‘When we talk about mortality,’ Didion writes in Blue Nights, ‘we are talking about our children.’

Most readers come to Didion’s work through her 1967 essay ‘Slouching towards Bethlehem’. Harnessing the dread that permeates W.B. Yeats’ poem ‘The Second Coming’ (from which it takes its name), Didion’s prescient piece captured the mood of the late 1960s long before flower power had wilted. Struggling to elucidate the unease she felt, Didion travelled to San Francisco to hang out with the generation that had turned on, tuned in and dropped out. What she discovered was a league of lost children not amid a social revolution but rather in a drug-addled stupor—consumed by a self-destructive nihilism and lacking the language to articulate their particular malaise. The haunting image that concludes the piece, of a five-year-old girl whose lips are so parched she appears to be wearing white lipstick, who happily informs Didion she is in ‘High Kindergarten’ (her mother has been feeding her acid and peyote for a year), is impossible to erase.

Like much of Didion’s work, the anxiety that permeates this essay was not only political but also deeply personal. She was suffering at the time her own crisis of faith, struggling with the purpose of her writing. ‘All that seemed clear was that at some point we had aborted ourselves and butchered the job, and because nothing else seemed so relevant I decided to go to San Francisco,’ she wrote. She later admitted that image of the young child had compounded her concerns about her own mothering skills. Didion had adopted Quintana the year before, and feared similar neglect in leaving Quintana in order to research the piece. And like all the essays in her first collection, this story was, for Didion, emblematic of the shifting values of a contemporary California—a sun-bleached land that spoke of new beginnings, but one forged in the bloody frontiers of the westward advance.

Didion was born in 1934, the first child of Frank Reese, Eduene Jerrett Didion—and the Sacramento Valley. Ever frail, Didion has always looked as far removed from the bronzed Californian type as imaginable, but it is to the country of her childhood that she has returned again and again in her essays and her fiction. Until very recently, Didion’s family had remained absent from her writing except for brief allusions, her history instead explored through the mythic landscapes where she was raised. In ‘In the Islands’, an essay taken from 1979’s The White Album, Didion discusses the writer’s relationship to place. ‘Certain places seem to exist mainly because someone has written about them,’ she says. ‘Kilimanjaro belongs to Ernest Hemingway. Oxford, Mississippi, belongs to William Faulkner … A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his image.’ If this is the case, then California certainly belongs to Joan Didion.

The story of the Donner–Reed party has long captivated Didion, and she returns to it again and again as a defining symbol of California. The group of eighty-seven pioneers set off from Illinois to California in 1846, but were forced to camp in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada when they were hit by a sudden blizzard. Trapped and faced with starvation, they ate their own dead, and only forty survived. Didion’s great-great-great-grandmother Nancy Hardin Cornwall had set off with the party from Illinois, but left them at the Humboldt Sink in Nevada to go north through Oregon. For Didion, this event encapsulates the dark side of California’s ‘unfettered individualism’, an act that poisons the ideals to which it was committed. The frontier ethos may be black and white, as clear-cut as life and death, but California itself remains a ‘wearying enigma’.

Her first novel, Run River, published in 1963 when Didion was twenty-nine and working as the features editor for Vogue in New York, stemmed from her homesickness for the California she loved. ‘I sat on one of my apartment’s two chairs and set the Olivetti on the other and wrote myself a California river,’ she recalls. It is the story of Lily McClellan, the wife of a hop grower on the Sacramento River, the first of Didion’s protagonists who at least in physical appearance so closely resemble her. (Lily’s demeanour is described as a ‘striking frailty’.) The same can be said of Maria, the heroine of her second novel, Play It as It Lays, who suffers from hereditary migraines like Didion does. Set in an amoral Hollywood, the characters’ values (or rather lack of them) are far removed from Didion’s unequivocal ethics. Written when she and Dunne were living in Hollywood and working as screenwriters, Play It as It Lays, like all Didion’s novels, represents what she once described as ‘cautionary tales’. The tragic lives of these fragile women are the ‘stories I don’t want to happen to me’.

In ‘The White Album’, the title essay from her second collection, Didion reveals just what her experience of the Haight-Ashbury neighbourhood in San Francisco was a precursor for—events such as the Manson murders and, most shockingly, the confession that ‘no one was surprised’. Here, too, this sense of societal panic cannot be separated from Didion’s own mental state. She infamously included a transcript of her psychiatric report that described ‘a personality in process of deterioration with abundant signs of failing defences and increasing inability of the ego to mediate the world of reality and to cope with normal stress’. She details what are now mythic events in American history in an attempt to make sense of the incomprehensible world around her. The arrest of Huey Newton, watching Jim Morrison record in the studio, visiting Linda Kasabian in prison—these vignettes are interwoven with Didion’s mental decline. As she proclaims in her opening sentence, ‘We tell ourselves stories in order to live’. Or more to the point, ‘cautionary tales’ that tell us how not to live.

Many of her essays can be linked to her ideas of California—her fascination with the meaning of water in ‘Holy Water’ and ‘At the Dam’, her wistful descriptions of a changing California in ‘Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream’, ‘John Wayne: A Love Song’ and ‘James Pike, American’—yet it is not always easy to pinpoint why Didion is as uncompromising about certain subjects as she is. In ‘The Women’s Movement’ she derides contemporary feminism as ‘a particularly narrow and cracked determinism’, yet in an essay on painter Georgia O’Keeffe praises her for her ‘hardness’ as a ‘guerilla in the war between the sexes’. While she remains transparent about herself, her attitudes towards her subjects are at times oblique.

Didion’s willingness to write about herself has always been double-edged. She provides a model of fortitude for those writers plagued by self-doubt (that may be all writers). Is self-doubt not the source of that strange bundle of knots in the base of the stomach that may linger for weeks, months, years? Or that leaden feeling each time one sits in front of the computer screen with the fear that, perhaps, this time nothing will emerge? Didion’s idol status among young female writers seems not only a product of her craft, but also the reassurance that such neuroses are surmountable. While Didion shares these secrets to create intimacy, it also seems some kind of compulsive defence mechanism: ‘If I fail this time (as I suspect I will), please know now that this is why.’

It was during her years in New York that Didion met Dunne, then an ambitious young writer at Time magazine with whom she developed a strong working friendship. Dunne corrected the galleys to Run River. In 1964, around the time she and Dunne married, Didion suffered her first nervous breakdown. In ‘Goodbye to All That’ she describes it also as a crisis of faith—that ‘everything that was said to me I seemed to have heard before, and I could no longer listen’. After their marriage in January, Dunne suggested in April that they go to Los Angeles for a few months. They stayed there for twenty years.

The details of their relationship described in The Year of Magical Thinking come as something of a revelation. For all Didion’s writing about her experiences, John and Quintana are curious absences in her work, almost tangential characters in the life narrative she has constructed. There is a passage in The Year of Magical Thinking that describes an evening in which she and Dunne are sitting at home, John rereading a passage from her third novel, A Book of Common Prayer, to see how a sequence worked technically. He shuts the book and looks at her. ‘Goddamn,’ he says. ‘Don’t ever tell me again you can’t write. That’s my birthday present to you.’ The two worked from home, co-wrote scripts for several feature films, including The Panic in Needle Park and Up Close and Personal, and were each other’s lifelong editors. Knowing Didion’s ongoing doubt about her ability, one cannot help but be struck by the pure romanticism of that scene.

In 1966 the couple adopted a baby girl whom they named Quintana Roo after the Yucatán Peninsula territory, which was at that time a terra incognita. Perhaps the quintessential photo of the three is one taken in 1976 on the deck of their house in Malibu. Didion is fresh-faced and beautiful, leaning on the sea-worn wooden rail with a cigarette in hand, gazing at the young Quintana. Dunne looks out of place, his tweed jacket and balding crown incongruous in the Malibu sun. Quintana is the only one who looks really at ease—a golden child of the golden land, her long hair sun-bleached, her honey skin so unlike that of her adoptive parents. And yet this image of Quintana is so at odds with the child Didion describes in Blue Nights, she of the quicksilver moods.

Looking back at Quintana’s childhood, Didion sees augurs of Quintana’s mental health issues everywhere. As a toddler, Quintana had recurring dreams that a figure she called the ‘broken man’ was coming to get her in the night. At age five, she telephoned a psychiatric facility to ask what she needed to do if she went crazy; she later called Twentieth Century-Fox to find out what she needed to do to become a star. Yet what prevails is Didion’s own fear that it is her mothering that has caused this. Quintana wrote a list of ‘Mom’s sayings’—‘Brush your teeth, brush your hair, shush I’m working’—these words resonating with implications of neglect. Quintana suffered from suicidal despair in her early teens. Didion recalls her sobbing on the ground and begging, ‘Let me just be in the ground and go to sleep.’ ‘She was already a person,’ Didion says now. ‘I could never afford to see that.’

It is as if Quintana haunts her prose, a spectre oscillating between presence and absence whom Didion can never quite speak of. In The Year of Magical Thinking we are given the details of Dunne’s death in the opening pages. She wrote it only eight months after the event. It took her five years to write about Quintana, and even now it is as if Didion cannot find the right words to convey its tragedy. There is the line she returns to again and again: when we talk about mortality we are talking about our children. But although Blue Nights professes to be a book about Quintana, it is not.

When I think of Joan Didion, I recall the photo on the cover of The White Album. She’s leaning out the window of a white convertible, head slightly tilted, staring straight at the camera. She is effortlessly cool, her gaze bearing the nonchalance and hint of melancholy her prose would suggest, a rolled cigarette held between her spidery fingers. Didion’s appearance—her pale-as-paper skin, her insect-like limbs, her flat brown bob—never quite matched the California she loved, nor the sharpness of her prose. Perhaps the only hint of Hollywood, where she lived and worked for many years, is her oversized dark sunglasses, a trademark that does not belong to a starlet but rather to a woman with self-confessed ‘bad nerves’ trying to block out the world.

The strange thing is that Didion now, the woman of constant sorrow, is not very different to the Didion of her youth. Despite a more severe angularity, her brown hair now turned grey, the woman of seventy-five is not much different to the one she was at thirty. And yet perhaps this is what makes the passages in Blue Nights in which she describes being forced to take stock of herself after having a fall all the more brutal. A doctor tells her she ‘has made an inadequate adjustment to ageing’. ‘Wrong,’ she replies. ‘In fact I have made no adjustment whatsoever to ageing.’ It is as if Didion’s ever-frail body is finally concordant with its age.

In Blue Nights, it is through the American landscape—this time the eternal blue dusk of New York evenings—that she seeks to come to terms with her experiences. New York has always been a wistful place for Didion (the site of her first nervous breakdown), the ‘blue nights’ a phenomenon so foreign to the eternal sun of California. The gloaming of New York in late April and early May becomes a symbol of the mortality that is accumulating around her. ‘This book is called Blue Nights because at the time I began it I found my mind turning increasingly to illness,’ she writes, ‘to the end of promise, the dwindling of the days, the inevitability of the fading, the dying of the brightness.’

I can’t shake the feeling that Blue Nights is Didion’s swan song. Her fears have moved from the physical to the cognitive, to the panic that these ‘blue nights’ may represent not only a stasis of the body but also one of the mind. After the death of her editor Henry Robbins in 1979, she claimed she would never be able to write again. (She later named her 1992 essay collection After Henry.) She said the same after the death of her husband, her lifelong editor. But the death of her daughter provides a much deeper psychical pain, bringing with it some unshakable knowledge of her own corporeality and the inevitability of her death, too. ‘What if the absence of style that I welcomed at one point—the directness that I encouraged, even cultivated—what if this absence of style has now taken on a pernicious life of its own?’ These doubts take on so much more weight at age seventy-five: ‘What if I can never again locate the words that work?’ In The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion discusses the way literature has always been a source of solace. ‘In times of trouble,’ she writes, ‘I had been trained since childhood, read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information was control.’ She reads the journals of C.S. Lewis after his wife’s death, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain with its descriptions of Hermann Castorp after his wife’s demise. She devours Freud’s work on mourning and melancholia, building up the medical vocabulary to describe her own symptoms. She may be in the midst of what she terms ‘magical thinking’—she refuses to throw out Dunne’s shoes in case he comes home, insists on an autopsy so the doctors can prove he’s still alive—yet she has the knowledge to understand it, the language to articulate it. This is what makes her fear of never again being able to find the right words in Blue Nights all the more heartbreaking. Information was control, and she may be losing it.

The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights stand together like a compendium of Didion’s grief, their styles identical—the same strong sense of rhythm, their use of italics and repeated phrases, the fine balance between the weight of emotion they carry and the at times clinical nature of the prose. The images of one flow through to the other, as if for Didion no time has passed in the six years between their publication. Didion does not deny the ongoing nature of grief. This is not a battle to be won, a struggle to be surpassed. It is not until near the end of Blue Nights that Didion reveals Quintana has been dead five years, and yet her thoughts of her remain overpowering. There is more potency in the declaration ‘I need her with me’ than anything more sentimental could conjure.

The rhythms of her prose, its ebbs and flows, its repetitions, mimic the processes of memory. In an interview with Sara Davidson she describes how this technique evolved, that ‘it seemed constantly necessary to remind the reader to make certain connections. Technically it’s almost a chant. You could read it as an attempt to cast a spell or come to terms with certain contemporary demons.’ And yet the ghosts of John and Quintana are demons Didion can never exorcise, and she doesn’t try. As she writes towards the end of Where I Was From, ‘there is no real way to deal with everything we lose’. In Blue Nights she is no longer commenting on the nature of grief, but rather detailing the throes of it, an experience that can be extremely uncomfortable for a reader.

What lies at the centre of Didion’s widening gyre has always been Didion herself, at once Yeats’s lost falcon and beckoning falconer. For an author who doesn’t know herself until she puts pen to paper, it is hard to imagine a more reticent way to live—she writes to discover who she is, to mediate between her fragile ego and the outside world. But in Blue Nights there is an overwhelming sense of finality. The day Didion understands herself is the day she stops writing. I don’t know which is the most unbearable conclusion to draw from Blue Nights—that she may never write again, or that she may die before her life’s truth is revealed.

Confessions of a Columnist

2012-05-14T00:00:00Z

Like the Duke of Clarence in Richard the Third (or Tupac Shakur in ‘Death Around the Corner’), I predicted my own demise. I’d been writing a column in Good Weekend, a supplement of The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald, for about 10 years, when it occurred to me every industry I had entered had collapsed. I began my working life as a typesetter, a trade that was devoured in a mouthful by the ravenous, patricidal beast of desktop publishing. I became a subeditor, and watched as tables of once-respected subs were devalued, demoralised and finally dismissed, their skills drowned in a sour cocktail of spellcheck programmes, Wikipedia and management apathy that broadened into open hostility. I edited men’s magazines, and that market sector collapsed. I began to write books, and the publishing industry quickly tumbled into an unprecedented decline. In my second Good Weekend column of 2012, I mused that there’d been a lot of ‘lifestyle’ columnists around a decade before, waxing whimsically and repetitively to a diminishing audience, yet I was one of the last men standing. One issue later, the new Good Weekend editor, Ben Naparstek, axed the column.

I wasn’t sorry to see it go, but I was surprised. After all, it had survived the savagery of the focus groups that killed off my erstwhile colleagues, Maggie Alderson and Stephanie Dowrick, whose columns the readers had supposedly ceased to read. And the column’s return after the New Year’s break was flagged with the cover-line ‘Mark’s Back’, which implied a certain permanency to the arrangement. But I figured Naparstek might have made the right decision. A column should live for two years, not ten, and I’d become increasingly weary of living with such a high public profile.

My photograph accompanied the column’s text—a full-body photo-byline, as was the inexplicable fashion of the day—and, by 2011, I would be recognised by strangers every second time I left the house. Their intentions were invariably friendly. They always said, ‘You’re Mark, aren’t you?’—although they rarely introduced themselves—and wanted to either shake my hand or, occasionally, hug me, and thank me for making them laugh. It was gratifying but unsatisfying. I wanted to know something about them too, before they vanished back into the mise en scene.

At first, I found it embarrassing, especially if I were with somebody else when approached by a ‘fan’, but I got used to it and, inevitably began to crave it—especially when I was with somebody else. I wanted to be seen to be seen. If nobody came up to me in a bar, I wonder how they could possibly be ignorant of the celebrity in their midst. Didn’t they even read the paper?

Also, people seemed to confuse the column with the author. The morning after the ‘Mark’s Back’ cover-line appeared, I walked into my local pub, the William Wallace, to be greeted with a hearty, ‘You’re back!’ by the publican. Since I had no clear memory of the night before, I thought I might have chanced upon an important clue as to how I had acquired a black eye. ‘Was I in here last night, then?’ I asked him. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I mean, you’re back in the paper.’ Oh, I see.

Before I killed off ‘men’s-lifestyle’ publishing, I ran the ‘lads’ magazine’ Ralph, where I grew used to readers phoning up and demanding to talk to Ralph. When I told them I was the editor and there was no actual Ralph, they’d often reply, ‘Yeah, of course, yeah. So, er, how’s it going, Ralph?’

Although I knew there was no Ralph, I was initially less certain if there was a Mark Dapin. The column had changed (I hesitate to say evolved) a lot in its lifetime. At first, I felt I’d had to create a persona, something close to the classic lads’ mag protagonist, a cross between Charles Bukowski and Karl Pilkington—an idiot at home, with a beer in one hand and bruised knuckles on the other.

My column stuck to the facts of my life, but it seemed as though this other less idiosyncratic and less vulnerable character were living it for me. After a few months, I stopped hiding behind my tattoos and started to be myself. This left me dangerously exposed—because if people didn’t like it, they basically didn’t like me. However, I assumed nobody except the editor even read it. Why would they? Who cares what I’ve been doing?

I began to write about politics in the column, focussing on the gloating theatrics of the last Howard ministry, with its cast of ghouls such as the disingenuous, oleaginous and ultimately shameless Peter Reith (watch him on The Howard Years, dissembling with merry contempt); the cryogenically frozen Philip Ruddock, wearing his Amnesty International badge on his lapel as if it were foreign matter expelled from his heart; and my favourite senator, Santo Santoro, who, while presenting a media awards night, gave a speech attacking journalists. I resolved to refuse my award if it meant I had to shake hands with Santoro—but then I didn’t win anything anyway. I cheered when the Coalition was voted out of office in 2007, but quickly came to miss its ministers, especially the ovine Alexander Downer, cloned like a sheep from his father, Alexander Downer. They were replaced by a deliberately characterless government whose members seemed bent on presenting themselves as nothing more than vessels through which policy flowed like recycled water. It was oddly galling to watch Peter Garret submerge himself into the lifeless ranks of union researchers and labour lawyers. With dour glee, he baldly refused to talk about himself, leaving frustrated journalists with notebooks full of the management-text pidgin in which the Labor government chose to couch its ambitions for the country.

I suppose I also felt the Labor Party were on my side, in some limited way, but my reservations about parodying them ran deeper: there’s something more tragic than comic about social democratic politicians in office, as they instantly distance themselves from their own beliefs in a scramble to embrace what they imagine to be the values of the people who believed in them sufficiently to vote them into government in the first place. When Julia Gillard said she opposed gay marriage, I despaired: not because I supported gay marriage, but because Gillard obviously did. There is no room to caricature people who are already mockeries of themselves.

There was nothing to play with anymore, so I walked away from the game. In the column, I concentrated on my home life again. Anything I wrote about my feelings for my children—or my feelings about anything else—attracted cyber-bags of love mail. This generally came directly to me, through the email address on my website. Perhaps hundreds of other readers were complaining to the editor about my shameless self-indulgence, but I never got to see their letters. Every Sunday morning, I would wake up to a barrage of love bombs on my computer screen.

For every ten compliments, I received one complaint. I took no notice of the first, and learned by heart each word of the last.

The things that moved my critics to anger usually came as a surprise to me, because I generally hadn’t written them. When I started out in journalism, I assumed I would receive hate mail from the kind of people I hated. I thought I’d stir up the racists, gay-baiters, chauvinists and chickenhawks. I had some initial success, and I was proud the morning I was attacked on the neo-Nazi web forum, Stormfront, for a feature I wrote about Jewish MP Michael Danby. But I came quite late to the understanding that psychotic bigots did not, on the whole, read Good Weekend. However, I repeatedly mentioned in my column that I was Jewish, because I hoped it would annoy anti-Semites. In fact, it seemed to annoy Jews.

I used to travel a lot, and I noticed there were often Hasidic Jews at the airport. I put this in a column, and a man wrote in to accuse me of anti-Semitism. Why didn’t I say I always saw Catholic nuns at airports, he asked, or Buddhist monks? Well, because I didn’t. And because I’d hoped that casually mentioning the Hasidim might make them appear less alien, and more like an ordinary part of life. But my correspondent knew my motives were murkier. I hated the Hasidim, he said, because I thought they were social parasites who sucked resources out of the society by studying Torah instead of working, which is what I had implied with my suggestion they had nothing better to do than wait around in airports. In parenthesis, he added ‘(this may be true of many)’.

This and a couple of similar letters coaxed me towards what Lionel Shriver, in Standpoint magazine, described as:

the unremitting revelation that so many readers cannot comprehend standard prose—that so many people prefer to make up what they wish you had written so they can object to it; that, not to put too fine a point on it, readers cannot read—[which] exposes the whole business of writing comment pieces as utterly pointless.

Shriver advocated not engaging with cyber-critics, but unless the writers were clearly insane—and, at least once, even when they were clearly insane—I’d write back and challenge them, ‘Would you speak to me like this in person, or is there something about the distancing of email that appeals to you?’

If they replied at all, they would often offer the distant relative of an apology. They were surprised they had offended me because they had, on some level, assumed I wasn’t a real person. And they were flattered I had given them a response.

The allegations of misogyny and homophobia generally left me puzzled but unmoved, but I found the accusations of anti-Semitism disturbing. I had grown up doing the shopping with my Jewish mother, who regularly challenged checkout operators about the freshness of supermarket vegetables, so it was no surprise to me that some people complain about anything—but I felt their energies might be better spent hunting a more dangerous beast than a Fairfax columnist. However, as well as both a columnist and living human being, I led a parallel existence as a novelist, which took me to writers’ festival all over the country. At last year’s Melbourne Jewish Book Festival, I realised many Jewish people see Fairfax journalists generally as bitter enemies of the State of Israel and, by extension, the Jewish world. Although I was received with limitless affection, my audience was concerned to learn how I dealt with anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism in the workplace. I explained they would be more likely to encounter a singing fish at the Sydney Morning Herald than an open anti-Semite, but I suspect the crowd just thought I was unusually thick-skinned.

My debut novel, King of the Cross, won the Ned Kelly Award for First Fiction, and sold, as they say, moderately well. I’d assumed that, since Good Weekend claimed more than a million readers, if only one in a hundred enjoyed my column, I’d have ten thousand guaranteed book sales. In fact, King of the Cross seemed to have been bought by virtually no-one from my Good Weekend audience. When I asked readers why they had bought the book, they were more likely to cite the striking yellow cover than my name as a journalist.

Earlier, at Sydney Jewish Writers Festival, I’d asked Morris Gleitzman, who’d preceded me as both a Good Weekend humour columnist and author of (children’s) fiction, why my public profile didn’t appear to help market my books. He said he’d had the same experience. He thought audiences had trouble carrying more than one idea of a writer in their minds. They could either be a funny back-page guy or a serious author, but not both. And I remembered comedians such as Alexei Sayle and David Baddiel, who’d written reputable books that I’d never think of reading—because their authors were, well, comedians.

I was at yet another writers’ festival last year, in Castlemaine, Victoria, when I received a single-line email, ‘I find your political correctness pathetic.’ ‘I wonder if you’d say that to my face’, I replied. ‘Gladly’, said my correspondent. The name of his company was part of his email address, so it was easy to figure out he was in Melbourne. ‘You’re in luck’, I told him. ‘I’m in the area.’

When I first came to Australia, I was in my mid-twenties, and sometimes, when I was walking down the street holding hands with my girlfriend, a boy would shot ‘Fagggoooooooooooot!’ from a passing car, presumably in the hope I might forget, for a moment, the difference in locomotive capacity between human beings and motor vehicles, and chase him down the road.

I felt that cyber-sneerers were a (not very) grown-up version of the hoons in their Valiants, and probably couldn’t move as fast. I looked forward to finally meeting one, and either finding out why he felt he could write something he would never dream of saying, or spending time in the company of a true sociopath. I wasn’t going to hit him, but I was hoping he might try to hit me. Of course, he never replied. I wrote to him from the departure lounge at Tullamarine Airport expressing my regret that I’d wasted a moment’s time on him, and pointing out that, in his first email, he’d managed to misspell his own name.

He wrote back from a safe distance the next morning, calling me ‘precious’ and suggesting that, if we met, we’d probably find we were both good people. But I had no interest in shaking hands with a South Yarra Forrest Gump. I wanted to duck punches from a corporate Chopper Read.

I started telling people about the email exchange, and I realised they thought I was crazy. Their argument was compelling. What on earth did I think I was doing?

As far as I could gather, the reader had been offended by my suggestion that teachers shouldn’t hit children with sticks. Perhaps he’d extrapolated that I believed nobody should ever be hit with sticks, which is definitely not the case. Either way, my attitude didn’t seem the kind of view the Strasserite goons of talkback radio might call ‘political correctness gone mad’. But so what? He was just a reader, expressing an opinion. I thought it was probably time I stopped writing the column.

But nobody else did.

I had often tried to give up the column – and sometimes escaped it for months on end – but it seemed to be extraordinarily popular, and I was repeatedly lured back with a mixture of flattery, money and threats by the editor, for whom I had great regard. I found the column easy to write but difficult to live. It was exhausting to trawl through each week of my life, looking for an episode that could be distilled into 650 words, given a beginning and an end, a punch-line and a point. Partly for this reason, I had begun to write about roundabouts.

I’d seen a book called Roundabouts of Great Britain, which was a guide to the supposedly thriving (but actually non-existent) British hobby of ‘roundabout-spotting’. I wrote a couple of columns about the aesthetic appeal of the various roundabouts in my life (I couldn’t comment on their effectiveness as instruments of traffic control, because I can’t drive). Roundabout-writing attracts a huge amount of reader feedback. Everyone has a story about a roundabout. None of them are in any way interesting.

I returned to the subject time and again, until I reached a point where readers were sending me photographs of their favourite roundabouts. At this point, once again, I realised my time was coming to an end.

At the writers’ festival in Byron Bay, about 70 people had turned up to listen to me speak for half an hour. I couldn’t understand what they wanted to hear. I asked them why on earth they read a weekly column about nothing. They replied it was because I was such a loser, it made them feel better about their own lives.

This was not the way I’d hoped things would turn out for me.

The editor of Good Weekend moved on, and I thought I would grab the chance to escape. But, when I had the chance to jump, I had a change of heart. I realised it was a privilege to diarise in public, to record and share the more important moments of my life. I looked back over some of the earlier columns I’d written, and saw that I’d forgotten most of the things that had happened to me—but there they were, written down and laid out, typeset, proofed and printed. It was fantastic, in a way. It was as if my life mattered.

And I knew that was what angered the more disturbed readers. The fact that the column existed meant to them that I thought my life and opinions were more important than theirs. They raged against me because they wanted to be me. The internet has given a platform to the bitter, untalented and failed. People who would never have had the wherewithal or fortitude to write and post a letter can dash off an email and press ‘send’, even if they can’t spell their own name.

I read a piece by Laurie Penny, a columnist on The Independent in the UK, who generally wrote on weightier matters than roundabouts. For criticising what she called ‘neo-Liberal economic policy making’, she was told by a reader she should be made to fellate a row of bankers at knifepoint.

‘An opinion, it seems, is the short skirt of the internet’, she wrote,

Having one and flaunting it is somehow asking an amorphous mass of almost-entirely male keyboard-bashers to tell you how they’d like to rape, kill and urinate on you…‘Most mornings, when I go to check my email, Twitter and Facebook accounts, I have to sift through threats of violence, public speculations about my sexual preference and the odour and capacity of my genitals.

Penny saw this as an attempt to silence women specifically, but the deranged ravings of the newly enfranchised emotional and intellectual underclass have the potential to drive out the meek—and not so meek—of either gender. Not everyone enjoys a fight.

It takes confidence to be a columnist. You need a measure of self-belief, and even the sociopathic trolls can sense that. They want to chip away at your base, cut you down, make you into one of them, an empty vessel of howling rage, wallowing in its own sense of frustrated entitlement.

I was saddened to read an on-line piece by my friend, the relentlessly funny Sydney Daily Telegraph writer Joe Hildebrand. Hildebrand, who describes himself with charming olde-worlde manners as ‘a Labor man’, said while the right-wingers in his audience affectionately ribbed him for his bias, and ‘politely point out’ his ‘various delusions’,

many if not most of the self-proclaimed left-wingers I encounter … bombarded me publicly (but almost always anonymously) with the most foul, nasty or snide abuse … I’ve just been shocked not only at the extraordinary level of viciousness but the fact that the abuse almost entirely seems to come from lefties. And it is not just a handful of incidents but scores and scores —probably hundreds.

What upset me most about the piece was it wasn’t funny. He had let them take his sense of humour from him. Hildebrand said he was ‘big enough and ugly enough’ to handle the abuse—and, it’s true, he is hideously deformed—but I know it hurts him still.

Late last year, there was a small internal restructure at Fairfax, and Good Weekend was brought under the stewardship of ‘national editor of the Metro Media division’, Garry Linnell. I had a meeting with Linnell in which he gave me his set speech about the future of the magazine. He told me the tone of the writing was going to change. ‘When was the last time’, he asked, ‘that you saw something in Good Weekend that made you laugh?’

I realised then that the writing was on the wall for the resident humourist.

In my penultimate piece, about the way I destroyed every industry I entered, I wrote: ‘A men’s magazine says all it has to say in its first couple of years, then repeats itself ad nauseum until the readers finally notice and stop buying it. (The same thing’s true of women’s magazines, but they seem to last longer, for some reason.)’

In response, a reader wrote, ‘You’ve completely lost me this week in your stated view that (me paraphrasing) you think that women take longer than men do to realise that magazines targeted to them are repetitive. Oh, is this the male ego rising above the the (sic) intelligence of the little woman??

‘I now think your laissez-faire way of writing is an insult to the intelligence of Age readers. Get over yourself and get a column of substance. Try to work a bit harder to keep the confidence of your readers. Otherwise, you are a waste of space.’

Like Shriver, I could see the whole exercise had become pointless.

I wrote back and said, ‘Good news: I’ve been fired.’

The reader replied, ‘Oh, that is great news. Thanks, mark.’

The Worm inside the Eggplant

2012-05-10T00:00:00Z

We let the human stream carry us, sensing that all roads would be leading to the divine lake. The mythical image of white temples reflected on mauve water had lured me, but I was now starting to question my presence in Pushkar—one among nine of the holiest Hindu sites of pilgrimage in India. In the late afternoon the main street was dusty and strewn with detritus: plastic bottles, cups and food wrappers crushed into soiled origami beneath the feet of thousands—the overflow from the five-day Camel Fair that had officially concluded in the out-of-town fairground, and to which a sense of carnival had been brought by lingerers like us to expire in the town. A short distance ahead walked our newlyweds, somewhat unwillingly, each hanging onto the other. Once we had held our daughter’s small hand in crowded places. Her slender fingers were now braided into her husband’s hand, the back of which was marked in blue ink with the Om symbol, a tattoo Deepak acquired at the age of ten with the money his father had given him to buy sweets at a fair, in his native land of the Punjab. By way of this matrimonial bond, India was now a part of our daughter’s destiny, and in that roundabout way also a part of our own destiny. And for the moment, this was India.

We had travelled for the wedding. After the celebrations, Deepak thought it the most natural idea to take his in-laws on his honeymoon. Embarking together on a journey across tourists’ destinations, we had started with the Taj Mahal, a choice too obvious to be discussed: the grandest of photo opportunities, a monument of grief and love built by Shah Jahan to immortalise his wife Mumtaz and marketed as the ultimate romantic site of pilgrimage. The highly regulated visit to the Taj, designed to guard it from the ravages of the masses, would linger as a mild experience in my memory. Next, we had agreed on Rajasthan and its gateway city of Jaipur. I had suggested adding a one-day stop in Pushkar with the knowledge about places of interest acquired while fingering Western guidebooks, fully aware that this too-picturesque place would have morphed into a tourist playground of commodified exoticism, suitably spectacular with a lake surrounded by ghats and swarming with devotees clad in the Rajasthani neon-bright colours of women’s saris and men’s turbans. I counted myself one of Maxine Feifer’s ‘post-tourists’,¹ ready to play the game of enjoying semi-authentic experiences with the self-consciousness of an ‘anti-tourist’. But this was not merely a game that could be played: there was no turning back from the march along a street of garish signs that offered cheap rooms, Ayurveda massages, STD calls, fast internet, FedEx parcel services, meditation and other traveller needs—eclipsing the deities of Hindu temples wedged between hostels, restaurants and cafés of bhang-lassi.

The entrance of a large neutral house claimed a second look: two soldiers stood guard, their guns peering behind walls of sandbags. On the upper part of the large two-storey building, a sign read ‘Chabad House of Pushkar’. We stopped and stared at the building, somewhat intrigued. I was first made aware of a Chabad House presence in India from the shocking news about the 2008 terrorist attack and massacre that extended to the Mumbai Chabad House. At the time I had been baffled by the concept of a Jewish outpost of spirituality on Indian soil. Now I was presented with this anomaly in the main street of the sacred city of Pushkar. Watching us from above was a man standing on the balcony in Chabad attire of outmoded black trousers and white shirt, his twin uncut curls dangling under his black, wide-brimmed fedora. I called out a Shalom. Hearing the familiar greeting he sprung to attention and invited us to enter with a sweeping gesture. The honeymooners walked back and followed us in.

We were ushered past the guards, crossed the fortified threshold of khaki to enter a large drab, sparsely furnished hall. The religious stream of Chabad—the Hebrew acronym that stands for ‘wisdom, comprehension and knowledge’—is defined by a philosophy that reveres ethereal manifestations of the Jewish soul and abhors images of gods and deities. In the years of my childhood I spent under the tutelage of Chabad educators, I came to associate religious life with the aesthetics of solemnity: the ghostly complexions of men clutching dark-jacketed books of scriptures, the endless utterances of prayers in beige-and-brown synagogues. At times Hassidic practice did stir into a metaphorically colourful life for religious festivals, men dancing and singing in bursts of euphoria, all such manifestations contained in the larger idea of devotion to the Holy Blessed One. The Chabad interior in Pushkar was familiar, with the looming photograph of the Rebbe, the Messiah, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who looked at me in his younger years from the walls at my school, and in whose gaze I had recognised my mother’s facial features, or at least her expression, perhaps in an attempt to validate my newly discovered Jewish roots upon arrival in Israel at the age of eight, having left behind a secular life in France.

A young woman welcomed us into the corner lounge area with a smile that illuminated for a brief moment her tired, burdened face. Her two young children, a boy and a girl, hovered around her in a state of flux, their complexion pasty under the neon lights, their ability to arrange their childhood around the contours of faith taken for granted. The woman said, by way of apology, that she and the children had been unwell for a few days. The man from the balcony came downstairs and was now addressing me in Hebrew—motioning towards the two men in my party—pushing for the mitzvah of laying the Tefillin, the set of two small black leather boxes of holy scriptures dangling black leather straps that are attached before a prayer, one to the left bicep and the other upon the cerebrum—a practice aiming to attain ‘unity of mind and heart, intellect and emotion’.²

To his visible disappointment, I had to inform the rabbi that neither of my male companions were Jewish. He could have been forgiven for mistaking Deepak for a silent Yemenite Jew, and my Australian husband for an obliging convert. He soon left us to be entertained by his young family. The small girl pointed at Deepak and asked me, with a tilt of her head, ‘hoo Hodi?’ meaning ‘is he Indian?’ The word Hodi sounded warm and evocative, reaching beyond India and far back into space and time, conjuring a bunch of eccentrics from the days I lived with my mother in an Israeli asbestos migrant settlement. An extended family of émigrés from Kochi—once the site of a thriving Jewish community in Kerala—had supported us in times of need: with a peculiar accented English they offered us a share of their bright-yellow rice and spicy vegetables, invited us to celebrate the holidays of Passover and Rosh Hashanah, and engaged my mother with a stream of odd, overpaid jobs. In my child’s eyes they were outer-worldly, from Hodu, the country of golden sun. Strangely, I was now an Australian, first-time tourist in Hodu, and I was sitting in a Chabad House, wrapped in a concentric set of spiritual rings: the epicentre—that religion that was once mine to keep—encircled by a vast Indian space of deep faith that manifested itself in many forms of worship and ran along many paths towards a spiritual core, a space of which I had no valid comprehension.

My own religious faith and practice ended in seventh grade when I was expelled from the Chabad School on account of my rebellious attitude. For all my acrimonious parting from that institution, I may have retained a girsah de yankutah, ‘the version of babes’: the knowledge that is absorbed in early childhood and carried into adulthood. I had been drawn into this house by the irresistible pull of that earlier version of ethereal experiences: lighting candles on the holiday of Chanukah, singing the song of atonement at Yom Kippur, blessing fruit before devouring it. The Chabad House was now my temporary refuge in the ambiguous space of Pushkar and, beyond it, of India at large.

On the evening we arrived at the gates of their house, members of our new Indian family lined up on the front patio. Deepak’s parents, his uncle, aunt and cousins greeted us with the gracious Namaste, welcomed us with bowls of floating candles and rose petals; we were sprinkled with the water and the petals and blessed with incantations before being ushered in. I delighted in this ceremony and appreciated the gesture and the time taken to bring enchantment to the mundane. A week followed that was to be remembered as the best part of our Indian trip. Deepak’s birthplace is a small town spliced in its centre by the Delhi–Amritsar rail line, where trains pass in a whirl of dust towards the nearest train station in the next town of Phagwara. There were no known tourist attractions there and we were the second set of foreigners to have ever entered the place. Apart from gazes of bemusement, the town didn’t make any concessions to our presence; daily life streamed by in anarchy and in grace. Most important, we had a valid reason for being there, as the parents of the bride, albeit fully aware that we would have to move on to the famous places of interest: Delhi, Agra, Jaipur, Pushkar.

On the road, Deepak kept saying ‘This is India’ by way of explaining the homeland that he was now observing from a New Australian vantage point, with amusement and a degree of longing. The constant chaotic flow of apparitions and events, the déjà vu of travelogues and literary narratives creates—paradoxically—difference and original experiences for the visitor. In an assault on all senses, the meaning escapes out of overused words such as confronting, land of contrasts and incredible, leaving obscure signifiers, empty shells standing for feelings that defy expression. Clichés become tools of misunderstanding, of pondering or of desensitised acceptance. In the Pink City of Jaipur a child-beggar had run to my open window at a traffic light, tapping her bunched fingertips against her mouth, her eyes two overflowing pools. She was, I suspected, the victim of a cruel beggar-master, better ignored lest her fate be perpetuated with my money—as one of Deepak’s cousins had explained. I clenched my fists and averted my eyes. She persisted with her teary gaze until the lights changed, then turned her back and moved away gracefully, skipping, singing and whirling towards a woman and two other children who were standing on the median strip. Was the trauma of this event exclusively mine, the result of my peculiar view of the world? Had I come to India to understand the same lesson my Chabad teachers had tried to teach me? Eizeh’hu ashir—ha’sameach beh chelko: Who is rich? One who is happy with his lot.

Seeking more intricate paths towards enlightenment and happiness, many Westerners in India venture into a plethora of religious practices. With my secular views, I find it hard to reconcile an ashram-acquired private nirvana with the images of undernourished child-beggars, of emaciated dogs kicked in the guts and other ubiquitous signs of misery. I side with Graham Huggan, who argues that many spiritual tourists buy a product manipulated by an industry that bestows on tourist destinations ‘a spiritual quality, where spirituality itself may be conceived of as exotic, as a mystique made accessible by travel’.³

In the Chabad House our host told us that her family’s two-year term in Pushkar was up and that they would soon be returning to Israel. I was glad for the boy and the girl, who would be joining a larger community of children, away from this confined situation, no more the appendage of parents who had ventured to faraway Pushkar in the name of an elevated ideal.

‘Suddenly a Chassid gets up in the morning and decides that he wants to be an emissary of the Rabbi King of the Messiah,’ begins the about section of the Chabad India website. The author explains that this decision is never sudden, that a Chassid who has been raised with ‘the love of Israel’ is bound to search the globe for a place where ‘A. there are Jews, B. there isn’t a Chabad House there yet’.⁴ Watching the young (mostly) secular Israelis flocking to foreign lands where they might be tempted to dilute their Jewishness with alien elements, or lose their mind altogether in the fold of mystical practices, Chassidic rabbis and their wives have travelled to alien places, often inhospitable to the requirements of their religious practices, wanting to offer ‘brotherly love, an attentive ear, and a helping hand’, a gesture of hospitality that is grounded largely in the desire to entice secular Jews back into the fold of Jewishness. There are Chabad houses in twenty exotic destinations across India, from Dharamsala to the Andaman Islands.

The Israeli travellers who mob India—often seeking temporary release from a tough homeland—make a captive audience for the emissaries. There is a parallel affinity with religion between India and Israel. For most Israelis, tradition is never completely divorced from secular life, with the common celebration of religious holidays and the practice of life milestones—in various degrees of adherence—from circumcision to Bar Mitzvah to compulsory religious marriage and a death that is monopolised by the ultra-orthodox. Taken out of their regular context, authentic Jewish religious rituals in a secluded environment in the Indian space could be considered bonus exotic adventures. The Chabad House of India is thus shaped as a one-stop support base for all things Jewish on the tourist trail.

On the Pune Chabad website, a woman named Meirav is concerned about kosher food availability in India. In her reply to Meirav’s query, Rocha’leh—presumably the rabbanit, the rabbi’s wife—starts by refuting, in colloquial Hebrew, the myth that ‘it’s very easy to keep Kashrut in India because there are a lot of VEG restaurants’. She asks, ‘What, for example, about the subject of worms?’ which indeed are deemed treif, non-kosher creatures. Rocha’leh says that when she sorts through pulses and sifts flour she finds there ‘a whole zoo’ and she doubts that the cooks in the local vegetarian restaurants would be looking for more than gravel in the raw ingredients, and moreover, she says, ‘I find bugs and worms in vegetables you wouldn’t dream about in The Country’ (meaning Israel). She asks: ‘Have you ever dreamt about a worm in an Eggplant?’ To overcome the ‘zoo’ problem, Meirav is given a detailed list of kitchen implements that she can purchase locally upon her arrival in order to do her own cooking along her meandering path across India: a portable electric stove, pots, pans, bowl, sifter, rolling pin, cutting board, cutlery, spices, flour and a bottle of Indian kosher oil. This equipment is deemed handy for making chapattis, frying eggs and even fish, which perhaps can be cut by the fishmonger with Meirav’s kosher board and knife.⁵ As Rocha’leh states, ‘there isn’t a thing that can stand against the will’—a phrase that would have sustained Alexandra David-Neel while travelling across China, India, Nepal and Tibet at the beginning of the twentieth century, at times with a large party of bearers for her luggage, which included a zinc bathtub.

Did Meirav embark on her solo trip carting her kitchen across India? If she did, would her luggage become an unbearable burden or would it rather present her with spiritual alleviation? Religion can shape one’s identity, a valuable device for trespassing on Indian cultural and spiritual space, and it may also provide the visitor with clear rules of engagement for each step along the convoluted journey away from home.⁶

Before we left the Chabad House of Pushkar, the rabbi’s wife gave me a pocket card of tfilat ha’derech—the Road Prayer I had once recited in the company of giggling girls, skipping words, overexcited in the early morning of a school excursion to the Galilee. Once there, in the heat of midday, I walked into a creek with my classmates and teacher. Fully clothed in long skirts and long-sleeved shirts, waist-deep in the water we cut dark shapes against the rays of the sun that graced us with halos: in all our meanderings we had remained true to our Chabad principles, and were proud of our religious identity. I kept the prayer card in my bag as a charm, a token of nostalgia for the religious person I had once been.

By the time we had made our way through the side streets of Pushkar’s market district, the crowds seemed to thin down around us, and some of the souvenir shops that lined the lanes had already closed for the day. An air of serenity descended on the town. I thought with irony about the public notices forbidding photography, out of respect for the sanctity of the place and the privacy of the pilgrim bathers in the lake, knowing from texts I had read about the lenient enforcement of this rule that hinged on the willingness of a tourist to pay for the performance of a puja—partly uttered in pidgin English—by a genuine or fake priest, depending on one’s luck.

A lane opened into the familiar panorama of mountains and white temples. When we arrived at the shore, we gazed at an empty expanse of muddy soil. Devotees were bathing in a large concrete pool. The holy lake of Pushkar was dry.

Lemonricks

2012-05-08T00:00:00Z

A student of Darwin named Bunky
debated a Creationist junkie:
‘Your theory of hosannas
is completely bananas
Jesus evolved from a monkey.’

There was a timpanist named Flynn
who forgot to tighten his skin
during Beethoven’s 5th
at the mark fff
he hit it too hard and fell in.

My grandmother sang from Puccini
while attempting to boil fettuccini
once doing a rendition
in a yoga position
she slipped, scalding her kundalini.

A three-legged dog from Hanover
tried pissing on hydrants in Dover
winds from the Channel
would disorient the spaniel
she’d lift her back leg and fall over.

There was a French chef named Marais
whose wig fell in the soufflé
it wouldn’t rise higher
so he set it on fire
and served it up Toupée Flambé.

A student of Schoenberg named Otis
in yoga could do a full lotus
he stood on his head
used eleven tones instead
fortunately nobody noticed.

Little Refuge: Design and Solitude

2012-05-07T00:00:00Z

In 1929, designer and architect Eileen Gray speculated that ‘one must anticipate that the present need for action, for a hectic life, will come to an end; that it will subside as soon as the effects of the war disappear and will be replaced by the need for inner knowledge and refinement’.¹ Writing this, Gray herself had moved to an isolated and rocky stretch of the Mediterranean that overlooked the sea at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin in the south of France, leaving behind considerable achievements as an interior designer in Paris. It was here that she launched herself as an architect, beginning work on a secluded modernist villa, all light reflecting white walls, horizontal hugging flat roof, and compactly minimal frame, which she was to name E. 1027. A progressive designer who found herself, for a time, among Le Corbusier’s inner circle, Gray was unique in her passionate defence of the need for spaces of solitude within buildings. She sensed that modern life and modern design were reducing such possibilities but that this would prove merely a temporary phenomenon.

It is intriguing to wonder, were she alive today, what Gray would make not only of the influence that technology now exerts in diminishing our privacy but also, from a design perspective, how the changing nature of buildings is arguably re-engineering our relationship to solitude. As notions of accessibility, openness and connectivity continue to gain greater traction as drivers of much contemporary design, solitude as an ideal now appears almost antiquated. But in Gray’s eyes, buildings had to offer some measure of privacy if they were to succeed as shelters for the imagination. It was a view echoed by the renowned Mexican architect Luis Barragán, who went against the grain in his 1980 Pritzker Architecture Prize acceptance speech by praising solitude: ‘Only in intimate communion with solitude may man find himself,’ he said. ‘Solitude is good company and my architecture is not for those who fear or shun it.’²

Yet today we do, in many ways, shun it. How likely are we to encounter it among the communal exercise hub of the gym, the noisy distractions of the shopping centre or the ever increasing number of crowded ‘non-places’ from airports to train stations that proliferate in our daily lives? Solitude in architecture is a magical and intangible quality, difficult to define, but we know it when we find it. These are spaces where, rather than being harried and stimulated to grasp and consume, we instead slow down, surrendering to contemplation or a meditative emptiness. Perhaps solitude is losing its desirability. Or, in a world that is squeezed for space (and pressed for time), it might simply have become unpractical, a luxury reserved for the privileged few who can afford it or dare to demand it.

This apparent redundancy of solitude crosses my mind as I consider the newly revamped Surry Hills Library and Community Centre in Sydney’s inner east. Highly lauded but not uncontroversial, the library is certainly an architecturally elegant building. But as a three-storey glass container with only a series of fin-like timber louvres dressing its otherwise naked facade, a sense of privacy can’t really be counted among its assets. At ground level, a row of chairs and desks are pressed against the building’s glass front, exposing readers to passers-by on the street outside, which leads me to wonder whether it’s possible to experience any real sense of solitude while reading in what is essentially a giant fishbowl. Unfortunately, the Surry Hills Library is not alone in its pursuit of a more spacious, open, transparent and airy design. At Sydney University’s Fisher Library, a new space-creating initiative involves moving books not borrowed within the last five years into storage to make room for collaborative work spaces and more student lounges. It’s likely to result in noisier, less private study spaces, but it’s a move Fisher librarian John Shipp defends in a 2011 Sydney Alumni Magazine article as necessary to make Fisher ‘more flexible, catching up on a global trend’.

Once a principal space of solitude, the library now appears headed in the same direction as the workplace with its embrace of the more economical open-plan environment. Here, the shift away from cellular offices is promoted for such advantages as better social facilitation, collaboration and unconscious knowledge sharing, not to mention the financial gains for the organisation. These are legitimate benefits. However, a research paper on the possible health impacts of open-plan, published in 2008, voiced what many had already long felt: that the loss of privacy, loss of identity and low work productivity were just the beginning of its pitfalls.³ A Sydney Morning Herald article published online a year later about open-plan etiquette sparked some lively venting in the comments section. Particularly vitriolic was one poster, identifying as ‘mac’, who riffed that putting people ‘into tiny cubicles and then enforcing strict rules of behaviour so they don’t upset other people and turning them into grey clones is not productive for the workplace and hell on mental health’.

Remove the cloak of online anonymity and would ‘mac’ be so bold? Open rallying for greater privacy is rare: are we losing our capacity to articulate the value and necessity of solitude? At other points in history it has emerged as a vital concern. Hannah Arendt’s thinking on solitude assumed an unexpected urgency when she attended the 1961 trial in Israel of the Nazi Adolf Eichmann for war crimes, which provoked her to consider its importance in ‘dark times’. Could the growth of the conscience depend upon the self-questioning that takes place in solitude, she wondered, and should we not then elevate its status as a much needed antidote to conformism? Arendt is careful to distinguish solitude, ‘this existential state in which I keep myself company’, from the anguish of loneliness where one feels truly ‘deprived of human company’.⁴ Montaigne likewise advocated a moral dimension to solitude; Rilke wrote eloquently on its necessity for creativity; and Heidegger, in his effusive praise of the hut, saw solitude as elementally tied to dwelling. Yet of all writers to link solitude to place it is possible none can surpass Bachelard, a kindred spirit of such designers as Gray and Barragán when he writes that ‘every corner in a house, every angle in a room, every inch of secluded space in which we like to hide, or withdraw into ourselves, is a symbol of solitude for the imagination’.⁵

Whether shared with others or lived in alone, the house as a shelter from the world outside that nurtures our memories, daydreams and sense of self endures as a space of solitude. Yet the nature of this solitude appears quite different today compared with a century ago when houses were more segmented in their design. The modernist architects of the first half of the twentieth century pioneered new models of living with their enthusiasm for open, connecting and flexible living spaces (Frank Lloyd Wright boldly banished attics and cellars from his), the liberal use of glass, the maximisation of views and light, and the seamless transitions from inside to outside—all innovations we now gladly take for granted. But these transformations also brought about a significant shift, which was to turn the focus one has in the home outwards rather than inwards. Eileen Gray absorbed many of these avant-garde principles in her design for the modernist house E. 1027, although she approached the open-plan cautiously. Wary of completely abandoning autonomous rooms, Gray argued that ‘everyone, even in a house of restricted dimensions, must be able to remain free and independent. They must have the impression of being alone, and if desired, entirely alone.’⁶ Her positioning of walls and doors reflected this.

Since the global financial crisis hit in 2008 we’ve witnessed a renewed interest in the house. Yet even with this return to ‘nesting’ it would be rare to hear an architect or designer today advocating as Gray did for spaces of independence. A ‘convivial’ solitude, which stresses multi-functional spaces that can be solitary but easily transfigured for entertaining, now appears more humanistic. But whether a house is conducive to solitude is about more than simply the configuration of rooms and how many people it can accommodate. It is also about its emotive qualities and the sensations it produces. When it comes to fostering a sense of tranquility, stillness and serenity, Japanese architecture excels. For Japanese novelist Junichirō Tanizaki, the contrast between the Western preoccupation with light in the house and the Japanese affection for shadows is striking. ‘The light from the garden steals but dimly through paper-paneled doors,’ he writes, ‘and it is precisely this indirect light that makes for us the charm of a room.’⁷ Locally, Glenn Murcutt achieves a magical silencing clarity in his houses, which seek to ‘touch the earth lightly’. Drawing upon carefully reasoned responses to topography and climate and the artful manipulation of form and materials, Murcutt shapes an architecture of place that is tantalising not only with the possibility of refuge but also with an invitation to reflect and to discover the pleasures of a quiet and restorative isolation.

In its more social goal of enabling being alone together, ‘convivial’ solitude falls short of embracing isolation. Have we outgrown genuine solitude, which implies a retreat from others? Not quite, it seems. For as much as solitude doesn’t fit with the contemporary fetish for ‘connection’, in the context of inaccessibility it arguably does still hold power. Inaccessibility in the vein of Thoreau and his isolated wilderness existence has long been linked to solitude; as technology continues to make us ever more reachable, the fantasy of inaccessibility at least remains a potent one. Such dreams have a remarkable habit of manifesting themselves in certain types of buildings and locations. Whether it’s a log cabin hidden away in the bush, a secluded beachside hut on a sun-drenched Pacific island, a tent pitched in the desert, or a luxurious spa or nature-sanctuary resort, the dream of a solitary escape remains both a marketable commodity and an innate desire that takes on a strong resonance in a hyper-connected world. For the designer, such spaces can offer rich creative opportunities.

Invited in 2007 to design a number of artist studios on the remote Fogo Islands off the east coast of Canada, Norway-based architect Todd Saunders was inspired to create a series of spectacular and starkly modernist hideaways stationed by the sea like lighthouses. Evocatively captured by photographer Bent René Synnevåg, the images of these elongated and minimalistic trapezoidal forms elevated on pillars and teetering over rocks lapped by the Atlantic Ocean have been widely blogged about; their experimental interpretation of a timeless romantic fantasy taps powerfully into the elemental human desire to seek refuge. In many ways the studios epitomise the ideal design for solitude from the inaccessible location to their self-sufficiency, designed to function off the grid by producing their own power and treating waste on site. Built from blackened rough-sawn pine, the textured materials lend the buildings a haptic quality while the unadorned interior embodies clarity and an absence of distraction. Beyond the physical form, which expresses both a sense of expansion and of protection, there is an enthralling mythical quality to these structures. By recalling the local architecture of fishermen’s houses, the studios softly evoque a past era when long stretches of time were spent at sea, alone in the elements, and a slower pace of life was built into the rhythms of daily existence.

Perhaps it was the sublime quality of the open sea that also drew Eileen Gray to build on the rugged coastline of Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, where solitude comes not necessarily from isolation but from the feeling of being overwhelmed and enveloped by nature. When Gray began designing E. 1027, or the ‘little refuge’ as it’s also known, it was in close collaboration with fellow architect Jean Badovici, who for a time was her lover, and despite her reputation for solitude, she generously entertained many guests there, including Le Corbusier and the French painter Fernand Léger and their wives. Stenciled on the walls of the house were a series of quotes, including one from Baudelaire, who famously declared that multitude and solitude were interchangeable terms. Just as the design of her house embraced the sensual pleasures and escapism of its seaside location with its streamlined ship-like appearance, generous decks and sleek nautical balustrades, Gray quotes a line from his ‘Invitation to the Voyage’, which urges, ‘it is there we must go to breathe, to dream, and to prolong the hours in an infinity of sensations’.

Solitude can be viewed as a destination, a place we can happily retreat to without staying too long. Yet it should not appear too remote, too far away. We need not only secluded getaways as occasional escapes but also poetic spaces for solitude within the grasp of our everyday lives, in the buildings we live and work in, as a counterbalance to the increasing demand for the total openness and transparency of shared space, which risks becoming oppressive, even authoritarian, as it crowds out our thoughts. As Arendt reminds us, solitude combats the loneliness of the modern world and gives way to an inner dialogue that might just be ‘the most outstanding characteristic of the life of the mind’.⁸ To design for solitude is not to create spaces for self-indulgence but rather to give ample consideration to what the self might need for the full realisation of our potential as thinking, conscious individuals.

Freestone Road

2012-05-03T00:00:00Z

Ask yourself, when
have you been most happy?
What slips in, unexpected,
swiftly as a cat turning through a door ajar
is that moment
driving alone on Freestone Road, as you crest the hill
and breach the decline where the whole
landscape is spread out below you like a wide bowl,
rough-glazed and stippled with the husks of gathered crops;
the bounding quiet when you hit the sealed road,
the car seeming to glide on water.
Beside the verge the pale grasses fan towards new stars
just now being sown in the same dishevelled scatterings;
brown horses turn away and shake their manes.
The light seeded with grey so all the colours draw in their breaths
and the seconds pool like heavy drops
on a leaf-tip, then plunge;
the dip in your stomach as you press down
and the needle rounds its own crest.
Speed—you wonder why
you crave it; why your friends know you as calm.
But you are calm, as you tip 140 on the empty narrow road,
the moon the one blind eye on you.

Golden Resources

2012-05-02T00:00:00Z

Nestled between the third and fourth ring roads in the unfashionable west of Beijing, the Golden Resources Shopping Mall is part monument and part reality check to the growing emergence of China as an economic superpower. At about a thousand vendors and half a million square metres, ‘The Great Mall of China’ was the largest mall in the world until China built an even bigger one further south in Guangzhou. Yet even by the incessant scale of Beijing, Golden Resources seems plenty big enough.

You wouldn’t call it suburban—Beijing is an eternal and seemingly endless city—but out here is a long way from where most Westerners go. It’s a different world to the Singaporesque new centre of Chaoyang where most expats reside; the charmingly rebuilt hutongs in the city centre that are a magnet for expat hipsters; the once-gleaming, now dust-drenched Olympic venues; the knowing irony of the 798 contemporary art district; or the ancient palaces and modern monuments to Mao around the Forbidden City where large numbers of local and international tourists flock.

Out here even the nearest underground station is a few kilometres away. If you walk here through the miasma of the Beijing summer, the air leaves a gentle tingling (or is it burning?) sensation with each breath. As the massive building emerges from the smog it evokes a mass of references, such as the steroid-fed bastard child of Melbourne’s Chadstone, the Big Pineapple and the design aesthetic of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. I had seen it described as art deco, but if that’s occasionally evident in the details it’s lost beneath layers of kitsch, dust and aggressive consumerism. It’s only seven years old but nothing new ages well here. Beijing is at its best with the recent and the ancient. From inside you can’t tell whether the opaque corrugated fibreglass roof is intentionally frosted or was once transparent before the constant sandblasting by the dust storms.

Photo by Narinda Reeders

In a country of monumental communo-capitalist mega projects, Golden Resources has become conspicuous—in the West at least—as an early and particularly epic failure. Wikipedia suggests as few as twenty to thirty people per hour actually visit here. On this particular Tuesday it seems slightly more active than that but it is easy to imagine that many of the stores could go through a full day without paying customers. The cleaners, the shop assistants, the information desk attendants, the three staff watching over a children’s play area with no children playing in it, or the hosts of the game show with elaborate staging and dozen participants but almost no audience easily outnumber the shoppers.

Inside it is bewildering and overwhelming. It is large and at once strangely familiar and uniquely Chinese. ‘The Girl from Ipanema’ plays on the muzak. The constant assault of pseudo Western brands and generic international retail design makes it impossible to distinguish between the Chinese labels, the knock offs and the real ones. Do Jeep sell children’s clothes back home? Trendiano? TR/BECA? Plory? Are these real brand names or has someone just gone crazy with a map and a faulty version of Google Translate? Louis Tocool? I-baby? Everywhere cartoon characters sell unrelated products. There is a Snoopy shop here, while Garfield has a clothes store and a bakery. Disney logos are slapped on an impossible range of goods and services from furniture to English lessons. In a country notorious for rampant piracy it’s hard to tell whether it’s a brand consultant’s horizontal integration fantasy or an IP lawyer’s nightmare. In the West, shopping centre placement is a carefully considered pseudo-science of demographics, transportation and assessment of competition. By contrast, the rationale behind building this mall here is difficult to discern—it seems too big and in the wrong spot. Yet somehow, despite early predictions of its imminent demise, Golden Resources has remained open for the best part of a decade. It is mostly tenanted. At first it’s difficult to understand how.

Wikipedia suggests that several of the foreign brands are subsidising their presence here as a loss leader to break into the Chinese market. Perhaps once that was true, but it seems unlikely now given the abundance of faux Western brands and the many genuine new flagship offerings and designer stores appearing downtown. Is it simply that the costs of labour and materials are so low that the overheads are affordable here? Is it hubris that won’t let the world’s biggest mall fail? Is it a capitalist creation or a folly of the state? Is Golden Resources a socialised loss in a sea of private profit, or is it a capitalist liability? As country after country is forced to confront bad loans and poor risk assessment, we might well ask: who’s left holding the mortgage to an underutilised, oversized shopping complex? After three months in China, my lingering fear is that the whole Chinese miracle looks better on paper than it does in the Beijing summer dust.

Australia has so much invested in China. Not merely financially but psychologically we have placed an all-in bet on it. China surges ahead just as our traditional partners are stumbling and falling over. As the ‘Middle Kingdom’ grows and as the United Kingdom and the United States recede, we find ourselves precariously balancing old alliances and a new partner that is culturally and politically very different from us. Our national resilience and prosperity are bound tightly to the growth and success of China, yet few would genuinely claim to understand it. China has crept up on us. Not long ago it barely registered as a trading partner, but now we have become so closely linked that the Australian dollar rises and falls as a proxy for the fixed-rate Chinese yuan. Australian companies are striving to be part of an Asian, and predominantly Chinese, growth story. Our exports to China have thus far insulated us from the mass unemployment and the housing busts that have afflicted so many of the nations we once regarded as our peers. China’s demand for our resources underwrites everything from our fiscal health and retirement savings to the billionaire who bought the football team I follow. China is the new sheep’s back on which Australia’s prosperity rides. It is the luckiest card the lucky country has drawn yet.

We think we understand the United Kingdom and the United States. The minutiae of their politics, their economic woes, their national obsessions, triumphs and tragedies are to some extent comprehensible to even the vaguely engaged. By contrast, China is opaque and notoriously difficult for even those who follow it professionally. For my part, spending time there seemed to amplify, not resolve, the uncertainty. From afar China becomes a series of myths and stereotypes: communist demon, capitalist miracle, a land of opportunity, and most compellingly a once-great nation returning to its rightful place and becoming great again. China’s many myths have underlying truths to them.

Yet up close it feels far more complex. China’s miracle is in equal parts brilliant and broken, prosperous and perilous, enlightened and endangered—in part due to forces beyond its considerable control and in part due to that control. China’s challenges are to a degree those of the West: an export-led miracle may flounder in a world that is reducing imports. The global chain that starts in the Pilbara and passes through the factories of eastern China ends in the bargain bins of American Walmarts. What happens when economies stumble from crisis to crisis and slow their once-reliable consumption?

Photo by Narinda Reeders

There are also considerable challenges in China. It balances precariously on its own contradictions: it is communist but capitalist, it is transforming but not transparent, and it is cheap but not efficient (sometimes a job that could be done by a single person is shared by four or five). It is at once a rich and a third-world country. It is a land of extravagance and staggering poverty. It is undemocratic and yet its leaders must constantly attempt to demonstrate their legitimacy and to validate the system in ways few elected governments are obliged to do. In China the mood is a strange mix of worldly and naive. There is weariness in the ways of the world after generations of turmoil and revolution, but there is also enthusiasm for the promise of global capital in a way that seems out of sync with recent experience in the West. It seems to be following a trajectory to prosperity pioneered by its neighbours while remaining oblivious to the pitfalls many of those neighbours have encountered. Almost all the Asian tigers have seen political upheaval and economic turmoil, while Japan enters yet another sluggish decade as it attempts to deal with the aftermath of massive debt, natural disasters and the challenge of an ageing population. Yet China, faced in the medium term with the demographic legacy of its one-child policy, now seems to expect decades of high and predictable growth. The expectation is that the state and the market will drive the boom while the party will protect the economy from the inevitable busts.

Jinan, the capital of Shandong province, is one of countless Chinese cities bigger than Sydney or Melbourne. Most Australians would never have heard of it and few could locate it on a map. It is unremarkable in China but from a global perspective it is growing faster than almost any place on earth. From the beautiful mountains that surround it or from any of the rapidly emerging high-rises, Jinan’s old city literally disappears beneath you. It looks like a construction site. The inconveniently placed small-scale old neighbourhoods are making way for ubiquitous brands and gleaming buildings.

‘Progress’ is a word out of vogue in the West. Yet from the new freeway that intersects with the Beijing–Shanghai high-speed rail line outside Jinan the sense of ‘progress’ is overwhelming. Our prevarication over major infrastructure projects contrasts dramatically with the capacity of the Chinese to decide to do something and get it done. Superfast trains emerge from a tunnel in a distant mountain and seem to fly across a long viaduct before disappearing among forests and factories. The rail line is an act of willpower over landscape that seems to belong to another era. Jinan, by virtue of its position on the line, is now connected to China’s two political and economic capitals in a matter of hours.

Outside Jinan—and every Chinese city I visited—rice fields give way to residential development that seems to sprawl. Outside Tianjin are clusters where twenty- or thirty-storey buildings are being built in several locations. Few had any obvious transport links or the economic activity that usually drive such developments. Outside Jinan and Tianjin and even in our neighbourhood in Beijing, most apartments seem unoccupied, if not unfinished. It is as if they have been built as a store of wealth, in a country with a dysfunctional banking system, and left idle in the expectation of a boom to come. By some estimates there are more than 60 million empty apartments across China. It is the flipside of the political certainty that allows for rail that runs at record speeds to be constructed in record time. Under the current system, having the right connections makes it easy to decide what but often difficult to ask why.

The Australia–China relationship these days comes sprinkled with a generous layer of ‘mineral dust’. Everywhere private and public monies stirred up by the demand for our raw materials are liberally sprinkled across the connections. Australia’s interests are increasingly seen to be in promoting cultural and economic exchange, accelerating interconnection, financing and fuelling relationships. Like Australia’s relationship with many of our powerful friends it is almost certainly more vital to us if than to them. Along the way it is creating layer upon layer of opportunities and absurdities.

We are in Jinan by accident, as extras for an Australia–China exchange, a mineral dust exhibition. It is taking place somewhere we mistook for Jinan but is effectively a new city outside it. Our destination feels almost as far from Jinan as Jinan feels from Beijing. We have been randomly recruited at an exhibition in Beijing, offered a free train fare and now find ourselves being chauffeured in a gleaming new Audi to the opening. Despite the grandiose new art gallery and the considerable investment involved, random Westerners are being bribed to appear there. The big gallery cum university complex outside Jinan is one of dozens if not hundreds of such projects—museums, performing arts centres, large galleries that form a small part of new pseudo cities—under construction across regional China. Even in China none of this would come cheap. They are part of stimulus on an unprecedented scale to counter the global financial crisis. So far it has proved an effective policy at the national level as China has largely escaped the global malaise, but it has resulted in countless local projects whose rationale it is difficult to comprehend. Even where the logic, such as that of a new university campus, is obvious, scale has the ability to triumph over purpose.

On arrival at the Jinan Yuan Bo Yuan International Exhibition Centre we play the role of honoured guests. A small army of organisers, assistants and uniformed observers ensure we are escorted at the right moment with fanfare across red carpet and ushered into one of two VIP rooms out of Communist Party central casting—full of oversized couches covered in doilies. Chain-smoking local party officials are re-enacting the sort of welcome that Deng Xiaoping would have prepared for Mikhail Gorbachev. On cue we are ushered onto an elaborate stage. Around us are people who may or may not be the artists, the organisers and a representative of the Australian embassy. The speeches, roughly translated into English, are a mix of corporate doublespeak and contemporary Communist Party propaganda. Officials laud the ‘science creative industries cultural precinct master plan’ to an audience who appear to be mostly students and for whom, one suspects, it was compulsory to be here.

Despite my gentle enquires, the rationale for building in the middle of nowhere a contemporary art gallery that would dwarf the national galleries of most countries is never explained. The impressive grandeur of the occasion only reinforces the feeling that this is an ivory elephant. The exhibition features quality Australian and Chinese media (mostly video) artists whose works are ill suited to the context. Intimate confessions and observations are blown up onto projections the size of tennis courts—as if to reinforce the sense that the whole project is unnecessarily big. As we take in the exhibition it becomes clear that we have lingered too long. Several of us—mostly the extras—have missed a crucial bus connection. Our official party has been split in two, and the illusion of control and clockwork logistics is shattered. Despite the efforts of the small army of people managing the event it is apparent that everyone knows what was supposed to happen but now no-one knows what to do. It feels like a parable of central control: the more we insist that our plans have gone awry, the more the various helpers, officials and hangers-on insist that they can’t have.

If there’s a word that makes sense of China for me it’s exponential. China is growing at an exponential pace—at an average of about 10 per cent a year for the last three decades. Many of the roads, apartments, railways, shopping centres, art galleries and museums, new cities and ‘science creative industries cultural precincts’ are being built not because they are needed now but in the expectation that before long there will be demand for them. Increasingly the growth is being driven by the fact that China expects to grow exponentially.

China’s decades of pent-up demand—held back by years of communism—have catapulted the country into the biggest export boom in history. The focus on growth has driven a surge in living standards and prosperity. But there are risks. Provided you put your money into something that would compound in value, you could become gloriously rich. Many provinces, ambitious entrepreneurs, party officials, careful savers and canny investors were smart, and many more were lucky.

Photo by Narinda Reeders

For every successful project of the last few decades it seems there are now dozens seeking to emulate them. It is a system based more on anticipation than on demand: of millions of new residents in unlikely locations, of growing markets, of booms that last forever. An exponential boom is needed just to keep pace with expectations. The whole system seems precariously balanced somewhere between a genuine economic miracle and a Ponzi scheme.

As the global econony contracts, will forward momentum, the sheer willpower and resources it possesses see China safely through the difficult period? Or will the spell be broken and the thousands of questionable decisions and investments bring the whole thing to a shuddering halt?

Since the mid 1990s China’s official policy has been zhuadafangxiao—the state ‘grasping the big and letting go of the small’. It describes the role the state plays in the economy but it hints at the collision of big and small scales that plays out across China. It helps explain why the massive shopping centres are replacing the markets, why often empty towers are replacing the small-scale urban form, why superfast rail lines can criss-cross the country and why provincial officials can will entire new cities into being where rice paddies once stood.

The scale of the country, the population, the centrality of hierarchies, the reach of the authorities, the power to move mountains or entire cities, the national desire to reclaim greatness and the ability to deploy resources to meet those ends all converge in an experiment unique in scale in history. The scale brings enormous temptations too. As China finds itself awash with the kind of capital that can and has run like a wrecking ball through societies with a well-developed rule of law, its Communist-era processes seem ill-equipped to deal with it. There are few checks and balances here. The developers, the financiers, the decision-makers, the party, the army and the police are inextricably linked. Where power is concentrated and the resources deployed are vast, so the risks of getting it wrong are high. At some point mistakes will have consequences that may lead to the kind of social unrest China is desperate to avoid. Coming from a country with a population the size of a large Chinese city, it is easy to misunderstand China. My natural sense of scale doesn’t work here and at times almost everything looks out of proportion. Away from the megaprojects, China is a country of entrepreneurial, resilient local endeavour. From the fruit traders who set up stalls in the laneways to ambitious entrepreneurs with bedroom businesses, it is hard to imagine that the long-term future isn’t strong. It is difficult to tell in practical terms whether zhuadafangxiao means the state has cut such people free or simply cut them loose.

The grand-scale narrative about China is so convincing that perhaps the details are trivial. It may simply be that given China’s population and the pace of its growth there will inevitably be dud projects and misspent resources—they just look bigger here because everything is bigger here. But as around the world once-miracle economies have fallen into recession, the lingering fear is that China may be no better. For the sake of Australia’s golden run, we can only hope China’s case is different.

The Sofa

2012-04-24T00:00:00Z

At the height of the craze for Liam Couch, buses edged down our street three or four times a day as tourists sat in the open upper deck listening to a commentary. We could hear every word of it, over and over. The bus stopped outside Couch’s concrete mansion and the guide told everyone to look closely at the wrought-iron front gates. There was a prize for the first person to notice something special. Eyes came slowly out from hiding behind cameras. Eventually somebody, usually a kid, noticed that one of the gates wasn’t properly hung. It rested on the ground and was held in place by barbed-wire.

‘That’s right,’ said the guide, tossing a Couch Cap (which only had half a peak) to the winner. ‘It’s not finished. He didn’t even finish his own front gate.’

The passengers smiled and cameras were remounted as the bus turned at the bottom of the cul-de-sac. They didn’t spend long in Couch Close. The company had an agreement not to disturb local residents and, besides, the mansion was now being used for disabled accommodation and if the bus purred too long outside, damaged people started to appear.

Growing up, we watched several bridal cavalcades sweep through the gates of the mansion across the street, but Celine was the only Mrs Couch we got to know, the only one who ever came out on foot. The year I finished school, she used to walk across to our place in the late afternoon looking like she was ready to face a new day. Mum would leave her computer to talk to her. Over time, Celine started staying longer and coming inside. She borrowed Mum’s old running clothes and spent a frenetic half-hour going nowhere on the exercise bike that had been lurking out the back since my dad had left. It had grass growing through the spikes.

‘Surely they can afford their own gym gear,’ I complained. ‘Of all people.’

‘It’s the only break she gets from him. That’s what she told me.’

‘And their own clothes.’

Often Mum held the bike steady so Celine could work hard on it. Occasionally Mum held her by the hips. You could see the imprint of Mum’s fingers in her sweat. Celine showered in Mum’s bathroom before she left.

‘And their own water,’ I said. ‘Surely they have their own water.’

Mum wrote a mildly satirical social column for a weekly paper that was serious about real estate and little else. The column alone would never have won her entrée to the launch of the Couch Complex but Mrs Couch organised that for her. The invitation came by registered post and specified elegant shoes, which Mum borrowed from Celine, who brought over a dozen pairs in a gym bag for her to choose from. She said that Liam had paid for the shoes but wouldn’t recognise them because he was a man who never looked down and, despite Liam’s requests, Celine was not a woman who could undress without taking off her shoes first. Mum replied that she took off her socks last, if at all.

Liam Couch had invited the most expensive shoes in the city to a cocktail party in the sticky clay at the bottom of the crater where he proposed to build the Couch Complex, the tallest building south of the equator. He spent the whole evening pointing upwards, asking his guests to dream beyond the stars. Most of them could not even follow his vision back as far as road level, let alone 120 storeys into the sky. He said on TV that the Couch Complex was named after his father, Claudio, not after himself. He could only take such big risks for others. That was the secret of his happiness in this life and in the life to come. He turned and kissed his wife as Mum stepped aside to make room. Some guests had already given up hope of finding their shoes again in the mud.

The Couch Complex has remained unfinished for almost forty years. They got as far as building the spine and the floor of each level. It’s the biggest tourist attraction in town, looking like the skeleton of a fish hung from the crane that still hovers above it. The backbone of our economy. The crane is repainted every year to stop it rusting. Each major anniversary has been the occasion of a festival. Five years after the Couch empire collapsed, there was a competition for the world’s tallest unfinished cake. Five years later, for the tallest unfinished story. For the fifteenth anniversary, there was a race up the outside for climbers. For the twentieth, there was a creeper-growing competition. That was the year Liam Couch died of a heart attack. You could have scheduled it. One obituary mentioned that Liam had started at university but never finished his degree, another that he never finished a meal. There was a competition to give the tower a pet name. The most popular were Liam’s Couch and The Sofa, which is what everybody called it anyway. For the twenty-fifth anniversary, the competition was to turn the tower into a work of art. The winner unfurled bolts of cloth from a number of the floors to make the whole thing look like a comb with hairs stuck in it. For the thirtieth anniversary, there was a wheelchair race the length of the long shadow the building casts in the late afternoon. In the thirty-fifth year, the competition was to design musical instruments based on the shape of the tower.

‘There’s no need,’ said Mum. She was old by this stage, and not well, but occasionally her mind still fitted pieces together with sudden dexterity. ‘The whole tower is a musical instrument. The wind whistles through the lift wells like a flute. You can use the fire doors as stops.’

‘Whatever you say, Mum.’ I was good at half listening. Her stories all came round again.

She went on: ‘Other times the unsealed concrete moans and shudders and the top of the stairwell gives little short gasps. There’s no knowing what then. Different sounds. Sometimes it sobs. Sometimes it gets the giggles. Sometimes it falls silent and the building keeps its thoughts to itself.’

Mum spent longer in the tower than anyone else alive. Mum and Celine. All those years ago, they were both invited to the first celebrity charity open day that was held during construction. This time, the guests wore sensible shoes and were taken to the ninety-ninth level in a cage that ran inside the shaft of a crane. The noise nearly deafened them. Liam apologised that they had, as yet, merely constructed the skeleton of the building. He said sorry with such pride in his voice that everyone applauded.

Liam explained that they were looking at an X-ray of his dream. He warned his guests against drinking too much and wandering close to the open edge of the building but didn’t follow his own advice. He got drunk and lost count of the guests when they returned to earth.

Mum and Celine stayed behind. The cage was sent up the crane to retrieve them and, when it arrived, they wedged a stray girder through the door and into the fretwork. The lift was stuck and the shaft was blocked. Nobody could get to them. Simple as that. They were safe. They had decided to stay.

Mum used to say that the time they spent squatting in The Sofa didn’t cause the fall of Liam Couch’s career but only brought it forward. Its collapse was inevitable anyway. His fortune was balanced precariously on the edge of fantasy and was bound to topple over sooner or later. No construction work could continue while the two women refused to come down. Liam assumed that without any supplies, they couldn’t last long. But Celine and Mum had planned this and were equipped for more than survival.

Celine had a phone with her. She also had a spare battery, but was so efficient that she didn’t need it. She rang the paper Mum wrote for and explained where they were and what they were doing. The editor was used to dealing with the ripples Liam Couch sent through the community and nothing surprised her. Besides, Couch owed the paper so much for unpaid advertising, and had so many law suits against them, that it was glad to help. Mum undertook to write a daily column from the top of the tower and the paper doubled her fee. In addition, it agreed to arrange a helicopter to bring fresh supplies to the top of the tower. There wasn’t much Liam Couch could do about it. He had promised Celine the ninety-ninth floor of the tower as a wedding present. It was hers to use as she saw fit.

‘I suppose people want to know why we’re here,’ wrote Mum. ‘The fact is that there is no reason. The whole stunt is as pointless as the tower itself.’

Mum and Celine fired the imagination of the city. Within a fortnight, the revolving restaurant on top of another city tower was calling itself The Squat. Mum wrote more elegantly than ever before. The ceaseless movement of air around the concrete latticework set her on edge, made her restless, filled her with longings that found expression in print. She assumed the persona of an avenging angel perched on the roof of the city, looking in on everyone’s lives. She imagined being able to peer over the back fence of the premier, look down the chimney of the aluminium smelter, see through the sun roof of every sports car, gaze into the load of every open truck, read over every shoulder. She wrote as if she could see everything that was hidden from her. She wrote all the gossip she knew to be true but insisted she was making it up. She held the whole city in the palm of her hand.

‘Celine and I are living on a cloud,’ she wrote.

Meanwhile Celine did deals. She got sponsorship. A department store offered them the use of a bed or beds, whichever they preferred. Every day a different restaurant sent up a hamper of fine food and drink and the contents would be reviewed in the column. Mum always wrote the column before lunch, so the review was based on what the food looked like. She held to the adage that it was impossible to write about food except on an empty stomach. A mahogany dining table was hoisted up the outside of the tower in pieces with instructions for assembly. Hairdressers were landed on the roof, as well as masseurs, naturopaths and a personal trainer who suffered vertigo and didn’t come back, leaving an exercise bike that blew like a windmill day and night and would only stop turning when someone was in the saddle. Photographers and film crews from overseas came and went. One of the best-known images from that time is of the helicopter sweeping to the top of the tower with a fresh port-a-loo suspended beneath, not unlike the opening of La Dolce Vita. The lesser buildings of the city can be seen in the background.

Celine and Mum conducted talkback radio from the top of the tower. People sent in problems to ask for help. The two of them were said to deliberate at length on the small things of life and to speak with clarity. They gave advice about thesis topics, hair colour, mortgage rates, tax minimisation, global warming, resort wear, perfume labelling, insurance premiums, child allowance and conflict resolution. Mum urged her readers, male and female, to stop shaving. She said that she and Celine enjoyed nothing more on a calm day than to watch the breeze move the hairs on their legs in unison, first one way and then the other.

In time, Mum asked for a copy of the Bible. She began tearing out a page at a time and releasing it from her cupped hands as if it were a bird. The pages fluttered everywhere. People found stories from the New Testament landed on their windscreens and thought they were parking tickets or flyers for something they didn’t want. Some of the Psalms landed in trees where they lodged until autumn when, having changed colour, they fell to earth. One man found the story of Noah in his swimming pool. A woman found a page about Moses in the gutter. The part about the loaves and fishes found its way into a lunchtime gathering of Weight Watchers. Some people waited for the release of the daily bible page and then tried to catch it but nobody succeeded in this. A single page has no will of its own in the wide-open sky. It was like trying to catch the end of a rainbow.

Mum and Celine announced they would stay for 120 days, one day for each floor of the building. It was the longest period, by far, Mum spent away from home. ‘If Liam Couch wanted us to come down sooner,’ wrote Mum, ‘he would have built a shorter tower.’

Work on the project was delayed and fell way behind schedule. Couch’s backers got nervous. They fought and his financial arrangements started to unravel. On the day Liam Couch went into receivership, Mum wrote a column about her plan to launch the world’s biggest paper plane from the top of the city’s tallest tower. She also mentioned that she and Celine were tiring of French champagne and lobster. The suppliers pleaded with her to change her mind. Her words affected sales.

After 120 days, Mum and Celine were flown off the tower to a hero’s welcome on the ground. They were on the cover of everything.

Liam said that he wanted a divorce but it was three years before Celine moved out of the mansion, this time to live on her own. Mum decided that she, too, intended to grow old in her own company. After a while, her face softened with age, her hair thinned, she gained a few kilos and became a nobody again.

‘You know what one of the worst parts of the whole thing was?’ Mum said years later when she heard that Liam had finally had his heart attack. She didn’t mention the tower very often. ‘It was having to kiss his wife for the cameras the day we came down. I didn’t like that.’

Mum sits on a sofa outside the house where she can look down three of four steps to the street. She likes a breeze. By the time I split with Jo, her memory was already crumbling, so she never gave me a hard time about that and never said ‘I told you so’ because she couldn’t remember what she told me. It suited me to come back and look after her while I thought about rebuilding my life.

Buses roll past, all eyes fixed on the concrete mansion opposite. They annoy me. Mum doesn’t even notice. The passengers all look the wrong way because they want to see the mansion. Many of the tourists will return to the gift shop at the foot of the tower and buy photos of Mum and Celine to take home. They sell piles of cards with the famous photo of the two women picnicking on the ninety-ninth floor with a waiter in tails hanging out of a chopper ready to refill their glasses. The two of them look strong. They look like they own the whole world and for four months they did. Maybe that one image of them still haunts the people who are captivated by their story and that of Liam Couch. When the tourists catch a glimpse of the feeble woman out the front of our place on a worn sofa, they look concerned, as if the place has been given over to special accommodation, same as the mansion. They want to look at something else.

‘Why did you come down when you did?’ I asked Mum once, years ago. ‘You could have stayed up there forever. In the lap of luxury. Had everything you wanted.’

‘I could have, I suppose. But sometimes you have to accept that something is finished. Even if it doesn’t look that way.’

To Civilise the City?

2012-04-18T00:00:00Z

In the early 1980s Don Gunner, a philosopher at the University of Melbourne, told me that the task of the university is to civilise the city. At the time he said this, many academics still believed that the concept of a university entitled them to say that no institution could rightly call itself a university if it did not have a department of philosophy, or classics, or physics. They thought this to be a conceptual truth—one evident after thoughtful, historically educated reflection on the concept of a university.

When Gunner made his remark to me, I worked (and did until last year) at King’s College London, situated on the Strand. Many of the great cultural institutions of London are within fifteen minutes on foot, so I did not take what he said to be generally true of universities. I also thought it was a very Australian, possibly even Melburnian, thing to say. Academics in London and elsewhere had begun to describe what they were doing in managerial newspeak. Rather than hope that King’s could civilise the city, I thought I should hope that the city might arrest its slide into philistinism.

‘Managerial newspeak’ is, of course, a term of denigration, so I must explain what I mean by it and why I fully intend the denigration. It was inspired by the belief that good managers could manage anything provided that the activities of the institutions they managed could be suitably redescribed to enable them to do it. If, for example, you describe what students and their teachers achieve in a university as a product, students as customers, heads of departments as unit managers and vice-chancellors as CEOs, then—this thought goes—good managers from BHP should be able take up management posts in universities whether they have a rich understanding of the life of the mind or virtually no understanding of it at all. The idea proved largely illusory: hardly any institutions seriously tried to implement it fully. Even so, its vocabulary took off, though that was as much an effect as it was a cause of the decline of a concept of the university that could support quasi-tautologies that were the expression of Gunner’s concept of a university.

Many academics went along with it, for at least two reasons. First, they thought that any description of what they did that made the work of management more tractable would not impinge on their sense of what mattered in what they did. People and activities can, after all, be described in different ways for different purposes. The university finance department can describe students as customers, while their employers may describe them as products of one kind or another and their teachers, simply, as students. Many academics believed that for functional purposes those different descriptions could be kept apart. Second, they believed that they could forever keep an ironic distance from the managerial redescriptions of what they and their students did and of the relations between.

That was the century of what a philosopher called ‘the linguistic turn’, when we became aware as never before of thought’s dependence on language. It should therefore come as no surprise that it was hubris for academics to believe that they could retain their distance from managerialist ways of speaking and even, when it suited, to manipulate them in order to outwit their managers and the government that paid their salaries. Though they were often alert—sometimes with aggressive condescension—to such hubris when the military resorted to ugly euphemisms like ‘collateral damage’ or when governments resorted to dehumanising descriptions of asylum seekers intentionally to diminish sympathy for them, they were blind to their own vulnerability to the corrosive effects of managerial newspeak. Yet even in the early eighties it should have been evident to anyone with their eyes open that universities could more easily survive government cuts than they could survive the degraded language in which academics were beginning to speak of what they were doing.

Managerial newspeak flourished and adopted a distinctive idiom and tone under an aggressive and ubiquitous free market ideology, but it is not essentially a product of such economics. It could flourish as well under socialist economies. Indeed it emerged first in Britain under a Labour government before Margaret Thatcher came to power. And the instrumentalist conceptions of the value of university study that it expresses are equally at home on the left of politics as on the right. It was the conservative political philosopher Michael Oakeshott who spoke most movingly against the managerial impulses that were already showing in university administrators in the late sixties.

It is no small matter, the ubiquitous success of managerial newspeak in the characterisation of university life. Students who learn to speak it, confident in no other language with which to express what it can mean to be a student, will not have the words with which to identify the deepest values of their education and thereby to claim its treasures as their inheritance.

An example will illustrate the point. Recently when I gave a public lecture at the Melbourne Law School, in which I lamented the ways managerial newspeak had estranged politicians, civil servants, school teachers, academics and others from the deepest values of their vocations, a student said at question time that he did not object to being described as a customer in his dealings with his teachers. In fact, he went on to say, he welcomed it because it enabled him to hold them to account if they did not deliver the product the university had advertised.

Students have justification for feeling aggrieved, perhaps especially in the more prestigious universities, where pressure on research performance is highest and where, inevitably, academics are torn between giving time to their students and writing papers and applying for grants. Universities are under intolerable pressure to produce research results as a sign of productivity and as a marker of prestige and at the same time to respond to the increased demands that teachers be more accountable to their students. Managers will therefore say, with some reason, that their task, not yet accomplished, is to find the right balance between time given to teaching and to research.

In such circumstances, resort to the metaphor of a balance is irresistible, but it can be misleading. Whether it be in politics, when people speak of getting the balance right between liberty and security, for example, or in our present discussion, the metaphor tends to obscure the fact that there are no value-neutral ways of describing what goes into the scales and how they weigh it. Or, perhaps more accurately, to say what weighing means in this context. When I teach students who study philosophy, I often tell them that I do not set the most important of the standards in whose light they should see what they do. Nor does the department or the university or even the community of philosophers worldwide. My colleagues and I try, with them, the students, to rise to the standards of the discipline, which are set by the work of the great figures in it and also by those, like Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, who had a tense relation to the academic practice of it and those, like Socrates, for whom philosophy was not, and could not have been, a discipline.

What I say to them relies on a sense of the intrinsic worth of what they are doing. It requires a continuing, ever-deepening exploration of what it can mean to do philosophy for the love of it, and of the joys and the obligation that love imposes. More often than not, we academics must acknowledge that we fail our students and ourselves when we judge what we do by those standards, but we would fail our students even more seriously if we did not make them and ourselves answerable to them. Obviously the limited family of concepts to which that of a customer or a provider of goods and services belong will not take us far in the direction of understanding what is at issue here. Nor will the metaphor of getting the balance right enable us to understand the disagreements about the deepest values of the academic life and of what it is to do history, or philosophy or physics, for example, well. Or, in the case of philosophy, what it is to do it at all.

I suspect that the student in my example welcomed being described as a customer because customers know—or can set out to know—how to demand value for money. Customers typically know what they want and what counts as getting it. The trouble, however, as I hope my example shows, is that students are initiated into things they don’t understand and which take time to understand. If they are well taught, they discover worlds they had never dreamed of and whose exploration requires disciplines that, at their deepest, can never adequately be captured in the forms they fill out at the end of the semester to assess their lectures and lecturers. When we describe students as customers we do not create a suitable means to enable them to hold their teachers to account. We make many of their teachers servile because they become fearful. We then betray the trust of the students and their teachers.

The concept of a university to which Gunner appealed is now defunct. No institutions that are called universities—from the most to the least academically distinguished—think seriously of what they do under that concept. Few academic managers feel the need to consider whether the courses they might introduce or axe are consistent with a serious conception of a university. The protest that one cannot have a university without a philosophy or a classics or a physics department falls on deaf ears, or provokes the irritated response I heard from a minister of education in Britain. Told repeatedly at a meeting with philosophers that one could not call an institution without a philosophy department a university, he replied, ‘In that case, we will call it something else!’

Does it matter that the concept is defunct? Has something important been lost? And even if there has, is there any point in lamenting it? Had its time not come? Can we not simply identify what is good and what is bad in higher education and try to develop what is good and eliminate what is bad to the extent that it is possible? To these questions, I answer with a yes and a no.

The English philosopher Michael Dummet asked recently whether we would have thought that no institution without a philosophy department could justifiably call itself a university if philosophy had developed only recently. He might have asked the same question of most of the disciplines in a university and the answer would have been the same: we would not have thought they were necessary to a serious understanding of what it is for an institution to be a university. The rhetorical point of Dummet’s question is, of course, to suggest that the claim that an institution could not justifiably call itself a university unless it had a philosophy department disguised a historical accident as a conceptual truth. He might have gone on to say that it often goes with a fantasy about a golden age of university life. And though he would not, others might go on to say that such fantasies are the expression of elitist nostalgia.

That may be a fair response to the way that some—perhaps many—people defended the concept of the university as an institution that was home to a distinctive form of intellectual life. It is true enough that we must look backwards to discover times when the concept of a university represented an inspiring idea. But when we do, we need not look to institutions and practices that one believes measured up to the concept. We need only look to times when their practices were answerable to it. Nor need we look to something like the Platonic Form of the university.

The best thought about the university was not about a Platonic Form of it. Nor was it about a historical paradigm. It was thought that was inward with the distinctive form of the life of the mind that universities nourished—thought in dialogue with a history of reflection that goes back at least to Socrates. It was that historical depth, rather than a metaphysical essence or a historical paradigm, that ensured fertile reflection upon one, historically accidental, form of the life of mind—the academic form. And that same—quite contingent—historical depth also secured for the concept some distance from times and places to make it possible for thinkers to judge that their desires, their purposes, their aspirations and even the spirit of their times were faithful or faithless to ‘the idea of a university’, which though expressed in the singular was, of course, never just one thing. This is thought of a kind that may deepen without limit, and that can never be exhausted by a set of definitions. To the student who believed he was empowered by being described as a customer, I would emphasise that this kind of reflection on what it is to be a teacher or student in a university requires inwardness with values slowly apprehended by living the life of the mind in community with fine exemplars of it. And as I noted earlier, it can awaken new desires and make us responsive to values we have never before encountered. The dialogical, interdisciplinary enactment of that reflection constituted what used to be called a community of scholars, with all the unworldly connotations that expression rightly evokes.

Exemplars matter and therefore it matters who one takes them to be.

The value of the life of the mind, what it can humanly mean, can only be revealed in the reflective appreciation of the way it deepens the lives of people who care for it. We do not have a sense of it independently of such exemplars. If you want to know what justice is you should look to the just man, said Aristotle, but of course you must have eyes to see. The same is true of our understanding of the life of the mind in all its forms. Or, to change the metaphor for a better one: examples will inspire us only if they speak to us in a language that lives to us. By the same token, language that reveals value of any depth depends on examples to make it vital.

I hope that it is evident, even to someone who believes that they deserve the hostility directed against them at present, that the humanities play a fundamental role in the critically reflective dialogue that should be the mark of a university community. In saying that, I do not wish to revive polemic about the ‘two cultures’. Discussion of the humanities needs to be rescued from the assumptions that informed that debate almost as much as it needs to be rescued from the poisonous inanities of the culture wars. The fundamental impact of science on our understanding of what it means to be human is undeniable. It has deepened immeasurably understanding of ourselves as creatures of the earth and as material beings in the universe. Neuroscience has altered our understanding of the mind, and evolutionary psychology has had considerable influence on moral psychology and, through it, moral and political philosophy. (It has also fed reductionist impulses in real and pop philosophy, but that is another matter.) Recent developments in technology have affected our lives directly in dramatic ways and altered our ways of thinking about and imagining ourselves.

Self-evidently scientists live the life of the mind as surely as their colleagues in the humanities. The BBC revealed this beautifully to a non-specialist audience some years ago when it screened a program on the origins of the universe. It went on for more than four hours and though I could hardly understand a word of it, I was glued to the television for the duration. I was exhilarated by the joyful love of the world, mediated in this case by a love of its beauty, shown by those high-flying astrophysicists. It gave me a new and deepened understanding of what the study of science can mean in a human life, of what it can be to pursue it for the love of it. Or, better: it enabled me to see the point of Simone Weil’s remark that it is misleading to speak of the love of truth: one should speak instead of the ‘spirit of truth in love’.

Yet only when they are engaged with the humanities are the natural sciences able to contribute to an understanding of the human meaning of their discoveries—indeed of their meaning, period. Only when it is engaged with moral, legal and political philosophies that are historically informed and imaginatively engaged with art can evolutionary theory, for example, deepen our understanding of the human condition. And though it must be informed by examples like the one I gave from the BBC, reflection on the value of truth, of what it is to seek it in the spirit of love as those astrophysicists did, is reflection best suited to the humanities. But the present conditions of academic life undermine the critical distance from the times, from convention and fashion, that the humanities require to honour their obligation to the need we human beings have to understand ourselves.

Academics now tend to cut their subjects down to a size that is tractable enough to meet the demands of accountability. Impressive technicality, a kind of high-flying thoughtlessness, can shine in such conditions. This is true even in philosophy that glories, but increasingly without justification, in the fact that radical self-criticism is of its essence. Wittgenstein suggested that philosophers should greet one another by saying, ‘Take your time.’ One needs time to muse, to meditate. Meditative reflectiveness does not issue quickly in publications and is often not sure of itself. It is seldom impressive on its feet. Yet for those of us who are not geniuses, it nourishes critical reflection, enabling one sufficient space and time to step back and to examine assumptions one might otherwise not have noticed.

Just as the emphasis on high-flying research performance undermines critical reflection, so it undermines teaching more surely. Even academics who work in the best departments in the best universities seldom produce work that is read by more than a handful of colleagues before it is forgotten. Yet for such mediocre achievement they cut corners in their teaching—by assigning more of it to postgraduates, by increasing the number in tutorials to ludicrous levels and by seeing students less often, for example. Many of them would be fine teachers and some would be wonderful—thus doing more for their students than they can by writing and more for their discipline. One could weep for the waste.

Worst of all, perhaps, the way universities now distinguish research-active academics from those who are not leaves little space for those who write little and have not attracted grants, but who are up to date with their disciplines and whose reflective engagement with them makes their contribution to the intellectual life of their departments and, in some cases, to the life of the university, invaluable. In that way they also contribute to the research culture of their departments. Don Gunner was such a scholar, as were some of my most challenging teachers even when I was a postgraduate. As much as people who write books and refereed articles, academics like them—genuine scholars and thinkers though not researchers in the contemporary narrow meaning of the term—need time free of teaching to be the inspiring teachers and colleagues that some of them are. Yet the descriptions of what they do that are implicit (though obvious) in the research requirements of most contemporary universities denigrate what they have to offer and humiliate them.

Because the institutions we call universities are in complex ways socially, politically and historically imbedded, it would be foolish to suggest that one could adequately characterise how they are and how they have come to be that way solely by philosophical elaboration of the decline of an idea.

The idea of a university had life when there were few universities. When their number increased dramatically, institutions that could lay no claim to it were granted the title university. When I say they could lay no serious claim to the title, I am not commenting on the quality of the work that was done in them. I mean that they were not institutions that had ever thought of themselves as answerable to the conceptual truths that defined the idea of a university, truths of the kind I mentioned at the beginning of this essay. It therefore became impossible for any of the universities to define themselves in terms of an ever-deepening exploration of those truths.

That will not change. On this matter there is no going back. Insofar as a university education is partly defined by the fact that it is acquired by living in a community that must continuously rise to the obligation to reflect on what it means to be a student or a teacher, responsive to the ideals that define the deepest and most rigorous standards of their disciplines, the upshot of the expansion of the university sector is not that many more people enjoy university education: it is that no-one does. This is but one of many examples in which the morally compelling pressure of egalitarianism eroded the very nature of the institutions to which it demanded broader access. The bitter irony in the case of the universities is that the distinction between the most and the least prestigious universities has reasserted itself, but with nothing like the now defunct concept of a university to restrain its more baleful consequences and to give academics a voice in which to speak back to increasingly authoritarian managers.

It would be foolish to talk of the radical change in the institutions called universities over the last forty years or so without addressing the social and political circumstances of that change. It would be equally foolish to think that one could characterise the plight of the universities, let alone understand it, without understanding the values that distinguished universities from other institutions of higher education and that determined the character of the disciplines within them. That means we cannot characterise or explain the plight of universities without understanding how they have come to be dominated by a largely instrumental conception of their nature. Whatever understanding we achieve about that will be in considerable part the work of history and social theory. But the offerings of those disciplines will not take us far unless they are informed by an imaginative conceptual grasp of what that instrumental ideal has displaced. That will, in its turn, depend on inwardness with the life of the mind lived in pursuit of understanding for its own sake—an inwardness that requires sympathy for the joys and obligations of that life. And the fruits of such inwardness cannot be expressed in managerial newspeak.

To avoid misunderstanding, I acknowledge without reluctance that vocational and professional courses have always been important to universities. Never before, however, have they determined the idiom, set so much of the tone, transformed the language and set the goals of the institutions to whose essential identity, if not to their attractions and prestige, they had previously been marginal. For a very long time the humanities have had to establish their credentials against the prestigious claims to knowledge justifiably advanced by the sciences, and against the attractions of the professional courses. Only recently, however, have the need to attract outside funding and the attraction of courses that guarantee secure employment so radically transformed the ways that universities understand what they do. So great is that transformation, so complete the success of managerial newspeak that some essential disciplines of the humanities and the sciences—philosophy and (even) physics, for example—have become mendicants for a respected place in institutions that should honour them, but honour instead the study of hospitality and gaming.

A British minister of education said a few years ago that although he had nothing against people who wanted to study classics, he did not see why the state should pay for them to do it. Though I was surprised that he said it, I was not surprised that he thought it. Many people do. He thought that none of the instrumental benefits of a classics education could justify its expense, and that the state should not pay academics to enjoy its intrinsic worth.

Earlier I wrote that managerial newspeak was as much the effect as it was the cause of the decline of the concept of the university to which Gunner appealed. Its energetic arrival on the academic scene was enabled by the difficulties academics everywhere faced when they tried to defend the intrinsic value of their disciplines to their paymaster. It was like a weed establishing itself where grasses had died. Much of the student protest movement of the sixties, which many of my generation now romanticise as expressing an ideal period of university life, wanted the universities to serve the interests of the revolution or at least those of social justice. A concern with the intrinsic value of academic study was often scorned as intellectual masturbation. Even subjects in disciplines and sometimes whole disciplines were hijacked to serve the radical cause. At Flinders University the course in moral philosophy was renamed American Imperialism in Vietnam. I imagine that was not what Gunner had in mind when he said that the task of the university is to civilise the city. But then, I think neither he nor I realised that the concept of a university as a distinctive institution of higher education no longer had life in it.

Some conceptions of intrinsic value go deep; others, however, are relatively shallow. Expressions such as ‘for its own sake’ and ‘for its intrinsic value’ mean something only in the context of a common understanding of how to characterise, more positively and fully, the value of something pursued ‘for its own sake’. When such common understanding is absent, those expressions often convey the vague thought that something that should not be pursued only for its instrumental value is pursued only for that value. Or they convey something very thin, like the idea of higher pleasure of the kind to which John Stuart Mill resorted when he tried to explain why the life of Socrates dissatisfied was preferable to the life of a pig satisfied.

For a long time we have been bereft of such a common understanding, one that would enable us to give authoritative voice to a conception, positive and deep, of the value of academic forms of the life of the mind. I have a passion for philosophy, and until back trouble set in I had it for mountaineering. Both yield higher pleasures but, quite rightly, the taxpayer does not pay for both. If the intrinsic value of university studies is nothing more serious than the pleasures that accompany the disciplined exercise of the powers of the mind, then it is right that serious people should look to their extrinsic benefits, be they political or economic.

The reason we find it difficult to argue persuasively for a more serious conception of the intrinsic value of study is not because philistines dominate our audience. Nor is it because of the effects of high unemployment on students or the effects of market-driven policies on staff and courses. Such economic and political factors are important but, like their expression in managerial newspeak, their impact on the universities is as much effect as it is cause of our inarticulacy. In the sixties the universities were vulnerable to the call that they serve the requirements of political idealism. They are now vulnerable to the pressures to serve the economic imperatives of the nation. In both cases their vulnerability has been partly a function of the fact that those who defended them, sometimes passionately, could rarely articulate a vision of the life of the mind that would move people to see something serious and deep where they had not seen it before. It went together with the loss of the concept of a university as something more than a high-flying institution, three stages past kindergarten, that excels at research.

This is a cultural phenomenon, a quite general conceptual loss, and has little to do with individual failings of character or intelligence. The concepts we need are beyond our reach in the way that we capture when we say that a form of speaking has gone dead on us. The spread of managerial newspeak was facilitated by the replacement of the idea of academic life as a vocation with the idea of it as a profession. At a certain point the concept of a vocation became as anachronistic as the concept of chastity. When that happened our sense of the value of truth and its place in the characterisation of academic life changed. What one makes of talk of the love of truth, of truth as a need of the soul, of the need to be concerned with truth over vanity, wealth, status and so on, will be different according to whether one’s conception of academic life and its responsibilities is structured by the concept of a vocation or by that of a profession.

In his notebooks, Wittgenstein agonises over whether his work is infected by vanity. ‘Infected’ is the right word, I think, or ‘polluted’ may be, because he was not worried that vanity would increase the number of mistakes he made, or in other ways distort the content of his work as we think of that content when we lecture on him—on the private-language argument or on rule following, for example. For him the spirit in which philosophy is done is intrinsic to its nature. Seen in the light of the conception of a philosophical life, including an academic philosophical life, as a vocation that is perhaps not remarkable. In the light of a conception of that life as a profession or career, it is likely to seem precious or neurotic. And we would acknowledge that it would be absurd to characterise Socrates as a great professional, and we know that is not because the option was not available to him at the time. But it would not be absurd to say that when he said, under the threat of death, that he could not give up philosophising because the ‘unexamined life is not worthy of a human being’ that he expressed an ethical necessity intrinsic to his sense of philosophy as his vocation. It is true that philosophy was not an academic discipline for Socrates, and Wittgenstein had a complex relation to the discipline. But though the expressions ‘academic philosopher’ and ‘professional philosopher’ are now virtually interchangeable, it was not always so.

The intensity with which Wittgenstein and Socrates engaged philosophy—the way it claimed them—is increasingly alien to the spirit of the times, which looks upon it with urbane condescension. The condescension is not new. Here is Callicles in Plato’s Gorgias attacking Socrates and all he stands for. Plato must have felt its power because it is one of the greatest speeches in his dialogues.

It is a good thing to engage in philosophy just so far as it is an aid to education, and no disgrace for a youth to study it, but when a man who is now growing older studies philosophy, it becomes ridiculous, Socrates … When I see a youth engaged in it, I admire it and it seems to me to be natural and I consider such a man ingenious and the man who does not pursue it I regard as illiberal and one who will never aspire to any fine or noble deed. But when I see an older man studying philosophy and not deserting it, that man, Socrates, is actually asking for a whipping … Such a man, even if exceptionally gifted, is doomed to prove less than a man, shunning the city centre and market place, in which the poet said men win distinction. He will spend the rest of his life sunk in a corner and whispering with three or four boys and incapable of any utterance or deed that is free and lofty and brilliant.

When I read that to students, they smile knowingly because they believe they have the measure of him. They think he is a philistine. In their hearts, however, most of them agree with him, as I believe do most of their parents and perhaps even many of their teachers. If one leaves aside for a moment his claim that the continued study of philosophy demeans an older person, then what Callicles says in appreciation of the worth of philosophical study is a good statement of what most students and their parents seek in a ‘liberal education’ and what many people would hope for if they hoped that the university would civilise the city. He does not offer an ‘extrinsic’ reason why young people should study philosophy. He praises it for cultivating certain qualities of mind—an imaginative appreciation of and concern for what is ‘fine and noble’—which is presumably conditional upon an absorption in the subject for its own sake. He believes that the study of philosophy for its own sake is necessary to a certain kind of personal cultivation. He could also agree that the study of philosophy tended to make its students more thoughtful citizens. For these reasons he would acknowledge that we need good teachers of philosophy. He would not grant, however, that a life devoted to philosophical study, or to put it more generally, a life lived in a love of truth, could be a life worthy of a noble spirit. Perfectly aware, if only because of Socrates’ example, that philosophy could inspire an absorption that lasted a lifetime, he denies only that it could be a worthy absorption.

In its worldliness, in its enchantment with ‘the market place where men [and women] win distinction’ and from where it looks with disdain upon the ‘ivory tower’, the modern academy sides with Callicles against Socrates. Callicles, though, would speak more strongly on behalf of the humanities.

If the satiric tone of that last sentence rings true, even faintly, then you may see why I say that our task—in the post-university era, as it were—is to see how much of the intimations of depth, in our rhetoric of ‘the intrinsic value of the scholarly and intellectual life’, are honestly and lucidly accessible to us in living and authoritative speech. It is tempting to represent this as a task to discover what we really believe or what we can honestly and consistently believe after we have examined the conflicting intimations of our ways of speaking. But discovering whether we can strike a non-rhetorical note in our talk of the love of truth, for example, is not a matter of discovering whether we believe in the love of truth. It is more like coming to discover which of the concepts whose structures we can still abstractly articulate are still fully available to us for living use. That discovery and striking the right note are interdependent. It is rather like finding which admired ways of living are real options for us without sentimentality or bathos or some other form of inauthenticity. Only radical political and social change, I suspect, will make that possible.

Socrates—not the historical Socrates but the character in Plato’s dialogues—developed various arguments to respond to Callicles. Plato gave us the character to show what a life committed to philosophy can mean. It is the character, at least as much as the arguments he developed, that has haunted Western culture. That is why Plato the poet is as important as, and inseparable from, Plato the philosopher.

I now turn briefly to something that seems implicit in Gunner’s statement about the role of the universities—namely that academics have an obligation to participate in discussion beyond the academy. It would of course be absurd to claim this is true of all academics merely in virtue of the fact that they are academics. And though I will not argue the matter in this essay, I think there is no justifiable description of university academics, even those working in, say, political theory or political philosophy, from which one can generate an obligation that they take part in the kind of public discussion that is now conducted by people who are called public intellectuals. A narrower description of them as employees of the state might generate obligation to contribute expertise of one kind or another, but that is another matter.

Leaving obligation aside, would it be a good thing if academics were more generally involved in public discussion? For any given period of time, that depends on the state of the academy and of the academic disciplines within it.

Take just philosophy as an example. Again, we are not contemplating a Platonic Form outside history, but philosophy as an academic discipline practised in universities at particular times and in particular cultures. One’s answer, therefore, to the question ‘Would it be good if philosophy were to be more involved in the public arena?’ will partly depend on how one judges the state of the discipline at that time. Sometimes a discipline is in decline because of reasons internal to it or external pressures on it of the kind under which academics now labour and that undermine the kind of reflectiveness that can protect philosophy (and other disciplines) against conformity, not to mention fashion. When it is in decline, especially if it has succumbed to pressures that undermine radical self-criticism, let alone radical criticism of public policy, then philosophy’s entry into public life by means of various ethics committees, for example, is likely to be less than edifying. That said, when people for whom philosophy matters judge, rightly or wrongly, at any historical moment that philosophy is in bad shape, they will hope that it recovers and that philosophers will again take part in public discussion without doing more harm than good. However bad it may be for a public intellectual culture to have bad philosophy, it is worse for it to have none. Despite the relatively recent and welcome addition of philosophers to the guest list at writers festivals, philosophers have a negligible impact on public discussion in Australia. Hardly ever is a relatively serious book of philosophy reviewed in the literary pages of the newspapers or even in the literary magazines.

Gunner made his remark to me at a time when many Australian academics and intellectuals were estranged from ordinary Australians. Australia seemed to them to be a cultural desert. Many fled at the time, mostly to England. Then none would have dreamed of living in a country town. Now of course it is different. Melbourne intellectuals follow Australian Rules football. They live in country towns. Writers festivals, festivals of ideas and public lecture series flourish all over the land.

At the same time, however, universities have retreated from the public institutions of culture, largely under the pressures of accountability, especially over research. Even interdisciplinary work within universities, regarded as desirable a few years ago, is now discouraged because publication in disciplines other than one’s own earns no points for one’s department. If you are a philosopher who has contributed to a book of essays on a novelist or poet, your department will not thank you for it, nor will the department of literature because it gets no credit. And a narrow conception of, and focus on, research discourages, indeed implicitly disparages, engagement with cultural institutions outside the university unless that engagement is narrowly professional—the provision of expertise of one kind or another. In many universities even academics in the humanities are discouraged from writing books rather than for A-grade journals.

Recently an academic organised an international conference on the work of a well-known writer and academic, to which academics from at least six disciplines, joined by novelists, poets, playwrights and a screenwriter, gave papers of high quality over a period of two days. One of the academics who gave a paper—a distinguished professor—said the conference reminded him of why he became an academic. Yet the person who organised it was vulnerable to the criticism—which indeed he received—that since under the present regime such a conference earns his department less points than an article in an A-grade journal, he should have devoted his energies to writing one.

Some years ago I argued at the Melbourne Writers Festival, to an entirely unconvinced Ramona Koval, that writers festivals and the broader literary culture focused too much on Good Writing (capitals intended) and not enough on good thinking. Some people say that where there is good writing there is also good thinking, but that is not true except perhaps at the highest level. Anyone who has read my work will know that I do not need to be convinced of the importance of art, especially literature, to our understanding of what it is to be human. But in the absence of any serious engagement with the various discursive modes of thought characteristic of the academic disciplines, the kind of emphasis on good writing and on storytelling that writers festivals and even festivals of ideas promulgate, will, I fear, contribute to a new kind of anti-intellectualism. That it has already set in shows itself in the fact—Robert Manne first made me aware of the extent of it—that so few people engaged in public discussion feel the need to respond to criticism by way of anything that looks like sustained, rigorous argument. We no longer regard ourselves as seriously answerable to one another for what we say in cultural and political polemic.

How might it become different? A couple of years ago Bernhard Schlink gave one of two keynote addresses at the Melbourne Writers Festival. He is the author of The Reader, a bestselling novel that was adapted to film and earned Kate Winslet an academy award. Schlink is also a professor of legal philosophy in Germany. In that capacity he spoke at the Melbourne Town Hall about his book—developed from lectures at Oxford—Guilt about the Past.

The festival screened The Reader. Afterwards Schlink spoke about the film, his novel and the book on which he had reflected a night or two earlier. The theme common to all three was how to respond clear-sightedly, politically and morally, to the discovery that someone you love and admire is guilty of the crimes of the Holocaust or was, in one of many possible ways, complicit in them.

Some thought highly of what Schlink did at the festival, others did not. For my part, I have no doubt that the kind of thing he did was a fine illustration of the way literature speaks to us against a background of a shared understanding formed by other arts and by more discursive modes of thought, in this case the philosophy of law. Only against that background can a work of literature find its voice and only against it will its readers form an educated critical voice with which to respond. By inviting such a range of critical voices into the conversation that constitutes the shared understanding that we call culture, writers festivals and festivals of ideas can play an important role in the way citizens are able to think and imagine themselves.

I don’t know how to answer for the universities. I do not know what is realistically possible for them in anything like the present conditions in which they seek funding. Those conditions are likely to become worse.

I have described how universities now appear from the perspective of a concept of the university that is defunct, and indeed, from a particularly unworldly perspective on that concept. My aim has been to describe what we have lost. It is not to lay blame for the loss, to suggest that we could recover what is lost or, or that everyone should agree that it is a loss, or even mostly loss and little gain. To a degree that was inconceivable in the sixties when academics were chronically suspicious of involvement with business and the military, for example, universities now welcome them onto campus. The problem with that is not that it directly threatens the independence and integrity of academic research and teaching. Rather, the worldliness it expresses and consolidates generates an impatient hard-headedness about accountability that undermines the meditative critical reflectivness that I described earlier. The difficulty is not so much that of speaking truth to power, but of speaking truth to a very attractive urbanity—sometimes even to glamour—that deprives most of what is taught in a university of the power really to shake us. ‘Tell me, Socrates, are you serious or are you joking?’ Callicles asks incredulously in response to Socrates’ profession that it is better to suffer evil than to do it. ‘If you are serious,’ he goes on to say, ‘then the whole of human life is turned upside down.’ He then gives the speech that I quoted earlier.

When academics enter the public domain, engaging with an educated, well-read, hard-thinking public, they do it best when they go beyond their capacity to give expert advice. They do it best as citizens in critical conversation with other citizens. Of course, usually it will show that they are academics, but the public conversational space I have in mind is one in which no-one takes for granted that even very good philosophers, historians, literary critics, physicists or evolutionary biologists will contribute only for the good. Even distinguished moral and political philosophers, after all, may speak from the perspective of narrow lives and narrow reading outside, and even within, philosophy.

In concluding, I return to the student who was pleased to be described as a customer. Had I thought of it, I would have recommended to him an essay by Hannah Arendt. It is called ‘The Crisis in Education’, written in the 1950s and published in a collection of her essays entitled Between Past and Future. She writes:

Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it and by the same token save it from that ruin which, except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and young, would be inevitable. And education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, not to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something foreseen by no one, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world.

Arendt’s remarks are a fine statement of the public duties of a university. When a university provides students with a space that protects them from the pressures of the world—from worldliness, in the sense in which I have been speaking of it—and from the pressures that conspire to make them children of their times, then it fulfils its primary public obligation, compared to which any obligation that academics may have to engage with the broader culture outside the university or with politics is secondary. It is a space in which they are invited to form new desires and ideals in the light of values that they had probably not dreamed of and certainly had never before fully understood. The unworldly connotations of the expression ‘a community of scholars’ should not be a source of embarrassment.

If I have succeeded in making that plausible, then I will also have made plausible the argument that we must preserve the unworldly space in which university teachers are able to reveal to their students what it means, mostly deeply, to devote one’s life to an academic vocation—to live an answer to Callicles. They will then reveal to their students, who will go into the world to live many kinds of lives, a value in their education that nourishes them more deeply than the kind of liberal education that many people praise. Perhaps Don Gunner had something like that in mind.

— This is a version of a speech Raimond Gaita gave at the University of Melbourne last year as part of the Dean’s Lecture Series.

The Strangeness of the Dance: Kate Grenville, Rohan Wilson, Inga Clendinnen and Kim Scott

2012-04-16T00:00:00Z

‘It does not follow’, E.H. Carr claimed, ‘that because a mountain appears to take on different shapes from different angles of vision, it has objectively no shape at all or an infinity of shapes.’ Taking these words as its epigraph, Kate Grenville’s most recent novel, Sarah Thornhill (2011), announces from the outset its interest in the question of the true shape of things. But what are truth, shape, vision—or indeed mountains? These are more uncertain, more contestable, than Carr or perhaps Grenville herself believes. For we might say that there is no true shape outside vision, that shape is always about perception. In recent Australian fiction—Grenville’s and others’—there has been renewed interest in uncovering the true shape of Australia’s colonial past and to tell its secret stories, but are we once more being given the mountain’s shape as seen from the colonialist’s angle of vision?

Kate Grenville is not alone among contemporary Australian novelists to attempt to tell a different story about the early encounters between the British and Indigenous peoples. Three very recent novels, in their different ways, have revisited the early years of colonialism with the hopeful project of showing that there was once a time, however brief, when relationships between Indigenes and the British still held promise. Grenville’s Sarah Thornhill is set in the early days of New South Wales before distinct lines between ‘white’ and ‘black’ were drawn and when there was nothing socially strange or terrible about a ‘darkie’ being brought up as a member of his white father’s family, or so its narrator claims; Rohan Wilson’s debut novel The Roving Party (2011) imagines a comfortable affinity between John Batman and Black Bill in Van Diemen’s Land in the bloody context of the Black Wars; and Kim Scott’s That Deadman Dance (2010) describes cooperative, friendly relations between British and Indigenous men along the south coast of Western Australia. Each novel follows a trajectory from collaboration to the terrible effects of white greed but each aims not at despair but at the possibility that these supposedly collaborative relations could be retrieved and renewed. Each novel, too, poses a question about the differences and similarities between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. What can we see and know of each other? Is the distance between us traversable? Where are we joined and where do we remain apart?

These literary projects refer back to Inga Clendinnen’s earlier historical efforts in a similar direction in her Dancing with Strangers (2003). In that book Clendinnen raised an evocative image of British and Indigenous people dancing together on beaches, a scene that she read as signalling happier possibilities of encounters with the strangeness of others than was later borne out. ‘We are still in the dawn of the world, with friendship between unlike peoples a blossoming hope’ (26—See Bibliography for details of sources).

But to raise Inga Clendinnen’s work and imaginative fictional renditions of the colonial past in the one breath is to remember another kind of dance, too, a dance between historians and historical novelists that shows just how complex and indeed hostile dance can be. Here I trace connecting lines between these three novels and Clendinnen’s Dancing with Strangers in order to unpick the places where, despite non-Indigenous writers’ best efforts to revise the colonial story, they nevertheless risk revitalising it instead; and to wonder what it is about Kim Scott’s writing that enables it to do such different work.

To do so will be to insist on the importance of aesthetic form: on the way a story is pushed into shape, on the form of its telling rather than only its narrative content. It will be to revisit arguments, made many times in other political contexts, that relying on our capacity to uncover new historical facts, new archival records or even new memories will not be enough to tell a different story. It is to argue that an emphasis on facts—on the supposedly objective shape of a mountain, its measurements—but equally an emphasis on white imaginative powers risks repeating the same old story, with all the reiterations of colonial impulses that this implies.

A white woman’s desire

Kate Grenville has described her trilogy—The Secret River (2005), The Lieutenant (2008) and Sarah Thornhill—as an ethical enquiry into our past, one that addresses itself to silences in the historical record, countering the dominant mode of memorialising colonialism. But instead of challenging her readers, she says that she deliberately constructs a ‘safe distance’ between novel and reader. Her writing is propelled by another concern, too: what is it, she asks, that keeps Indigenous and non-Indigenous people together and what keeps us apart? In the words she gives to her protagonist, Sarah Thornhill: ‘Generation after generation, the things joining us and the things cutting between us. All made by something done so long ago’ (Grenville 2011, 303).

Massacres of Aboriginal people are among those things that keep us apart, those things made secret and hidden in the narratives that colonialism tells about itself, and which Grenville’s writing pulls out into the light. Sex, too, is among the hidden acts ‘done so long ago’ that gathers us as it tears us apart. Unusually for Australian fiction, in Sarah Thornhill there is the explicit figuring of a white girl’s sexual desire for an Aboriginal man. This is an important move because such desire has been disavowed in colonial and postcolonial discourses; but how to figure it? Grenville has opted for historical romantic fiction, bearing a touch of Gothic as this fiction so often does. Might this form enable a new story of black and white to be told, in the unchallenging ways at which Grenville aims? Through this strategy she sets out to ease a reader along the path to new knowledge of the violence of the colonial past by making it familiar, and not too discomforting.

But loyalty to the old aesthetic forms—here romantic fiction—restrains the possibilities of writing a new story. The romance that drives Sarah Thornhill is between Sarah, daughter of a wealthy colonist, and the handsome, strong and honourable Jack Langland—the black son of another wealthy neighbour. But what is ‘black’ here? Jack’s position in the colonial scene of race is highly ambiguous: ‘… you wouldn’t pick him straight away: Dark in the face, yes, but the men who worked the ships all got dark. A heaviness around the brow. That might tell you. And the colour of his eyes. A greeny colour, very bright against his skin.’ This is a black who: ‘Talked about the blacks the same way everyone did. They were strange to him the same way they were strange to us’ (34). This is a black whom Sarah, and a reader too, can see as not so black after all and, as Sarah declares at the end of the story, it was really only Jack’s ‘white bit’ she ever wanted.

In what way, then, is this story new? For it tells—again—the story of whiteness’s love for itself. This is where the effect of aesthetics is felt. It takes a lot of work to write in a genre such as romantic fiction and not fall into step with the expectations of the form. Under the rubric of postmodernism, some writers have sought to recover the historical romance for cultural criticism but they have done so by way of a kind of writing that puts the very form of the historical romance under pressure, pointing to its logic and aiming at a reader’s discomfort or dissatisfaction or confusion. Kate Grenville’s writing, though, remains true to form. In historical romantic fiction, sexual relations between a woman and a man are naturalised and therefore require no interrogation: girl meets boy. So it is in Sarah Thornhill. And, again typical of the genre, the narrative in Sarah Thornhill is propelled by the consequences of a socially inappropriate sexual relation: Sarah and Jack’s is a match that does not suit the patriarchal lines of inheritance. For sure, the space between lovers is now marked by this thing we call race where it is usually marked by other names for social difference but this is just to install a new item in historical romance’s stock of disappointments in love.

What is missing in this story of doomed love is how the discourse of race superiority might have constituted the very possibilities of a white woman’s desire and not only its demise. Sarah Thornhill pointedly excises the possibility that it is blackness that a white woman might desire for all that she might deny it. How to tell that story?

Dancing with strangers

Kate Grenville’s project has been roundly criticised by historians, notably Inga Clendinnen, who has claimed that Grenville confuses history and fiction and has failed to understand the ‘formidable’ possibilities of a proper historical practice. But does Clendinnen not practise a version of historical fiction herself? In the name of a historical practice that interprets the written record, in Dancing with Strangers Clendinnen embellished it in an imaginative retelling. The ‘silences, absences and evasions, accidental and deliberate’ make for ‘a most imperfect mirror of “what happened”’ (43). So she filled in the silences, extrapolating from and paraphrasing archival findings—letters and diaries—until in an act of ventriloquism she made the British men’s voices appear to swell into the gaps and crevices of history.

Clendinnen’s prose is shaped by anachronistic voices and rhythms borrowed from the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century historical texts from which she draws and which she starts to copy, inflecting her own narratorial voice:

Writing home must have filled many empty evenings, but it would rise to fever pitch when a ship was due to leave for England or the Cape. Then whole days could pass in writing letters … Assistant-Surgeon Worgan from the Sirius had somehow contrived to bring his piano with him (he beguiled his fellow-officers with concerts in ports along the way) … we see him writing vast letters to his beloved brother Dick, as if, as he wistfully says, he were sitting opposite him by the fire. His love of his distant sibling is as palpable as his loneliness. (15)

This is the fever of romantic fiction, with its beguiling men, beloved brothers, the wistful loneliness of men on distant shores … These are the stock emotional landscapes of nineteenth-century fiction brought now to garnish and galvanise a supposedly formidable, objective historical practice.

This is a kind of telling where the Indigenous peoples are ‘beach nomads’ and the relationship between them and the British ‘began with dancing’ where dancing is … what? Charles Darwin she imagines ‘peacefully dancing with savages in the Land of Fire’ (7). Indigenous men dance like ‘children at a picnic’ (9). With her assistance, we can discover the reassuring scene of British men looking after a sick and terrified Aboriginal woman and her child: ‘There is the naked woman cowering with her baby in a curved grass shelter; there are the tall Englishmen standing protectively around her like a wall … these men bustling about arranging for the comfort of a frightened woman’ (42–4). Never mind that it is the men who terrify her, or that is was the British who introduced the tuberculosis from which she might be suffering. This is lifted from nineteenth-century artistic and literary arts with their vulnerable and suffering feminine victim rescued by gallants. For levity, Clendinnen helps us imagine another scene where Lieutenant King ‘had one of his men unbutton and publish his privates, at which sight the locals made “a great shout of admiration”—or so King interpreted … It seems that, whatever their cultural backgrounds, lads will be laddish’ (11). Her narrative strains to show the British in these first days as full of humour and good will.

Inga Clendinnen repeats stories of the ‘first Australians’, as she likes to call Indigenous peoples—Clendinnen rarely uses Indigenous peoples’ own names for themselves—with all the amused interest of a David Attenborough speaking of the antics of animals, and proffers the Britishers’ surprises and disgusts with great pleasure and sympathy. In this dawn of the world, men don’t rape or take sexual advantage of women but find solace in them. So:

Some time during 1790, with life in the colony harsh and getting harsher, White found solace with a young convict woman, Rachel Turner, first his housekeeper, later his mistress. Rachel bore him a son in September 1793. He was proud of his boy, and when he returned to England on the Daedalus in December 1794 he took his fifteen-month-old child with him, and found him a loving carer in the sister of his old friend Lieutenant Henry Waterhouse, which indicates how close-knit the friendships wrought in the course of colonial tours of duty were. Meanwhile White’s convict mistress … had landed on her feet … (47)

Historical romantic fiction invites the reproduction of the old apologist’s stance. It is libidinally charged, figuring the erotic in ways that reiterate whiteness’s claims to centrality, and for anyone hoping to reinvent the genre for another end it takes work to resist the siren call. Australian historical practices, despite claiming a privileged insight into the truth about our past, are not immune to its song.

‘Sand and blood in rich amalgam’

The Roving Party is also an imaginative retelling of colonial history, this time in a hybrid of fantasy fiction and a Cormac McCarthy–style realism that invites the use of rich imagery, strange juxtapositions and an elaborate prose style. Are these powerful enough to enable Wilson to give the colonial scene another shape?

The Roving Party’s rendering of another time recalls post-apocalyptic and other futuristic fantasy fiction where the past, present and future are mixed up in strange and often visually exciting ways; where, for instance, the old is carried into the future nostalgically in anachronistic sartorial styles, architecture and interiors, say, or in outdated technologies; and where the new takes ‘primitive’ forms, referring to the ancient. In the case of The Roving Party the old and the new are juxtaposed, too, but in inverse relation: the tattered clothes worn by the Pallawa belong to a violent and chaotic present and point to a dismal future under colonial rule: trousers old and torn, looted cotton shirts gone to rags, an infantryman’s crosswebbing, a fine worsted coat (1–2). And the ‘primitive’—figured in kangaroo mantles and ochred skin and hair—belongs to an Indigenous present that is fast fading into the past but to a modern reader is no less strange and exotic for that. The men and women, white and black, who move in this troubled time are vividly described and, again like much fantasy fiction, the language is deliberately and elaborately stylised to suggest another era.

What work can this hybrid do? Can it do what Wilson aims at, to encourage his readers to revisit old assumptions, and to ‘suspend disbelief’, as he says, about what happened between white and black under colonialism? ‘Suspend disbelief’ is an interesting choice of words. Disbelief must be suspended before the magician’s performance, for instance, otherwise we cannot enjoy its fantastic feats in which we want to believe even as they defy laws of physiology and gravity. But the magician’s act is not art; it is obfuscation, seducing us to suspend our disbelief in order to make the circle of make-believe complete.

The Roving Party relies on its fantastic imagery on one hand and its rich language on the other to effect suspension of disbelief. Its voice, its lexicon and its grammar, are evocative, but they do not belong to this country. This language is not ours; it is Cormac McCarthy’s. McCarthy’s aesthetic preoccupations are with language. The language in a McCarthy novel follows bodies as they lean into the country itself. The reading pleasure lies in one’s conviction that his novels’ very specific, very particular, vocal qualities belong to his protagonists, that it speaks them. We are convinced that here is a language and its rhythms that are made in the conditions in which the speaking body moves, breathes and lives.

If a protagonist refers to events out on the plains, McCarthy’s readers are persuaded that he speaks in the language of the plains. As Sarah Drummond puts it so beautifully, McCarthy ‘reinvents the sentence to accommodate the rolling, travelling rhythm of horseback narrative … McCarthy puts together long paragraphs, piling up the gore with carnivalesque violence. I am breathless and realise there hasn’t been a full stop for a page or two. Then he will slam the whole scene to a halt with a few choked words from an inarticulate mercenary’. For Sarah Drummond, The Roving Party offers these pleasures, too, but it failed to move me in the same way because I find a too-obvious mimicry here of McCarthy’s grammar, the beat of his prose, its rise and fall, its accent.

How would Wilson’s novel have sounded if it had reached for a language that could hold the beat of the very specific bodies that it figures, and in this country? This is more than ‘mere’ aesthetics. This is an idea of aesthetics as shaping narrative possibilities. A different language would figure a different body, with its own affects, its own desires, and its own position in relation to the bodies of others. It would be to speak of another story. No longer would we have a novel about a hunt for Aboriginal men, women and children across Ben Lomond mountain that reads like a cowboys-and-indians story, the ‘Plindermairhemener’ people wild, grimly visaged men painted for war, women round of belly with ‘great double braids of black hair trailing like mooring ropes’ who are silent or ‘wailing a long torn miserable wail ripped from the very well of [their] being’ (274). The language might have been able to sustain differences between these men and women and their dogs: no longer might there be packs of fighting dogs described in the same terms as are the hunting men, all filthy, thin and flea-ridden, their ‘chief’ Manalaragena something between a witch and a devil. This is not a new way of coming to know our past. This is make-believe.

If Wilson had tried to find a language in which to represent this frontier he may have been able to speak, for example, of the intimacy between two very particular men, John Batman and Black Bill, and without making each a version of the other. Each man has deadly power and calm precision, each man strides across a heroic landscape with coats and shirts that sweep around their imposing bodies: ‘Shoals of cloud glowed blood red on the horizon and the sun cast Batman tall and intense’ (17); Bill’s ‘musculature beneath the gleam of his skin draw[s] taut, the cords of his forearms like pulleys’ (21). Each man’s face is always shadowed beneath the rim of a hat, one overuses a pipe and has a fondness for rum taken straight. We know these men already. To have worked with another language might have opened up the writing to a new possibility, one figuring bodies that move towards each other and apart according to a rhythm different to those suggested by American fantasy or fictions of the American frontier, and to speaking of men who are stirred and soothed by something we, as readers, don’t yet know.

Wilson has been quoted as saying: ‘The novel format is the most important artistic form we have. It is the only form which can fully embody the moral complexity of human life.’ Novels, he goes on to say, ‘routinely achieve an utterly believable view of humanity’. (Wilson, ‘Rohan Wilson’) There, for me, is the traditional novel’s limit rather than its aesthetic power: it inscribes the believable. Australian novels such as these insist on giving us what we already know and believe in. Rather than continuing with this kind of literary practice that, much like magic tricks or circus, invites us to suspend disbelief, what if we were to pursue an art that invites us to suspend our beliefs, that encourages doubt rather than the suspension of it? To misquote Roland Barthes, if the novel is about what is already believable, then art, or poetry, is about that which seems to us to be unbelievable, implausible—for now.

That Deadman Dance

Kim Scott seems to aim at what is implausible, at least to a white reader—men swallowed by whales, men who levitate, and so on. His writing works poetically with what is unbelievable or implausible (to me) in order to suggest an alternative to the story that I already know, to suggest a new way of seeing. In this writing, the unbelievable is allowed to do its own kind of work. This is the work that silence or gaps can do, gaps that will not be filled in or stitched over, that suggest the existence of an as-yet-unknown, perhaps even the unknowable.

Scott’s That Deadman Dance forms part of a loose trilogy that includes Benang: From the Heart (1999) and Kayang & Me (2005). Each of these books is set along the southern coast of Western Australia near Albany, with protagonists that reappear in different books and with stories that intersect. The texts share a preoccupation with questions about how to write of the colonial past—in narratives dignified as history as well as those of historical fiction—without falling once more into the old story with all the violences of representation that that story commits. In particular, each seems to ask how to figure Indigenous protagonists and their point of view so that the claim to know the true shape of a mountain is undone. Scott’s methods are very different to those of Kate Grenville, Rohan Wilson or Inga Clendinnen.

In Scott’s writing the gaps in Australian colonial historical record are not filled by recourse either to the diaries and journals of white colonists or to excesses of imagination. Instead, gaps are pointed to rather than covered over. In That Deadman Dance Jak Tar turns the yellowed pages of an old colonist’s journal and discovers there is nothing of his story in it: ‘There is nothing of how he sang and danced on the whale’s back as the inside of the sea spilled all around him. Nothing of the people he had known, nothing of what they were seeing, thinking’ (161). Scott has another strategy, too: to draw on the stories and other documents that have been excluded from the colonial narrative. In writing That Deadman Dance he consulted Noongar story regeneration projects and late nineteenth-century letters written by the Noongar woman Bessie Flower. He also deploys his own familial knowledge of the area around Albany, giving his protagonists the names of his own ancestors, Wunyeran, Manit, Binyan. Thus he points to some unnecessary gaps in the colonial record, the ones that remain only because of the failure of white desire to consult other sources, Indigenous ones.

But Scott’s writing does more than show up the places in colonial discourses that can be easily filled. It points to the gaps that remain between Indigenous and non-Indigenous knowledges. In Scott’s hands, the mountain turns out to be much more enigmatic than Carr suspected. Scott’s writing refuses the terms that a writer such as Inga Clendinnen sets where, despite her claims to the contrary, Indigenous knowledges and practices are infantilised, reduced to the naive and irrational—reduced, that is, to a lesser version of our own knowledges and beliefs. (It seems That Deadman Dance explicitly speaks back to Dancing with Strangers.) So, for instance, whereas Clendinnen marvels at the so-called beach nomads’ mimicry of the Britishers’ dance and song, Scott speaks of the Noongars’ ‘appropriation of these new cultural forms—language and songs, guns and boats’ and of their appreciation of ‘reciprocity and the nuances of cross-cultural exchange’ (Scott 2010: 398).

Clearly we are in different registers here: Clendinnen’s Indigenous figure is childlike and passive—humorous at best—and Scott’s is a sophisticated subject in an act of cultural engagement. Scott finds wonderful examples. He refers for instance to a moment in the earliest days of the colony when a man named Mokare, a Noongar, with great wit interrupted ‘a conversation with soldiers to sing out to an arriving brother, not some traditional Noongar song, but “O where have you been all the day, Billie Boy?”’ He goes on to tells of a Noongar guide—Manyat—who ‘exploited structural characteristics of the “expedition journal”, a popular literary form of the time.’ And he speaks of Noongars choreographing a dance after observing Matthew Flinders’ marines performing a military drill on the beach. In Scott’s hands the men do not merely copy, they transform (399). In That Deadman Dance, dance is an elaborate language, a complex system of signification before which, crucially, the colonists are illiterate. The narrative’s protagonist Wabalanginy doesn’t realise that his white audience cannot read his dance, that they take it for mere entertainment, and this is his tragedy. While Wabalanginy dances, the colonists perform an execution.

Put beside Wilson’s or Grenville’s or Clendinnen’s figurings of Indigeneity, Scott’s protagonists are animated—they live. They are not cut-outs. Nor are they presented as living as whites do, save in shabbier, hungrier circumstances. Scott’s writing figures his Indigenous protagonists in their differences to the colonists, differently sensate and differently desiring, in ways that are deeply strange to non-Indigenous subjects. In his hands, even the country—the mountain itself—is differently shaped: it is a different thing. In That Deadman Dance we are told of the mountain that sheltered Wabalanginy: ‘like an insect among the fallen bodies of ancestors, he huddled in the eye sockets of a mountainous skull and became part of its vision, was one of its thoughts’ (52). Rocks are fallen ancestors, country is a body, to travel is to journey beside animated ancestors. Scott is not telling the same old story, populated with men and women who are remarkably recognisable to white readers as a version of ourselves, or familiar from our fantasies of our others. His writing calls his white readers to suspend our belief in our own knowledge of the smell, shape and sound of the world; he calls readers like myself into stories that are unbelievable (to me), impossible, implausible, even as they are ‘true story’ for his Indigenous protagonists. He invites us to bear the unbelievable, to stay with it until it morphs into another shape.

Scott has said of his own writing that he aims to build on a story of defeat so as to signal an alternative possibility: ‘The story is not over yet.’ The stories that he and other Idigenous writers are telling white Australians are often unpalatable as well as unbelievable. It may be that to let the story of the Australian past, present and future be rewritten, white Australians will need to relinquish the position of novelist and historian, for now, in favour of the position of reader of Indigenous-signed textualities: to become literate before the dance.

Bibliography

Roland Barthes, ‘The metaphor of the eye’, in Georges Bataille, Story of the Eye, trans. Joachim Neugroschel, Penguin, London, 2001.
Inga Clendinnen, Dancing with Strangers, Melbourne, Text, 2003.
Sarah Drummond, ‘Boots full of blood: The Roving Party and Cormac McCarthy’, Overland, June 2011.
Kate Grenville, The Lieutenant, Text, Melbourne, 2008.
Kate Grenville, Sarah Thornhill, Text, Melbourne, 2011.
Kate Grenville, The Secret River, Text, Melbourne, 2005.
Kim Scott, Benang: From the Heart, FACP, Fremantle, 1999.
Kim Scott, That Deadman Dance, Picador, Sydney, 2010.
Kim Scott, Kayang & Me, FACP, Fremantle, 2005.
Rohan Wilson, ‘Rohan Wilson answers ten terrifying questions’. Rohan Wilson, The Roving Party, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2011.

Alison Ravenscroft is in the English Program at La Trobe University, Melbourne. Her new book The Postcolonial Eye is available from Ashgate.

My Fifties Melbourne

2012-04-13T00:00:00Z

Most people consider Melbourne in the 1950s a dull and empty place and time. Any story of that city a hundred years from now will simply report that consensus—no further evidence would be called for. Yet each time I come across that judgement I know it doesn’t fit my experience. I have decided to question the received history, even if that risks a memoir hinting of ‘the education of (another) young Donald’.

Born in 1930 in St Kilda into an ordinary lower middle-class, half-Catholic family of moderate education, I reached twenty the year the fifties began. I want to revisit some of the exciting moments from 1949 to 1955: those six years adequately stand as synecdochic for the decade. I write this from memory.

Starting with music, I touch down on my particular curiosity with twentieth century music, which dominated my attention at that young stage of life. I heard my first full opera on radio. I often listened on Saturday nights to New Music on the ABC, presented by Kevin McBeath. Once, probably in 1949, he played Alban Berg’s Wozzeck in full. I was engrossed, fascinated. It was powerful. Schoenberg’s Transfigured Night also had an impact. That program over a few years was my grounding in musical taste.

In 1950 my family acquired our first record player—a big piece of furniture. I therefore bought my first record: it was to be something I had not already heard. I settled for Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloe Suite, and was very pleased with the pick.

For a few years an Argentinian, Juan Castro, conducted the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. He steadily introduced a collection of modern works. I vividly remember my first Bartók—Concerto for Orchestra—and the moment of first hearing the triumphant brass in the final passages. One of the most memorable musical experiences of my life was Castro’s conducting Hephzibah Menuhin in Bartók’s second piano concerto. It was an intense living in the moment. Reinforcing the aural sensation was that beautifully physical woman, her bare arms rippling as she displayed the dramatic percussiveness of the piano.

Only on two occasions in my life have I ever gone to the stage door to greet an artist. I did that night. Was it Bartók or Hephzibah who seduced me more? She didn’t appear. As (small) compensation I bought the three piano concertos the next week.

Even though Stravinsky and especially his Rite of Spring seemed so ‘right’ to me, it was Bartók who continued to haunt me. I had a subscription for several years to Musica Viva, then more commonly known as Paul McDermott’s String Quartet. Near the end of 1954 it played Bartók’s second string quartet. It is a difficult piece but I knew I wanted to grapple with its density so I bought the record the same week. With a bit of cheek I invited my philosophy tutor home to listen to it. He promptly bought the set of six.

The fifties set me off on a glorious journey of discovery. But it wasn’t till the sixties that I found Bach.

The second time I stood outside the stage door of the Melbourne Town Hall was to farewell and thank Juan Castro for all the pleasures he had given me over the years. He also failed to appear.

The stage played a smaller emotional role for me. Between 1949 and 1951 I went to most ballet performances. No one ballet stands out now, but one dancer does. After her first solo performance with the Borovansky Ballet I decided that Kathleen Gorham would soon be recognised as a great dancer. I was right. She was acclaimed wherever she danced. Although she was ‘classical’, her smiling face betrayed something seemingly incongruous—a spirit made for comedy. She was matchless in later years larking around with the inimitable Robert Helpmann.

Theatre was more challenging and satisfying, and the Arrow Theatre in Middle Park, run by Frank Thring, became my main focus. He was very talented, in a fulsome manner, as his several later roles in Hollywood confirmed. He was essentially a sensationalist with taste, and his productions at the Arrow always reflected that. He had a superb leading actor, Zoe Caldwell. She acquired an international reputation in later years but she thrilled the audience in the inaugural Arrow play, Oscar Wilde’s Salome, in which she played the title role. Herod was played of course by Thring.

I remember well two Christopher Fry plays, performed within a few years of their London premieres, and Jean Anouilh’s Antigone and, I am sure, some Shakespeare. It was I think at the Union Theatre at Melbourne University that I saw Peer Gynt in the fifties. It made me realise, for the first time, how ‘complicated’ life can be. I felt awed by that discovery.

Peter O’Shaughnessy struck me as the giant of theatre those years. He was both actor and producer, highly educated and sensitive in all things theatrical. I saw him perform several times. He introduced me later to that special world of Beckett’s, with Waiting for Godot. He also produced a remarkably successful revue at the New Theatre in Flinders Street in 1955. Peter Carver was impressive, but another neophyte by the name of Barry Humphries was certainly noticed. His performance was pre-Edna. Without using the name Sandy Stone, he sympathetically introduced that old man’s harmless musings to Melbourne.

From 1950 I regularly visited a few city art galleries, in particular Peter Bray’s in Bourke Street. The next year Georges and Mirka Mora arrived from France and quickly established their first Mirka’s Cafés, this one in Collins Street—a friendly hub for the Melbourne art world, especially on Friday evenings.

One exhibition at Bray’s in 1953 had an enormous impact. It was Arthur Boyd’s ceramic paintings on biblical themes. The boldness of primary colour excited and shocked me; and for the first time I felt a strong urge to buy a work of art. But I couldn’t afford it: they were perhaps 100 or 200 guineas each. The other obstacle was that I had recently left the Catholic church and, I confess, I had to struggle with the notion that a (brand new) atheist might still buy and live with a ‘religious’ work of art. I’m not clear how I appeased my (new) guilt; anyhow under the circumstances the debate was academic.

Boyd had a lasting impact on me, but in the short term he was more like an infection: he produced an itch to buy a piece of art. I soon had my chance, when I entered the Victorian Artists’ Society Spring Show, saw an oil that pleased me, noted it was fifteen guineas, and immediately told the lady at the desk I wanted to buy it. We walked back together to a work entitled Composition by someone called Dorothy Braund and I boldly asked, ‘What do you think of it?’ She replied, ‘I painted it.’ A few minutes later I walked out with my first painting (metaphorically) tucked under my arm. What an extreme contrast with the Boyd’s dark, dense, menacing primary colours. Braund was brightly, cheerfully colourful in a gentle way, economic, with a modernist flatness, like a Matisse. It is still pleasurable—and nostalgic.

In 1956 the Australian Galleries opened with a constant flood of new, great Australian art. Names keep rolling: Boyd, Nolan, Blackman, Brack, Percival, Tucker, Dickerson and so on. The fifties witnessed one prolonged display of Melbourne modernists—individual, confident, assertive.

Inge King, the diminutive German creator of huge metal sculptures, and her Australian printmaker husband Grahame, settled in Melbourne around 1951. Four years later I approached her to make a copper and silver wedding ring. How did I reach such an odd idea? A little ring from Inge! I don’t know. However, she willingly agreed; but a year later we had to replace it with brass and silver after the copper ring was crushed by a ladder. I had ignored one of its qualities—softness. Once I casually commented on an attractive oval ceramic plate with a cheeky rooster motif in Inge’s kitchen. It had a horizontal crack from one end to the other. She gave it to me. It was some time before I discovered that ‘M Preston’ on the plate stood for Margaret Preston.

I cannot recall exactly when I decided that: a) film was the most exciting art form there was; b) it had endless possibilities beyond all other art forms; and c) my appetite for devouring ‘good’ film was insatiable. It wasn’t until I had experienced non-English-language films that those revelations struck me. From 1949 to 1955 I wallowed in its pleasures and challenges. Film remains my great love.

Les Enfants du Paradis, which screened in 1949 in the Australia Cinema, Collins Street, was my baptism. Oh, that last scene as the Pierrot, mimed by that beautiful actor Jean-Louis Barrault, stares in anguish as the woman he aches for strides away, gradually being swallowed by the crowds until we spot nothing other than her red hat, and then little more than a red dot bobbing in and out of view, as he plaintively calls out her name ‘Garance, Garance’.

My world changed on the spot. From that moment certain films gave me experiences and excitations I had never witnessed elsewhere. More often than not these were non-English language films: others came across as essentially false and superficial. (Apologies to those wonderful English-language films I have loved so much.)

I remember seeing films by Bergman, Pagnol, Fellini, de Sica and Rossellini during the 1950s at the Savoy. In those days Melbourne had three cinemas specialising in foreign films: the Australia, the Savoy and the Lyceum. Today Melbourne has none. The last one, the Lumiere, died of public neglect several years ago. All the Italians’ work had a certain sun-drenched, raw, unsentimental hardness and pathos about them, and always a certain integrity.

Then there was the New Theatre. In 1952 or 1953 it screened all the Russian revolutionary classics, especially the works of Eisenstein and Pudovkin. I was awed by the dramatic, powerful distinctiveness of Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin and its numerous memorable scenes; by the power and economy of the silent film, with the challenge of knowing where to cut and what to join. I remember Eisenstein’s first sound film, Alexander Nevsky, with the music of Prokofiev, the Teutonic Knights after the sacking of the city of Pskov. Has brass ever so brilliantly, horribly evoked human evil? The impact of all these films was profound, and complemented by a stimulating book of essays by Eisenstein. I became engrossed in speculating on the unique attributes of film, and on what exactly determines a great one.

The Melbourne Film Festival started in 1951, one of the world’s earliest. The first two years were weekend affairs in hillside Olinda. I started attending in 1953. The world seemed at our feet. Luis Buñuel and Andrzej Wajda were two of the many new names to which we were exposed. What a thrilling collection. Possibly the biggest ‘shock of the new’ was to experience Japanese film for the first time. Kurosawa just bowled me over. He made audiences see, as if for the first time, raw nature at work: wind, rain, heat, sweat. Film was suddenly visceral.

What a fascinating contrast between the physicality of Kurosura and the quiet yet stormy inner life of Bengali filmmaker and writer Satyajit Ray. Ray’s eventual recognition was said to have been born in Melbourne in those years.

Jump ahead to the University of California, Berkeley in 1968. While I was there a retrospective was held of about fifteen films by the splendid, scandalous Jean-Luc Godard. Only one had not already been screened in Melbourne.

To borrow an expression favoured by certain national leaders at the moment: Melbourne in the fifties was ‘punching above its weight’. It was an exciting decade of endless discovery and pleasure. It was a wonderful time to be. Life, in its many possible representations, just opened up. It could have been otherwise.

Gaps

2012-04-04T00:00:00Z

We first see our son sitting on the grass, reading near the Hyde Park fountain, the one with Apollo on top, Diana and Theseus and Aristaeus in the pool below. He arrived before us, so we approach him from a distance through the cathedral of fig trees.

His mother cooees and he stands up for a hug, her first, then me. He has changed; seems taller, leaner, a bit harder. Those same blue eyes are now accentuated by the tanning of his face after two years on the road in South America. His head is shaved on the sides and he has stringy hair long on top, a sort of dreadlocked mohawk. He looks like a character from Avatar, or an escaped minor god from the fountain.

He hadn’t told us he was back in the country. He’d wanted to surprise us, but we found out through a panicky friend when he’d asked to stay at her place in Sydney, then disappeared. We go looking for food and coffee. He tells us he’s a vegetarian now, and interested in anarchism. He’s been reading Malatesta, a book given to him by some travellers he met in Colombia.

He is wearing brown corduroy pants and a grey T-shirt showing lighthouses of America, bought for a dollar each in Bogotá. His feet are shod with second-hand Colombian army boots, the leather worn down to the steel caps on the toes. ‘Is that from kicking lefties’ heads in jail,’ I say.

‘Don’t joke.’

We walk to Martin Place, find some vegetarian food, then take it back to the café on the edge of the park to talk and eat. ‘I haven’t seen a television or read a newspaper for two years, so I’ve got a few gaps. Fill me in on what’s been going on here.’ What to say? Most of it (the Australian politics in particular) seems like utter trivia. ‘So what happened to Rudd?’

‘He got a rough deal.’

It sounds so hackneyed when I try to summarise it. The global financial crisis, sub-prime mortgages, spending our way out of it. ‘New school buildings—they’re everywhere. Your old primary school has a new hall, so does Rosary, and the Murdoch press ran a huge campaign against him for wasteful spending. Then there was the messed-up home insulation scheme, and propaganda from the big mining companies so they didn’t have to pay more tax, and his own party didn’t like his style any more …’

‘And the woman, what’s she like?’

‘Okay. Much the same, really.’

The coffee is inky-black and good. ‘I haven’t had coffee like this in a long time.’ We wash down the rice balls and nori rolls as ibises scout the park.

‘And Obama turned out to be no good?’

‘That’s not right. He was left so many problems. They’re broke. Been spending more than they make for years, and the cost of the Iraq war—a trillion. And he’s trying to run a country where people think they’re having their freedom taken away from them by introducing a public health scheme.’

I look into his familiar blue eyes (forgotten until today) and he says, ‘Did you know the Americans have robot planes they control from game screens? They sit in lounge chairs in these dens and they have a joystick and a screen and they kill real people. And these dens are behind game parlours where kids can come and play and they pick the best ones with the highest scores and give them a job in the killing room.’

‘I haven’t heard that about the game parlours, but I have seen pictures of the dens where they control the drones. Disgusting. Leather chairs with built-in drink holders.’

He goes on to tell us about the Realpolitik of Venezuela and Colombia—the violence and machismo, the double-dealing, the military on the streets, the good and bad of socialism. His love for the people he met and his way of life there, surviving on a minimum of money, busking, making things to sell so he could eat, and how the unregulated system works because everyone needs to do it. He made chocolates by hand to sell on the streets of Bogotá, but he doesn’t like his chances of doing it here. Who would buy one in this park from an unlicensed seller with a cardboard tray?

We missed his nineteenth and twentieth birthdays, though we used Skype a few times—beautiful in its way, but paradoxically distancing, with his moon-shot voice and his image breaking into a pixelated jumble, or frozen to an old photograph eaten by rain and termites.

We walk through the Domain and the Botanic Gardens, past the trees hung with bats. An old dragon tree stands out against the sky like a Dr Seuss cartoon. The bats smell musty and so does he, not choosing to wash every day. Down at the quay he says, ‘Let’s get out of all these tourists,’ so we catch the train to Newtown where he’s staying for a few nights in a student house.

He’s been back in the country for longer than we knew, living near Newcastle. At Corelli’s Café he tells us how he borrowed a bike and went camping on a bush trail for two days, riding under the powerlines on the access tracks into the forest. On the second day, he met another cyclist coming the opposite way. It turned out he was from Spain and our son (now fluent in Spanish) surprised the traveller by asking him in his own tongue what he thought of Australia. ‘State control like America with British punctuality.’ Our son’s heart sank. ‘That’s how I find it too, coming back.’

And what do I think about it? Heavily regulated, impatient, food-obsessed. A brashness from American media layered on top of English reserve and the old Aboriginal wound, tempered with new Asian and Middle Eastern influences still working themselves out. Citified children wrapped in cotton-wool, living in more and more virtual worlds; silently segregated communities; gated apartment blocks. Somewhere, the traditional self-deprecating humour and outgoing lack of respect like an echo underneath a crumbling, boarded-up pub, bought by developers and soon to be bulldozed.

But I don’t say any of this. Just ‘It’s true. It’s getting more rule-bound here every day. And people get angry really fast if things don’t go to plan—but when they do go really wrong, I still think Australians are ready to help each other.’

‘Yeah? I was on the beach at Newcastle and I accidently asked something in Spanish because I’d forgotten the English, and these guys told me to go back where I came from. It was pretty funny, really.’

He’s hungry again so we order more food—chilli beans and roast vegetable salad. I tell him, ‘I’m thinking of going vego too.’

‘Do it!’

I used to run a line with myself that it was acceptable to eat a small amount of meat because it was ‘natural’ for creatures to eat each other, even though we are all sentient beings. And yes, although we are the type of sentient creature that has other choices, if we were aware, and honoured the creature we ate, it was okay. But all that depended on someone, somewhere else, doing the killing. Lately the thought of the process has haunted me more and more at table, the industrial lives of so many animals—and the increasing discovery of other species’ sophistications that we had assumed to be ours alone: tool use, language, deep family bonds …

‘Just do it!’ he says.

‘I’ll give it a try.’

Up King Street we look through retro shops—chairs, record players, dining tables, lounges and curtains that were simply the furnishings and fabrics of our (now collectable) childhoods. How quickly your own life becomes nostalgia if you let it. We walk back to Waterloo, where we are staying in the apartment of the friend who tipped us off. Just talking quietly, getting to know each other again. The night after we discovered he was back, his mother lost her voice with a throat infection. He jaywalks the intersections while she harries him in a hoarse whisper. He tells her not to be afraid, that bad things happen because fear attracts them. They argue quietly under the trees, mother and son, and I say ‘Yes, but you need some wisdom …’

Our friend buzzes us into the white tiled foyer and we go up six floors to her one-bedroom flat. We are sleeping on a fold-down couch in the lounge so we all go out on the small balcony to talk. We look over the lawns in the quadrangle to the thousand other flats. Only three balconies have plants, the others are bare except for barbecues, satellite dishes, some desultory Christmas lights. A lone currawong tries out its call from the top of a cooling tower.

Our son raises one leg of his corduroy shorts and shows us a blue, finely inked tattoo of a wire bicycle above his knee. Next to his left ankle is a triangle of solid indigo. ‘My rough play button,’ he says. Apart from these, there are no new tattoos or scars.

Sipping tea and eating carrot cake, he fills in a few more gaps.

‘One night I was on the street late in Bogotá and these four guys came towards me. I could tell it was trouble, so I crossed to the other side of the road, but another two guys jumped out from a corner and suddenly I had two knives against my neck. I told them I only had one mil—that’s about fifty cents. They searched me and that’s all they found. I told them I wasn’t worth robbing. Why not rob the rich instead? But they took it anyway and walked off.

‘Then some cops came past on motorbikes. It was straight after it happened, so I pointed out the guys and they chased them down and aimed guns at them. They made them strip and lie down in the street. I wanted revenge so I said they stole fifty mil, but the cops searched them and all they had was my lousy one mil. So I only got my fifty cents back. Six guys and only one mil between them!’

His mother and our friend are making a celebratory meal for him and they send us off to buy some wine. We walk up Bourke Street and find a wine shop but decide to keep walking. We take the footbridge over South Dowling Street and the Eastern Distributor, then make our way up through the gum trees at the back of the Moore Park golf course to a high hill where we sit looking at the city skyline. Behind us, men stand in an open-fronted building, driving little white balls into an artificial green paddock. ‘Strange species, aren’t we?’ I say.

‘So, how are you?’ he asks.

‘I’m okay. I like my work, but I’m slowly getting to the point where I want to do something different with my life. I want to maybe go and do something useful somewhere else in the world—like volunteer to teach in Cambodia, or even here—Aboriginal literacy—there’s lots of things I could do. I’m relatively happy, but I feel like I need to connect more directly to people.’ We talk about plans and ideals and commitments and what’s stopping me, and I give him some more details about things he’s missed: his sister’s break-up with her boyfriend, the last days of our family dog, the death of my father.

A man with a blue singlet, and tattoos on his huge deltoid muscles, runs up the steep hill we are sitting on, then walks back slowly to the oval below. He repeats the procedure a dozen times. ‘He looks like a bouncer—I wouldn’t want him chasing me.’

‘You’d be the last person I know who’d get into a fight, Dad.’

‘I don’t know. Sometimes bad stuff just happens.’

‘I think nothing happens by chance. I learnt that on the farm in San Augustín. The community leader there told me that bad things happen because you need to learn a lesson from them. It’s about energy. If you’re full of positive energy and you share that with everyone then nothing bad will come to you. I really believe that.’

‘I don’t know. It sounds like it presupposes that the universe has some kind of force or deity deciding if you need to learn a lesson or not, or if your energy is positive enough. I think it’s more random than that. If there is some kind of controlling justice in the universe, then why did a good, kind man like your pop have such a tortured death?’

‘Was it bad?’

‘Yes. I’m not going to lie to you. He had twenty days in hell. He was demented. He tore out the drips. Didn’t recognise anyone. Didn’t drink or eat. He’d signed papers that he couldn’t be force-fed or artificially kept alive. Maybe somewhere deep down he knew if he kept tearing out the drips he could die. It was his only way out of the mental pain.’

As we’ve been talking the sun has slowly gone down behind the city. In the twilight we walk back through the trees towards Bourke Street, passing people exercising their dogs, jogging, shopping, at least half of them talking on mobile phones at the same time. I tell him, ‘There’s a lot more conversation on the street now than when I was a boy, but most of it is one-ended.’ We listen as we carry two bottles of Grenache back to the flat:

‘… it’s in the red bag near the washing machine …’

‘… I’ve had enough of your lies …’

‘… yeah, five ninety-nine each …’

‘… no, I said the city end …’

‘… so I told her if you don’t do something about it now, you never will …’

‘… the fat ones or the skinny ones …’

‘… and they were doing it in the lounge when I came in …’

Back at the apartment I turn on the television, which has surprisingly snowy reception for such a new building. Maybe something is wrong with the rooftop aerial or maybe it’s the thousands of metal railings creating a Faraday cage. ‘Do we have to?’ he says. ‘I haven’t watched TV for two years. It’s not good for you.’

‘I just want to watch the news.’

Through the electronic snow the prime minister announces that the search for more bodies from the Christmas Island boat disaster has been called off. Under the fuzzy red dye she says, ‘There is no expectation of finding any survivors or, tragically, dead bodies.’

Perhaps they will wash up in ones and twos between the rocks of the island in the next days and weeks. Perhaps they have literally been swallowed by the sea and its creatures. There will be families in Iraq who will never know, who will have a gap in their hearts that simply grows wider with the years, as wide as the Indian Ocean. I turn the television off.

His sister arrives, having come up from Adelaide for Christmas like us. After dinner they head off together into the night, back towards his place. ‘Don’t walk through Redfern!’ our friend calls after them, but they just turn their heads and laugh.

Four Sonnets

2012-03-29T00:00:00Z

Dear Siobhan, hello. Is it 5.15 am where you are?
I don’t weep since You. ‘For contrast & shock,’
you say, ‘Zaha Hadid—her winning designs never
built—her first building in Baghdad.’ Today

the new Enmore pool—the four of us, then the Carlisle
on Albermarle with Tory—she calls our boy ‘The Malley’
which he almightily is. If I could play an instrument
to amuse you: the theremin. This poem (like others)

is to amuse you. Ships pitched our antecedents into
thin air & colonial goldfields & we cheer their resolve;
it results in us. You say ‘the Perth developments are better
with mature trees’, and they are, almightily they are.

Still able & socially active, let’s live on the top floor, &
every day lap the Enmore. I ratchet through the week.

(I’d like to pick up where I left off (left you,
that is (tracking in the snow (lets you know
you can’t track everywhere, not even in light
falls (& where’d you get to just then with yr

elemental final sentence (‘stone & water’
(remember the 1st of the 2nd 04—it’s the divisibility
of the date (it’s a strange dream of alienation
in which: dad’s yellow ute (so keep yr letters

to young poets to make paper cranes (sure
we’re easy oars, sure I saw Esau kiss Kate¹
down in the orchestra pit (down in the downy
pit (down to her painted toes (oh noes (& sure

yr ease awes² (& yr desire, aged & lowing (till you
shuck out of the car; clods of field, clots of blood (

Noisy mynors catch & chase over the street. Yr ex
throws out yr monogrammed effects (robe, slippers,
travel case, toiletry bag), auctions the rest on eBay
& about now yr a GFC bankrupt erased on a stoop,

so pause & make of yr carcass a new partner,
an adjustment, a honed invention out of cadence,
out of tone, right out of mid-century abstract
expressionism make a nice suit, a shell. Before you

statues knit forecourts to antiquity, to imports & a cooling,
vaporous sky—gigalitres of high-volume air wash
through yr shopping experience & yr borne along
mezzanines which don’t fit anymore, not when you order

online & option the consequences. Once I was in love
(a longing? a longueur? dunno) & I lowered us both.

News is my landscape—oh great, it’s Australian
gothic. Apothecaries kiss their sweethearts
in the stockroom on breaks & bump & jumble
Rectogesic (fr treatment of anal fissures, apply

twice daily) & Vicks Vaporub. No romantic melancholy
left? Never mind—you need it less than you
think, FFS. For you I’ll be appearing in band mode—
the best-dressed, best-in-show, strong opening,

chandelier-swinging crooner & you, darling bud, up
on stage with yr bluegrass tunes & tight banjo-rich
hick panegyrics (oh the yips, licks & lyrics)
are so cool in an acceptably indecent & benign

Gen Y way—I heart yr 80s pants suit & yr Bali Writers
Retreat keepsake flashcards: See. Feel. Touch. Write.

While I’m Away

2012-03-28T00:00:00Z

Right before Christmas I threw my dog, my guitar, and a change of clothes into the back of my car and headed off on a solo road trip. Having made a solemn promise to myself to switch off my phone and avoid all contact with my real life during my ten days away, I thought it would probably be a good idea to set up an out-of-office auto reply for my email, because that is the kind of professional woman I am. I patiently explained to anyone who had bothered to get in touch with me that I had taken myself off on a vision quest, and I would be unable to attend to their correspondence until I had returned from this important journey—preferably after having discovered my spirit animal.

When I returned from my Luddatical—that’s a word I just made up to describe a sabbatical where you embrace being a Luddite—my inbox was positively heaving with electronic missives. Some of them were even from real humans with real things to discuss with me, not just generic press releases and Google Alerts set for the words ‘Girls Aloud 2012 Tour Australia’. (I don’t have to explain myself to you.) Many of these real humans appear to have enjoyed my out-of-office reply, but for some reason they seemed to think it was a joke. I mean, really. Do I seem like the kind of woman who would make up a quasi-amusing tale about vision quests and spirit animals in order to entertain anyone who bothered to email me from mid December onwards? I only wish I had added even more truthful revelations regarding my trip away. Examples might have included:

I am unable to attend to your email because I took a wrong turn while exploring the countryside and somehow ended up travelling down a track intended solely for use by four-wheel-drives. As we speak, I am trying to wedge assorted sticks and leaves under my back wheels to stop them from spinning helplessly every time I try to reverse my vehicle. If this doesn’t work, and you still need to get in touch with me, please direct all future correspondence to Jess McGuire, Middle of Fucking Nowhere, Mosquitoville Vic.

It’s going to take me a while to reply to your undoubtedly important correspondence because I am currently stark naked and lying on a beach soaking up the sunshine while enjoying a novel I began eighteen months ago but didn’t have time to finish. No, it’s not one of the four legal nude beaches in Victoria. Do you really think I’d take myself on a holiday to Werribee? It is a magical and totally deserted beach I discovered in south-east Gippsland. Only me and a couple of local fisherman know about it. Wait, hang on a minute, that doesn’t sound nearly as private as I’d like. Oh God, where did I put my shirt? Where did I put my pants? How long has that guy been standing there?

Hey there! I’m away at the moment ‘getting my rural on’, so I won’t be replying to you until after the festive season. That’s if I ever come back. There’s a general store near where I am camping and the owners are adorable. I am kinda hoping that if I hang around long enough, they’ll adopt me. Although I have only known them a short time, I can already tell that they have hearts of gold. You know what else they have? A poster of Madeleine McCann, the British girl who went missing back in 2007 while holidaying in Portugal with her family, stuck on the wall. It says ‘Have you seen her?’ and features a computer-generated image of how police believe Madeleine might look now. Seeing this poster made me feel sad and slightly confused. Why do my potential adoptive parents believe Madeleine McCann might be in regional Victoria? I really don’t know.

Sorry I’m not available to banter with you on email at the moment. After realising that I hadn’t had a proper shower in nearly a week, I made a spur-of-the-moment decision to drive to Sydney where I plan to break into my absent mother’s house and use her bathroom. I’ll probably stay for a few days as the idea of hitting the Hume isn’t nearly as appealing as wearing pyjamas all day and raiding Mum’s pantry. Later, when people ask about my trip, I’ll deliberately leave out the part where I spent three days on the couch at my childhood home eating Tim Tams and watching Friends, Law & Order and other cable television staples, and instead pretend I spent my whole holiday reading books while lying naked on a beach in south-east Gippsland. — FYI: My spirit animal turned out to be a white-bellied sea eagle.

Reading Doris Lessing and Meeting Maudie Fowler: Notes on Writing and Doing Good

2012-03-26T00:00:00Z

Like many who will be reading this, I write. I always have, even before I knew how. When I was four my mother would find me filling notebooks with infinite cursive ‘e’s, line after biro line of them, pages of stories that could never be read. ‘That’s very good practice,’ she would praise me, but my face would burn with the embarrassment of not yet knowing how to properly do this thing that seemed to me the key to all understanding.

Writing helps me make sense of the world. Though if I am really honest (and when I am writing, it is the only way to be), writing helps me to make sense of my world, rather than the world. My writing explores the emotions and relationships that make up my middle-class inner-urban life, but if I want to make sense of the bigger world, the one of wars and famine, of Wikileaks and Google, of history and science, then my own writing is of little use. It is then that I read.

Over the last few years I have been writing a novel. It started off as a character study, a play with words and form. It expanded into a metaphorical political treatise, swooping into recent history and the alluring landscape of obsession. And then it politely retreated into one room, interested only in the two characters who had held their ground throughout.

Even when completed, ‘novel’ still sounds too grand a word for my project. A word to be whispered apologetically to those who ask why I do not blog or write short stories. After all, I am a writer, aren’t I? ‘No time,’ I say. ‘I’m working on my, umm … my novel.’

When I sit down at my computer I feel an anticipatory joy at the prospect of writing. While in the process, typing out the words, I almost writhe with pleasure—positioning my chosen words together, learning their rhythms and sway, chiding them when they sidle astray. I feel like me at my desk: no apologies, no caveats. But when I step away from my computer I feel a fraud.

Writing is a natural state for me. It seems I have always done it and, in some form, I always will. But it is never anguished nor transcendent. It leaves me wanting; it is an inadequate way of addressing the world. For all of this lack, I feel guilt. When I finished my novel I despaired. Because in the time it had taken, I had changed. I was not sure if I wanted to write any more.

Is writing (not all writing, but my writing) simply an indulgence? It is a way of stroking my own ego. When I do not write, I get edgy. I am short with people, combative. I fret in company. I pine for time to myself so I can turn inwards and examine my thoughts. My writing is all about me. I find myself interrogating my reasons for writing, rather than the writing itself. Do I write to share what I have to say or because I want to know what others think about what I have to say? If I write to understand this world, why don’t I do more with my understanding?

I studied creative writing, among other things, at university before commencing a career of sorts, more accurately a succession of jobs, and then becoming a subeditor for architecture and design magazines. Magazine publishing is an industry of aspirational performance. The glossy pages show how wonderful life can be, especially when you have in your possession an expanse of recycled timber floorboards set off by a pair of genuine Eames chairs. The further I got sucked into this world of aesthetics, the more conflicted I felt about writing as a pursuit. Was it not just allowing me to do the same thing, to create an identity for myself that said, ‘I’m not one among the indistinguishable masses. I’m an artist, I reinterpret the world’? But to what end?

With writing giving me such confusion, I turned to reading. If it was not quite an addiction, it was my everything. I have heard of writers who do not read. I do not understand this. It seems to me the height of rudeness, and also of disservice to self. I read old books to find out what writers have done before and new ones to find what they are doing now. I carry an old address book with me, its tabbed pages scribbled with author names and book titles I can hunt out at the bookstore or library. Yet, as I read, I grieve for my own writing. A hasty and greedy reader, I feel writing slip further away. Why write another book when Virginia Woolf has written them all already? I pick up Helen Garner, lie down with Ali Smith. Each book is a pointer to my own futility as a writer.

The rain is coming down, it would be almost fair to say, in sheets. I can barely advance, I stand above the seat and press on the pedals, but it is as though I am being swaddled in a wet towel. I steer my bicycle onto the verge, and wait out the downpour beneath low-hanging trees.

Perched on the bicycle frame, as the forest steams about me, I scribble recollections in my notebook. The smell of birch branches in a banya, the floral tastes of wheat beer and salty herring devoured by the Baltic. I have spent the morning at the perfect circle of the Kaali meteor crater, marvelling at its symmetry, and I am on my way to a copse of wooden windmills, far on the other side of Estonia’s Saaremaa island. The sun shone all morning as I cycled on flat roads past fields of poppies, iPod turned up loud, Mazzy Star drifting in my ears. And then the rain, bringing pause.

I have been travelling through Russia and Estonia for weeks, and I have months ahead of bus rides, backpacker hostels and snatches of unknown language as I make my way down towards Bosnia. I carry a camera loaded with high-speed black-and-white film, its results satisfyingly grainy, but mainly I try to forgo the ease of the visual medium and instead put pen to paper. I do not know it yet but this journal will be filled with stories of sweet-talking Frenchmen setting out to Siberia, a band of New York brothers trying to get themselves and their banjos to Albania, and gun-wielding taxi drivers by the Sava river. The rain drips through the canopy and blots my page. It makes the ink run until the words are no longer themselves.

During my reading odyssey I came across the work of Doris Lessing. The pleasure! That she has written so much and that it is so consistently very good. It was like some kind of gift from the literary universe that I should find her when I was in need. For when I read The Golden Notebook (1962), I wept.

I came late to Lessing. She had never been recommended to me; I had never heard anyone say her name, much less endorse her. She was not on any syllabus, she was not fashionable. As I would discover, many people consider her something of a relic, caught in a sepia time warp, tainted by communism and unwanted feminist clout. A grand dame of English literature, she is seen by some as having lost her way in science fiction, quietly reappearing to claim the Nobel Prize.

Oddly, nobody I have spoken to has told me what they feel when they read Lessing. As though her words are only cerebral, that they do not entice a shortening of breath, a biting of the lip. For this I am flummoxed. I cannot think of a more electric writer, one whose words speak of things always precisely of the moment. As the character Anna Wulf in The Golden Notebook, Lessing caught the tension of living rather than writing: ‘It was all wrong, ugly, unhappy and coloured with cynicism, but nothing was tragic, there were no moments that could change anything or anybody. From time to time the emotional lightning flashed and showed a landscape of private misery, and then—we went on dancing.’ A writer so giving, Lessing recognises that the moment is never over for the reader, or the writer.

So there I was, sitting in a park alongside a river in Germany, and I had planned to read for only twenty minutes or so. It was cold; I had somewhere to be. I read The Golden Notebook for more than two hours, my feet jiggling up and down so as not to go numb, my hands taking turns to hold the pages while the other was tucked beneath my thigh for warmth. I cried in the kind of desolate manner that brings no relief.

In her precise and honest way, Lessing has taught me that to write is to be human, that writing is a way of thinking. She tackles that familiar feeling of inadequacy—that the artist writes out of an ‘incapacity to live’. She reminds me that writing is a way to make sense of the world and to order my thoughts. The great game of structure and narrative and momentum and pause is a way of engaging in a present I sometimes feel I do not touch. She shows me how to interrogate the relationships between characters and selves, and explains that this exploration is more than the sum of its parts.

At the risk of quoting Lessing at such length you will put down this essay and go seek out some of her own, I direct you to her 1971 preface for The Golden Notebook:

At last I understand that the way over, or through this dilemma, the unease at writing about ‘petty personal problems’ was to recognize that nothing is personal, in the sense that it is uniquely one’s own. Writing about oneself, one is writing about others, since your problems, pains, pleasures, emotions—and your extraordinary and remarkable ideas—can’t be yours alone. The way to deal with this problem of ‘subjectivity’, that shocking business of being preoccupied with the tiny individual who is at the same time caught up in such an explosion of terrible and marvellous possibilities, is to see him as a microcosm and in this way to break through the personal, the subjective, making the personal general, as indeed life always does, transforming a private experience—or so you think of it when still a child, ‘I am falling in love’, ‘I am feeling this or that emotion, or thinking that or the other thought’—into something much larger: growing up is after all only the understanding that one’s unique and incredible experience is what everyone shares.

For some time this comforted me. Lessing confirmed that writing, however personal it seems, is an important way of engaging in the world, and allowing others, through reading, to do so as well. But each time I sat down to write, something still niggled at me. Surely there was something else I should be doing?

In a relentless 2010 essay reviewing Mark McGurl’s The Programme Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, Elif Batuman attacked university creative writing programs and captured my own growing discomfort: ‘Pretending that literary production is a non-elite activity is both pointless and disingenuous.’ Ouch. She continued: ‘Despite the recent trend in viewing fiction as a form of empathy training, I’m pretty sure that writing short stories isn’t the most efficient way to combat injustice or oppression.’¹ I agree.

Her voice sails up from the darkness, reedy yet forced.

‘Paul? Paul?’

The audience shifts uncomfortably. It is nearing the end of a long play, one intended to be more dramatically touching than it is. We want to believe that we are seeing great theatre but the artifice has never fully departed; I can taste the memory of Maltesers caught in my molars, and my bad knee has stiffened to an ache.

‘Paul? Wake up! Somebody help! He’s not moving.’

Her voice takes on the tremor of fear, people begin to whisper, an usher gets to her feet in the aisle. On stage the penultimate scene comes to an end. The entire theatre is plunged into night and only then does somebody else’s voice join the lone woman’s.

‘Put the lights up!’

And as the next scene begins, another audience member calls for the sole actor on stage to stop. He pauses, lifts his hand to shade his eyes from the glare, gathers his props and scurries away. The house lights are up and I can see the woman’s arms wrapped around her husband. She is trying to rouse him; he is slumped deep in his chair.

‘Paul! Paul!’ It is no longer a question. ‘Is there a doctor, a nurse in the house?’

As one the audience stands. It has become theatre in the round and nobody wants to be taking part. The actors watch from the wings, hands clasped to chests as though in this moment all they can do is perform the pitiful, useless anxiety that we all feel. A doctor steeplechases over the seats and stumbles between the rows to reach the stricken man. Two women are attempting to lay him on the floor but the folding seats are in the way, and the man’s wife continues to call his name.

‘Paul?’

Wordlessly, my friend and I take up our jackets and bags and turn our backs on the scene. We sidestep along the row, not uttering the usual apologies and excuses as we push past the other patrons. As we reach the exit an usher’s voice releases the audience from this unwelcome spell.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, please leave the auditorium. Tonight’s performance will not continue.’

With just this small moment of reality, the action onstage has become farce. We feel a collective naivety at having been so drawn in, at having felt any emotion for the characters’ plights. What is the point of art when it can be destroyed so equivocally by reality? We are ashamed at having been entertained as a man silently died in our midst. And trying to make sense of it, I find myself wanting to write it down.

Please do not misunderstand me. I believe in the inherent value in writing and in art. The production of art hints at the health of the society it reflects and critiques. Lessing’s Anna Wulf writes of the novel as a function of the fragmented society and the fragmented consciousness: ‘It is a blind grasping for their own wholeness, and the novel-report is means toward it.’ But is writing the best that I can do?

Somewhere in my Lessing binge, I read the two novels she wrote under a pseudonym: The Diary of a Good Neighbour (1983) and If the Old Could … (1984). They had been published and reviewed under the name of Jane Somers as a snub to a publishing industry Lessing perceived to be closed to new writers. It was not this literary intrigue that held me, however, but the narrative of the books. In The Diary of a Good Neighbour Jane Somers, an editor on a women’s fashion magazine, meets the elderly Maudie Fowler in a pharmacy. She accompanies her home to find that Mrs Fowler lives in an alarming state of squalor, the result of poverty, age and the simple consequence of being forgotten by society: ‘Before a few weeks ago, I did not see old people at all. My eyes were pulled towards, and I saw, the young, the attractive, the well-dressed and handsome. And now it is as if a transparency has been drawn across that former picture and there, all at once, are the old, the infirm.’

And so it was that the power of fiction guided me into action. In the week I learned that my novel was going to be published, I started studying social work, with the aim of working with older people in need. At first I spoke of it in the same apologetic way I had muttered the word ‘novel’. People were curious about my change of ‘career’, and wanting to do good rarely seemed a convincing enough reason for leaving a promising job that paid the bills and allowed me the time to pursue my own writing. Of course, noticing what others think probably says more about me than either social work or writing.

‘It’s so lovely that you could visit me, dear. It’s always nice to have a chat, isn’t it?’

‘It is, Miss Donovan.’ I find myself modulating my voice to her whispered levels. ‘How are you feeling this morning?’

‘Quite well.’ She looks at me quizzically and I know that she has forgotten my name, as she has every morning. ‘I had a lovely sleep and a cup of tea. I even managed three biscuits, but they keep telling me to eat up.’ She gives me a smile, indicating a biscuit still sitting on the bedside table. ‘Did you want the last one?’

‘No, thank you. You can save it for later.’ I take a seat. ‘My name is Melanie, I’m the social work student. I’ve just come to say hello. You have lost a lot of weight, haven’t you? Have the doctors figured out why?’

She is an elegant lady in her early nineties, who sits tall in her chair. I am still finding my way in the hospital setting, completing my first social work student placement in a geriatric rehabilitation ward. I had made the mistake of calling this patient ‘Mrs’ Donovan when we first met, wrongly assuming she was widowed. But she had very firmly told me that she was a spinster, never married, and to please call her ‘Miss’, and, quite firmly, none of that buzzing ‘Ms’ nonsense.

‘Oh, they do lots of tests, but I don’t know what they’re looking for.’ She shakes her head. ‘I will save that biscuit. Maybe I could save a few and have a little party later.’ She reaches over to the biscuit, takes it carefully in hand and wraps it in a tissue. ‘I’m rather good at saving things. I used to keep my sandwiches from the Meals on Wheels to have at night while watching the Tour.’

‘The Tour de France?’ I ask. A mad keen cyclist myself, I know well the late nights in front of the television, lulled by the race’s peacefully unremitting form of competition.

‘Oh yes, dear. I watched it every night. The way those men cycle, their muscular thighs pumping away. It’s quite mesmerising, isn’t it? That was the problem, I would get so lost in watching, all that marvellous footage they show from the helicopters of the countryside … just beautiful. And I would fall asleep on the couch, forgetting to eat my sandwiches.’ She winked at me. ‘Probably why I lost all that weight. Really, I don’t think there’s much wrong with me.’

I laugh along with her and we spend half an hour talking about cycling and travelling, the places I will go and the places she has been. And I do not write anything until my placement finishes many months later.

When asked what kind of writer she was going to be, Zadie Smith said:

I don’t know. I don’t have the physical and mental will to be a great one, which is a shame. But you have to make a choice. I like life. I want to be in love, and maybe have children, and exist in that proper way. I used to think that there wasn’t a life I could have that would be worth as much as the books. Now I don’t. And I think you really have to believe that your life can’t be as [valuable] as the books to be the kind of writer whose books are immortal. And I don’t feel that way anymore. ²

When I ask myself what kind of person I am going to be, I realise that ‘a writer’ is only part of it. If one of the ways we live our lives is to seek happiness, we have to understand what happiness means. To me, the happy life is an amalgamation of the creative life and the moral life. Becoming a social worker is a way I find that I can help others to help themselves. In many ways it is a decision born of self-interest—I was unhappy in the career I had found myself in. But it is also one born of compassion and a feeling of obligation towards those who do not have the opportunities I have had—circumstances that make it easy for me to get through each day, and still have time and energy to indulge my desire to read and to write.

Oddly, I have found that people find it much easier to understand why I would want to write novels than why I would want to help others. At odds with a world where most things are judged by their monetary worth, writing still retains a somewhat noble status. True, there is a mistaken view that it is possible to make a living on novels alone (sadly impossible for all but a happy few), but even those who understand the precarious financial state writers often find themselves in appreciate, and applaud, the endeavour.

Necessary rather than noble, the professions engaged in helping or caring do not attract the same feelings of goodwill. When I am introduced to friends of friends and we rattle through the social small talk, one of the early questions is, inevitably, ‘What do you do?’ ‘I’m a student,’ I reply. ‘I’m retraining as a social worker.’ Most people look confused or ask why I am pursuing further study for such a low-paid occupation, and one with a reputation for being so ‘draining’. And then my mutual friend will often say, ‘But tell them what you really do,’ shaking their head as though we are engaged in some kind of party trick. ‘She’s actually a writer.’

This disregard is reflected (no, encouraged and reiterated) in policy and societal structures. The Australian Services Union recently took an equal pay case to Fair Work Australia, arguing that workers in the social and community sectors are not paid at a level that reflects their true worth. In arguing this case, the ASU and its supporters are fighting for carers, community workers and, yes, social workers to be acknowledged in the most recognisable language of our times: money. In May 2011 a preliminary ruling acknowledged that this pay disparity is real (no surprises there), and in November the federal government announced it would contribute $2 billion to help cover a pay rise for workers in the community sector.

Even in writing all of this, however, I realise that my angst is not with others—it is with myself. As Jane Somers pondered how to fit Maudie Fowler into her life, she asked, with true curiosity, ‘How do we value ourselves? By what? Work? … We are to judge people by their beautiful thoughts?’ And so it is that I will judge myself: not only by my thoughts and their written form, beautiful or otherwise, but by my actions as well.

Old Copmanhurst

2012-03-22T00:00:00Z

Much exclamation occurs when people realise Foal’s Bread is my first novel in sixteen years. Sixteen years ago I was about to turn thirty-one. From this distance that seems inconceivably young and I was inconceivably bewildered that only horses understood that something horrible had begun to happen in my legs and feet.

I can clearly remember how for that birthday I rode my brown mare Bellini down as usual to my father’s letterbox on Old Copmanhurst Road. It was July, so the air was full of tiny winter moths, their wings such an exquisite shade of blue I couldn’t resist picking up any dead moth I saw to later enclose with letters. I liked to imagine that I was transferring the sheen of flight to words. A flock of babblers were making a great racket getting white ants out of an ironbark fallen over in the last storm but after a big shy, Bellini cantered on.

Although the advance author copies of The Grass Sister had arrived early, far from any feeling of luck that they’d landed in the letterbox on my birthday, only dismay was sweeping through me. Whereas a few weeks before I could’ve vaulted back onto my horse with my backpack full of mail, on that day it had become a difficult scramble.

Nothing expresses the power possible between a horse and rider more beautifully for me than this line from John Masefield’s ‘The Ballad of Right Royal’. As steeplechase jockey Charles Cothill ‘knotted his reins and took his stand, the soul of the horse came into his hand.’ Now the multiple sclerosis that would defy diagnosis for another seven years, was slowly but surely taking away my ability to ride even the quietest pony, let alone Bellini, my loveliness Wind of Song ex-barrier rogue, rescued by my eldest sister Yvonne from the brutality of a Brisbane track for me to purchase.

I felt a growing sorrow that as the mystery progressed, less and less chance existed for those moments when my own soul could meet my mare’s through a long pair of favourite old leather reins. Gone too were the afternoons of practising bareback tricks, standing in the sun on top of Bellini’s gleaming rump.

My grief at seeing her sold wasn’t unconnected to the fact that whatever was happening in my body was inexorably also severing my connections with my own horse-loving family. It was probably around about then that I began to see the disease as being equivalent to some fierce Old Testament chapter. It was as if that Old Testament God, stallion like, had snaked out its neck or cracked an Uncle Owen whip to say, Thou shalt run no more with your beloved family, nor be of the gracious town or on the river where you’d planned to live happily ever after.

‘My mare turns back her ears / and hears the land she leaves / as grievous music’, wrote Randolph Stow for the refrain of his poem ‘Outrider’: if my sisters were like land, then I was the mare. Stow’s refrain was eventually to filter also into Noah Nancarrow, my damaged Foal’s Bread heroine, and into the piebald horse she’d called Magpie. Despite the roughness evident in both horse and woman, it’s this very roughness that made me love them all the more even as they come to their final decision.

Before I really knew what my novel was to be about, soon after Bellini had left my life, I found myself making a rough watercolour and texta sketch of a grey horse coming down over an almighty high jump, its rider slight and thin with her arms outstretched. The feeling of danger came from my realisation that the horse’s head, its nostrils, rump and tail were practically as if drawn from my sister’s pen.

With accidental exceptions I’m not much of a drawer really, but these lines were a surge of pure energy. They made me remember Yvonne’s habit when we were children of commandeering my sketchbook for Art and, to my teacher’s confusion, filling it with sketches of animals more wild and curvaceous than anything my pencil could possibly have produced. However, this horse, which later would clearly be Lainey on Landwind landing after her Wirri Show–winning high jump, caught something vital. The horse’s head was bold, with beautiful blue dapples streaming off its rump into the sky.

Yvonne’s 1995 Vogel-shortlisted novel had involved high jump horses, hadn’t it? How on earth could I be contemplating one too?

After Yvonne’s tepid enthusiasm and simmering anger at my suggestion that as if for a dare devil tandem hunt of the 1930s, we bring our novels out together, I flung myself into other writing tasks and even other genres. Yet I couldn’t stop collecting the images and ideas that I knew could belong nowhere else but in a high jump novel of my own and that it would be called Foal’s Bread.

Casually flipping through an art history hardback one summer in someone’s beach shack library, I first saw American visionary painter Albert Pinkham Ryder’s Death on a Pale Horse and felt transfixed. It too seemed connected to my novel that was at that stage little more than a title and a file full of images and feelings. I also felt a deep link to his defiant explanation of why he might take up to fifteen years working on one painting. ‘I only want to paint my own experience, in my own way,’ he wrote.

In different writing rooms of different houses over many years, I pinned the sketch of the girl jumping her dappled grey gelding. This was as much for the magnetic presence of the horse as for words I’d scrawled beneath the horse and rider landing. I loved the beauty of my rough sketch but loved the words and their meanings even more. The words are:

Saltare, Latin for leap
Saliens, a leaping forth with a dancing quality.
Saillir, meaning an outrush, in French.

My sketch reminded me of early morning rides around my graceful childhood town. In winter, on frosty mornings, my hands were so cold I could hardly hold the reins but still, with excitement and fear in my heart, I had to attempt to follow Yvonne and her horse over any fence, picnic table or road-closed sign found. We popped over graves at the cemetery, in and out of wrecked cow bails and held on tight as our horses cat-jumped the huge ditches on the left-hand side of the stock route. Driving around Grafton these days our madcap stunts are like a ghostly fast and reckless imprint, skullcaps hidden under any handy tree, over all the ugly new subdivisions eating up the pleasing old paddocks and routes we used to ride.

As I waited patiently for Yvonne to send her novel out into the world first, writers I revered were beginning to die: Geoffrey Dutton, Andrea Stretton, Thea Astley, Elizabeth Jolley, Jessica Anderson, Glenda Adams, Dorothy Porter. I began to dread the arrival of the Australian Society of Authors newsletter for the possibility of the next out-of-the-blue vale. I began to wish there could be some kind of Balm in Gilead column that would at least give some forewarning before the obituary, of disease or calamity to come. Ruth Park, Eric Rolls, Bill Roycroft? How can you be dead before I ever found the time to write you that letter expressing my highest respect for your work?

Why when I’d gone to the trouble of getting Randolph Stow’s home address from writers who knew him well enough to call him Mick, did I never post him the letter telling of being trapped in my old ambulance in a flood in the Wedding Bells state forest in northern New South Wales in 2005, with only Tourmaline for company?

A pang of sorrow hits that I’ve published Foal’s Bread too late for him to ever accept the tribute copy I intended to send. Even if he’d only looked at the cover I feel fairly sure that it would’ve brought back memories of the horses so fondly known by Rick and Rob in Merry Go Round in the Sea.

I was never a rider in the league of Yvonne, let alone any of the Nancarrows. Although I once won a champion girl rider class due to the kind old judge taking mercy on me in my old-fashioned second-hand coat, I much preferred when the moment arrived on, say, a sports day at Newton Boyd, when I could swap jodhpurs for jeans and be part of Yvonne’s team in the apple race. I was the nimble one leaping off to plunge my face into a bucket of water to pick up half an apple in my teeth, then using my sister’s foot as a stirrup, back on for the gallop we hoped would be swift enough to catch Raymond Bail already whirring for the finish line on his champion grey jumping pony High Ace.

On 1 January 2009 the realisation dawned that Yvonne might never send out her book. I could wait no longer. My wholehearted attempts to write first a play and then a wisdom cat fable had, against all expectation and effort, utterly failed. With the MS inexorably growing worse, I felt in a race with myself. In honour of Stow’s claim that fuelled by pork pie he wrote all his novels fast, I resolved to have a final draft for Foal’s Bread finished by the first day of spring. Memories of that kind of Newton Boyd country west of Grafton but before the Great Dividing Range, informed my writing days.

Even though I was thousands of miles away from the Clarence River, ghosts of horses of the past seemed to walk right into my writing room. When I’d typed the draft of each week’s chapter onto my computer I even developed the habit of throwing a cloth over it and the printer, as if they were horses to be rugged before nightfall. Then I could practically feel the warmth of a horse. I could feel that I really was clipping up the back legs straps of a rug as a cold wind sprang up off the river.

Every time I began a new chapter I’d make a fresh sketch, sometimes using actual blood from my own pointer finger from the week’s obligatory coagulation thickness test. The rudimentary figures and horses represented what I hoped the new chapter might hold. Each week I seemed less and less able to walk. I tried to ignore the terrifying spasms and stiffness and wrote on. Inevitably, through the voices of my Nancarrow family came an insight into the pain of paralysis via Roley’s lightning strike.

On Saturdays, my official day off, when I wouldn’t write anything fresh at all, .303 gauge shotguns ringing out from the rifle range behind the back paddock held the sound of all my outrage at my own inexorable decline far better than words. Leonard Cohen came quite close though. This life is designed to overthrow us, I wrote in blood as an old radio interview coincided with my day’s INR test. No-one can master it. Then my finger drew two figures stretched out with yearning.

I send the sketch to Cohen soon after narrowly escaping death on the day I went to his Leconfield concert. Although I wrote a letter teeming with gratitude and a funny account of how my ambulance had nearly electrocuted me en route to the concert, it was the sketch that held all the beauty and immensity of that night beneath the glowing stars, in a seat so close to the front that I could practically taste his sweat.

The sketch dried into a high enamel gloss. I felt that no book, let alone the just emerging Foal’s Bread, could ever match the beauty of the two floating figures. That was Australia Day 2009 and for Foal’s Bread I had written two chapters and the prologue.

What I sense of urban readers with a penchant for regional and historical fiction is that there’s a tender and urgent longing for life lived at a quieter tempo. Perhaps like me they love leather not velcro, old-fashioned flowers with fragrance rather than scentless blooms from a twenty-first-century florist, gingernut biscuits that might take out the corner of a filling they’ve been baked so hard as opposed to anything purchased in exhaustion from an American Cookie Man franchise as you flee your local shopping mall.

Is it only someone who has ridden a horse who has to run to the window at the sound of a shod horse’s hooves crossing a road? Or who feels some inexplicable joy at the fragrance of a horse’s coat?

I’d say it was in about 1994 when, as I swept the hallway of my younger sister Sonya’s house in Grafton, an old woman knocked at the door. Until she introduced herself I thought it was a horseman standing there in the late afternoon light in his well-worn but highly polished riding boots. She said that she’d seen the float out the front, paddocks out the back, and that she was looking for any work at all that involved horses.

When I unfolded her hand-typed CV, its paper so thin and creased it felt in danger of immediate disintegration, I read of her wide experience as a horse-rider, including working with hacks, hunters and high jump horses at Sydney Royal in 1928. It was as though she’d stepped right out from my much revered copy of High, Wide and Handsome, old Moss Vale equine veterinarian Alan Chittick’s pictorial history of Australian show-ring jumping from 1900 to 1950, and I was strangely moved.

I felt the patience of the old woman’s disappointment when Sonya said that unfortunately we had no work. Even the floorboards of the hallway seemed somehow longer, darker, smoother as the old horsewoman turned away to continue her walk south down Queen Street. I’m certain that Lainey returning as an old woman to Wirri in the Coda, would have shared many a likeness to that beautiful old stranger.

As the years then seemed to catapult by, coping with MS taking precedence over everything else, I continued to meet old high jump riders from the 1930s and 1940s in strange places. En route to South Australia, I stopped in Ballarat to have a five-dollar haircut at the barber’s. A tall stranger walked in and apparently on cue, began a golden reminiscence of his years of riding high jumpers for a Victorian woman called Alma.

Alma, what an old-fashioned name. I delighted in it and began to compose lists of men’s and women’s names from that era. Roley, Ral, Minna, Septimus, Reenie and many other minor characters were later to be named from that list.

As for the uncles who began to take a prominent place in Foal’s Bread, it’s like first Nipper and then Uncle Owen sprang out of a fissure in the (cattle ruined) earth to sow their old seed in horse-loving girl children. They were like the old raping Gods of classical Greek or Roman mythology. Even first reading those stories when I was a child, I felt their erotic charge: ‘Then I leapt up for joy, but he stealthily put in my mouth a food honey-sweet, a pomegranate seed, and compelled me against my will and by force, to taste’ (lines 411–14 from the Homeric Hymn to Demeter).

Old creek pomegranates appeared in the novel, down along Flaggy Creek, just as they do each year along many a creek where I loved to swim as a child. I wrote my novel with no such conscious considerations in mind, neither of audience appeal nor of a potential inter-generational audience. What I did have was a memory of what proved to be a very false rumour. Even to this day, mention the name of the late Merv Mulligan to a Grafton person and you’ll almost immediately get the still hushed recollection that he got my friend Janice Goodies pregnant. Deciding to ask Janice about that directly in the lead-up to our thirty-year school reunion, she looked at me in disbelief.

‘Is that what people think? Well they couldn’t be more wrong.’

‘That’s why I was so moved by your presence at Merv’s funeral. I thought you’d had to go up to the Gold Coast, year 9 or 10, for a termination, yet you still loved the old renegade so much you could weep for his passing.’

Again I felt Janice’s disbelief. ‘Look, once when I’d left school—I would’ve been about eighteen I suppose, I was a bit drunk and I did try to kiss him. He totally rebuffed me. Shocked, offended that I’d tried to make a move on him not vice versa.’

‘But remember afternoons after school? I’d tie Tarka up near the stables and duck into his garden to get loquats or mandarins. I was so jealous of you going in and out of his bedroom. I was never allowed further than the kitchen. And you always had the biggest bags of lollies; that seemed connected to Merv giving you money.’

‘Oh, well he might’ve done that. He knew I didn’t come from a rich family.’

A gladness but also a disappointment was sweeping through me. Such a long-held myth and the basis of more than just the beginning of Foal’s Bread. The love Noah always feels for Uncle Nipper, intermingled with guilt, is part of the underlying lamentation of her life.

I took a thoughtful sip of my one drink of the year. ‘I miss him always you know? His presence on a good clovery stretch of roadside. Giving a horse a pick.’

‘Me too,’ says Janice. ‘Mervy.’

‘The stories he could spin.’ I exclaim. ‘There was one about a goanna wearing silver slippers.’

‘And wit. As dry as a bit of old unbuttered fruit bun.’

‘I can’t believe he’s in that cemetery. He used to call me Gilly Anne! Had even bothered to read one of my books. Said I needed to make them funnier. And to put in a bit more of a story. We were sitting right here in this pub.’

‘Have you ever seen the grave?’

I shook my head. ‘Because at his funeral, you know, already I looked like a drunk walking. That’s why I didn’t go to the wake.’

‘And you’d become a lesbian there for a while! I couldn’t believe who was sitting next to you in the cathedral.’

A mild and fond feeling stole between us.

‘If you really must know,’ said Janice, ‘I got pregnant after a party up the road from Merv’s. I got drunk. Passed out and got raped by a boy. Not Merv!’

‘Bitch!’ said a flock of girls whose names I don’t remember as they saw Janice, in all her still-slender, still horse-riding glory arrive at the reunion.

I came back to South Australia to finish writing my novel as if on my own perilous ride down One Tree Farm’s hill.

Alan Chittick’s history was a constant reference enabling me to re-create the interwar years. I felt a weight of responsibility when my characters tore off in their own wild sometimes drunken directions, behaving in ways untypical of most of the feats and families Chittick so respectfully describes.

I wrote the book as I used to sprint, my body tilted forwards as it would be running into the teeth of a gale. I wrote with a memory of a Kandinsky romantic landscape seen long before at the Pompidou in Paris—three riders catapulting in a headlong gallop down a bluey-purple hill. I sent my manuscript away, fearful that my eldest sister would be angrier than ever that mine was heading out before hers could do so again.

I concluded, though, that the milieu of high jumping between the wars was easily as huge as the river where we both grew up jumping our horses. I felt that just as two painters can stand at Newbold Lookout and produce two very different paintings of the Clarence, so it could be with our two high jump novels.

Once when Yvonne was temporarily out of action after dislocating her shoulder over a V-jump, I was given the task of keeping her horse fit— just in case her shoulder healed in time for the Dubbo 3 Day Event Championships. After doing the requisite number of times around the Arthur St stock route, I used to try to pop the horse over this giant of a five-bar gate opposite where Merv now lies in the old Grafton cemetery. It was to be my gift to my big, injured, out-of-action sister. But in the early morning mist, apart from teaching the horse to baulk, success was never to be mine.

As I’ve dedicated Foal’s Bread to Yvonne, maybe it’s my five-bar, six-foot gate for her at last; my apology for getting her talented, distantly related Radium gelding behind the bit all those years ago.

Returning these days to my father’s farm, I’m anguished to find that some of my sisters are so enraged with each other that, although they just ten minutes from one another, they don’t even get together for Christmas any more. Rancorous recollections mingle with more recent betrayals. ‘You don’t know what wars are going on down where the spirit meets the bone,’ I read on the inside cover of a Lucinda Williams album and feel rue at its accuracy.

Returning briefly, in mid 2009, I realised that the spot where we used to turn into Dad’s place had irrevocably changed. There were many more houses carving up the land and Old Copmanhurst Road had embarrassingly been renamed Clarence Way, while the 150-kilometre road that soon turns to gravel after you get through the locality of Fineflower was already a large cul-de-sac in an ugly subdivision of the future. No-one could fondly call me Old Copmanhurst any more as best friends often did in the letter-writing 1990s.

‘Hey, can you draw me a piebald horse mucking up with a farrier?’ I asked Yvonne at Dad’s, putting a piece of drawing charcoal in her hand. Swiftly, in less minutes than it took for me to finish my cup of tea, she had drawn a beautiful horse that I knew was Magpie, the hero mare of my novel.

‘It’s mad isn’t it,’ I said, showing her a few of my better blood sketches, ‘that it’s my finger that’s been given the living ink?’

Nothing was said about my novel in progress. I talked instead of calligraphers of ancient China; Sung Hui Zong with his Skinny Golden Style and Crazy Zhang’s wild cursive.

Sometimes very thin and slender strokes are possible from my pricked finger. Tiny shapes with beaks, bodies and wings can accidentally appear that are as beautiful to me as Pinkham Ryder’s Dead Bird. Reading up about the drunken Tang dynasty calligrapher-monk Huai-Su, I suddenly long to abandon writing altogether and instead make intoxicated sketches that might resemble ‘snakes and dragons racing, a turbulent storm or lighting and thundering’.

Back in South Australia, I put Yvonne’s charcoal sketch next to the little and precious embroidery of the four black Mears Mares Girls, sewn by a friend and wrote on.

Whenever homesickness gripped me for the river, my sisters and father, I would sometimes look up the farm on Google Earth. Late one night, my foal’s bread novel nearly finished, my eyes feasted on the circular yard Sonya had built of local iron bark and bloodwood, because wasn’t the wild hope rising in me that my aim was nearly fulfilled, that I had succeeded in writing a novel as round and lovely as any old showground’s ring?

Yvonne lives at the farm now and even the old potato paddock is full of the Arab endurance ponies she has started to breed. A wry grin can pass between us, for as children who ardently lived, it often seemed, for jumping horses alone, didn’t we once despise Arabs?

The potato paddock makes me remember many things. I used to love our high jinks when the horses were on their summer spell. I jumped here much better than in any show ring, hopping Grey Chancellor or the kind old black stockhorse gelding bareback and bridle free over a jump set up with a line of 44-gallon drums. When many years passed and Yvonne’s first Hart mare was unexpectedly found dead in the same paddock, it seemed a terrible thing that a fox or dog had torn off one of the mare’s honestly shaped ears. I wrote a sorrow letter and Yvonne wrote one back, baldly stating that the mare had only died because Yvonne no longer needed her. Although by then had come a rancorous falling out of our own, I decided to stake out Brith’s burial site like an archaeological dig. Hadn’t Yvonne been looking for a horse skull for ages? Hadn’t we fallen in love together with the goose-girl fairytale wherein the decapitated head of the horse Falada speaks from the castle wall?

I would salvage Brith’s skull as a testament to Yvonne’s love of her inimitable jumping mare and of my love for Yvonne. Yet the deeper I dug, the clearer it became that not enough time had passed for the task. The crumbly sandstone soil turned a deeper colour. Was that still flesh attached to a piece of hoof? In haste I filled my trench back in and thus my bizarre but sincere attempt at a sisterly reconciliation was abandoned.

When Bellini died up in Queensland from a snake bite, it was Yvonne who collected and hauled the wood for her funeral pyre.

I’ve sat typing this for Meanjin in a second-hand Mobility Plue wheelchair. The first time I ever went out publicly in this, I was alone, off to the final day of the Royal Adelaide Show.

Just as I was deriding myself for delaying the wheelchair moment so long, what a spanking pace was possible after a walking stick, I stopped at a gelato van. As I carefully reversed down a tiny incline, suddenly the chair reared and chucked me off backwards. I heard my head land with a crack on the bricks. A baby in a pram waved its tiny white and pink mottled hand at me. I gave it a bewildered grin back. Someone called over a pair of police officers who hoisted me back in and bought me a new ice cream.

I’m so sick of writing about MS and will try not to any more. Rowan Atkinson as Mr Bean with a catheter, or Andrew Hansen from The Chasers doing a spruik for all the ugly disability aids suddenly overtaking my house again might just raise a laugh.

‘I’d like to die,’ I joke when people ask me what I’m doing for Christmas. When a much older and much revered Clarence River horse-woman was given a grim health prognosis I heard that she almost immediately threw herself off a high enough bridge.

The reason I don’t kill myself is mainly because I couldn’t stand for everyone to think they could’ve somehow prevented it: phoned more often, sent more flowers or chocolates or whatever. I don’t have a gas oven and the thought of inflicting a García Márquez–like bath full of blood on one of my lovely early morning carers is impossible. And anyway, I last could get into the bath many months ago.

Nor could I bear some nephew or niece of the future in a temporary black mood saying, ‘Well Auntie Gillian did it,’ and following suit.

I also fear that it would hurt and that I might not succeed and find myself in a situation far worse. There’s a wisdom quilt too that I must finish and The Cat with the Coloured Tail, even if I must eventually swap writing pencil for needle to sew his wisdom.

And what about my ongoing dream of funding the building of the farm’s stiles? To allow access again to the rainforest remnant? Isn’t it after all my fault that no-one walks through there any more since, in a moment of environmental fervour, I had a rainforest remnant agreement slapped in place for perpetuity?

I know the shapes of all my sisters so clearly that I can picture which way they’d each favour climbing over my stiles. Surely then, once in, as we walked as a family beneath the tulipwood, foambarks, figs and whalebone trees, regeneration of sisterly love would be an effortless thing indeed. We’d collectively remember when we were little, having porridge on the Fallen Tree of Mr Greenwood, the next door dairy farmer. I’d like to finish my abandoned Remnant novel that, although based on the life of Buddhist bushwalker, solicitor and conservationist Marie Byles, also has the scope to present a family as being just like a forest that can be restored using the Bradley sisters method of bush regeneration. There is another novel too, compelling me to gather together images and memories.

I wish I could sit up tall and true in this writing wheelchair as I would be if I were in a saddle. What else is there to say anyway about the ongoing indignities that weren’t addressed in the writing of Foal’s Bread or my old Map of the Gardens stories? Barney, my beloved grandfather who developed MS at twenty-two, died aged fifty. Before his death both his legs were amputated but he couldn’t see what he looked like any more, for he had also gone blind. I wonder about the books I would’ve written had his disease not become my own. I wonder, given that I’m now forty-seven, if there is any writing time left.

The spasms that have locked one of my legs straight, the other permanently cocked as if I’ve also developed cerebral palsy, make me think it best to sing this old nursery rhyme to end:

Horsey, horsey don’t you stop
Just let your feet go clippety clop.
With one leg up and one leg down,
Giddy up you’re homeward bound.

Jaffna

2012-03-20T00:00:00Z

A friend in Colombo said ‘a trip to Jaffna is emotional’, as she described the impact of travelling through the war-ravaged countryside of Sri Lanka’s Northern Province—a battle zone for almost three decades, and the site of intense fighting between government forces and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in 2009.

From Vavuniya, formerly a frontline town in the 26-year-long civil war, the two-lane A9 highway is choked with northbound traffic. Road crews of men and women, some barefoot, shovel gravel and lay bitumen in the 35-degree heat. European de-mining teams whisk past in shiny white Land Rovers. Cows wander across the road at random, dangerous moments. On either side the harsh, dry countryside is interspersed with military camps and the occasional ruin of a house.

At Elephant Pass, an arid piece of land where a narrow causeway connects the mainland to the Jaffna peninsula, we are stopped at an army checkpoint. It’s here that one of the bloodiest campaigns of the war took place, and now there is a park of young frangipani trees encircling a bronze monument—the recently opened War Hero Memorial. As the light begins to fade, we arrive on the peninsula. The lonely ‘headless’ trunks of palmyrah palm trees are silhouetted against the darkening orange sky. Thirteen hours after leaving Colombo we arrive in Jaffna, the cultural capital of the Sri Lankan Tamil people.

We are anxious to get to the Jaffna Public Library. The sign greeting us at the gate the next morning states—in Tamil, Sinhala and English—that visitors will only be accepted between 5.00 and 6.30 pm. It’s 10.30 am but the security guard at the gate happily ushers us in. A statue of Saraswati, the Hindu goddess of knowledge, sits regally in front of the Mughal-style white-domed building, which is surrounded by a tropical garden blooming with hibiscus. At the front steps we take off our shoes and pay 10 rupees (8 cents). We are at the site of one of the worst examples of vandalism in the twentieth century—a biblioclasm, the deliberate mutilation or destruction of books.

Incredibly, the Jaffna Public Library has experienced this most dreadful act of cultural genocide more than once since it officially opened to the public in 1959. It was considered one of the finest libraries in South Asia, and housed more than 97,000 irreplaceable books and historical manuscripts, some handwritten on ancient palmyrah palm leaves.

On 1 June 1981 the library was set on fire by a drunken mob in response to the shooting of three policemen at a Tamil political rally. The loss of the library’s entire collection was seen as a direct attack on the intellectual pride of Jaffna, as well as an attempt to erase the archives of Tamil culture, history and society. Restoration of the building and the collection began in 1982. However, during ‘Black July’ in 1983, the anti-Tamil attacks that marked the start of the civil war, the library was under attack again. Unfortunately, it was in the war zone between the army and the LTTE, and the building was damaged by bombs. In 1985, what was left was further destroyed when fighting broke out again. Rebuilding began in 2001 and the library reopened in 2003.

The shelves in the reading rooms and reference sections are slowly being filled, thanks to local and international donations. The range of books in Tamil, Sinhala and English is an eclectic mix of literature, sciences and the humanities. New publications sit alongside slightly water-damaged or charred volumes. One of the librarians told us that there are already more than 94,000 books in the current collection. Despite this, the library is so grand and stately, with its high ceilings and elegant indoor palms, that it’s difficult not to ponder what has been lost. It is clear, though, that what has survived is the library’s perpetual value to local people, evidenced by the fact that nearly every table in the reading rooms is occupied by enthusiastic readers of all ages.

It’s not until after our visit that I hear of the very recent attack that befell the library. In October last year a group of Sinhalese tourists were apparently refused entry because a medical conference was being held there. Enraged, they pushed in the gate and vandalised some of the reading rooms and the garden before being expelled. The Jaffna Public Library remains a potent symbol of the conflict for both sides.

Rawshock

2012-03-16T00:00:00Z