Articles - Meanjin

Aboriginal Art: On the Margins no Longer

2012-02-21T00:00:00Z

Who would have thought? It is something of a miracle that Papunya Tula Artists has survived and prospered for forty years.

Through the great art and wise counsel of the men who founded Papunya Tula Artists, contemporary Aboriginal art has made its way from the absolute margins to the very centre of Australian art. This success is a tribute to the many artists who have made their contribution and those dedicated managers and staff who have represented them so well.

But the success of their art has raised questions that decades later remain unanswered. It seems many are still not ready to decide if this art is contemporary or just indigenous and our public galleries are still uncertain where and how to place it.

Today the artists work in purpose-built studio spaces, but in the era of the intervention, remote communities still feel the imposition of outside solutions.

It all began in 1971 when a young art teacher, Geoffrey Bardon, was sent to teach in the remote Northern Territory community of Papunya. His situation was not unlike the many Aboriginal people who had been sent to live at Papunya too. Under the government policy of assimilation, Aboriginal people from across the centre were pushed together, to be educated in the ways of white Australia. Many were far from home and there was no meaningful reason to be gathered together in this way.

One can imagine what solace it must have been to sit quietly in the painting shed making art that talked of bigger things, among peers who understood.

The young art teacher was there to teach art to a people many anthropologists had already declared artless, so in what must have been a shock to many of the white Australians there, this naive young man saw value in Aboriginal art and encouraged the production of murals for the school, using Aboriginal designs, so the children he was teaching might have connections to their culture.

It sounds so simple, sensible and harmless, but this was flying in the face of the intention of this place. This expression of Aboriginal identity was precisely what was being discouraged. (This innovation so confronted the administration that at the first opportunity these murals were painted over.)

A few of the men began making paintings of their own in the back of the art room, paintings that drew absolutely nothing from contemporary Australia except the boards and paint they used. When these raw and striking images began receiving attention, some recognition and even sales, they simultaneously elicited anger and jealousy from many who were not involved.

However, this small band of painters, assisted by what may be considered their first manager, Bardon, formed the Papunya Tula Artists company (PTA), owned by the artists, with artists forming the board. This act of independence created what has proved to be one of the most important and successful Aboriginal community organisations. This artist-owned company has supported the artists who created it, nurtured new talent and provided the platform for their art to be seen and appreciated across Australia and, increasingly, the world.

It has also provided a real benefit to their whole community, through a source of independent income, and significantly through the recognition and respect the artists have come to enjoy. PTA also acted as a catalyst, inspiring many remote communities to follow their lead and begin producing arts and crafts to generate an income and as an expression of identity.

Many new arrivals at Papunya were literally straight out of the desert, families plucked from the remotest regions where they were still living the life of their ancestors. Some of these men were quick to join the painters too.

This act of painting on boards, for display and sale, was not part of their tradition. Almost all the designs, symbols and decorations used for ceremony were temporary, wiped away after the event. These small ‘boards’ were something completely new. The only comparable reference was with a few savvy stockmen who had encountered the Namatjira family’s watercolours and knew of their success in Alice Springs. They realised the unique independent opportunity painting might have for them.

Bardon lasted only a relatively short time at Papunya, removed like his murals at the first opportunity. Fortunately for PTA he was followed by a succession of managers who all contributed to the often difficult task of keeping the company afloat.

Although from many different backgrounds, the managers shared a respect for Aboriginal people, real admiration for the artists and faith in their art. Theirs was a very difficult job. In those days, one person was responsible for the provision of art materials, the collection and distribution of finished works, the recording and documenting of every painting, managing the finances, and often had to act as a private bank. It helped to have great skills of diplomacy and the patience of a saint. It still does, but they shared a respect for the artists they represented and many delved deeply into the culture, history and land of the artists to better understand the substance of their art.

Many formed strong and enduring friendships and in the process accumulated significant collections of these great artworks, for often it was their purchases that allowed the business to survive. It is fortunate that most of these collections are now in public institutions where we can all enjoy them. When you see the quality of this work you have to wonder: where were the curators of our public institutions at the time? What was the broader Australian art world thinking? Some of these works languished in storerooms for years, going begging at the time but now regarded as treasures.

By the early 1980s one group, the Pintupi, many of whom were leading painters, decided they had had enough of Papunya and life on the margins of this town. They moved west, returning to their traditional lands. They established Kintore first and later a smaller group went further west to establish Kiwirrkurra. This return to country was a significant act of self-determination. As many of the Pintupi were by now well-established artists, the PTA manager needed to drive an extra few hundred kilometres to Kintore and a couple of hours further to Kiwirrkurra as part of their rounds.

By this time there was a PTA house at Papunya that the manager could use, but elsewhere their office, storeroom, home and workshop was the PTA four-wheel-drive, which in those days was a ute. Paintings had to be stretched, primed, unstretched and rolled for transport in the open. It is amazing that many of the masterpieces that are hanging in our museums today had such an early life. The scale of the achievements of PTA managers of this era is even more remarkable when one considers how few people in the wider community were interested in art and how few in the art community were interested in Aboriginal art. Fortunately a small group of collectors, a few government agencies such as the Aboriginal Arts Board and some tourist interest started to make an impact. I was at art school in the 1970s and I don’t recall a single reference to indigenous art the whole time I was there.

The first Papunya Tula art I saw was in the Australian Museum, slipped into a broader Aboriginal exhibition. These small works were a complete surprise. I had never heard of Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula, but I saw immediately that he could really paint. I recall how different his paintings looked from everything around them. Over the years I sought out every exhibition of contemporary Aboriginal art I could find. I had always been interested in tribal art but this was something else altogether. This new work was vital and demanding and new. Fortunately I wasn’t the only one taking an interest.

By 1988 the media were running stories suggesting a boom in Aboriginal art. Certainly a few major institutions such as the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) had begun to pay attention and commercial galleries such as Gabrielle Pizzi in Melbourne had begun staging serious art exhibitions. While a few advertising executives were rolling up bundles of canvases under their arm, taking them back to the city and hoping to make a quick killing, the idea of a boom was hype. It was still hard work convincing collectors and institutions, let alone the broader community, of the significance of Aboriginal art. (The boom did come, but not for another decade.)

Of course 1988 was the year of the bicentennial and as tall ships came in through the heads of Sydney Harbour on Australia Day, a march of indigenous Australians, who had travelled from all parts of the country, entered the city from the opposite direction, to have their voices heard on this day. Among them were many artists I was soon to represent.

Papunya Tula Artists, now with a staff of two, managed the business from a double shopfront in Alice Springs. Its white walls were hung like an art gallery. A ‘troop carrier’ had replaced the ute for the field trips, and at Kintore a largish garage was now used as the art shed, soon to have a little flat attached. PTA’s art gallery persona was in stark contrast to the tourist shops and almost junk shops of the town where you could buy old boomerangs, an assortment of kitsch and an early board off the top shelf.

It was around this time that the contrasting attitudes towards Aboriginal art were becoming apparent. Some people thought the work was too indigenous to be contemporary, while others felt the same piece was not indigenous enough. This difference was overlaid by others and, while a few great collectors were enthused, it was no easy task to have these paintings simply considered on their merits as contemporary works of art. People were conscious of their inexperience with this new art and felt they needed different eyes to judge it. They were wrong.

The ability to transcend specific cultural boundaries is a defining quality of great art. Our museums are a United Nations of art and the viewing public is well exposed. The shock of the new is always confronting, but there was no necessity to put this new Aboriginal art in its own box and look at it as a separate thing, except that is exactly what had always happened to Aboriginal people and here it happened again.

Many of our major art galleries had long had small holdings of indigenous art. The Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) had a lovely marble staircase that led to a series of subterranean rooms filled with some very interesting barks and sculpted works. There was even an occasional indigenous curator who divided their time between working with a community in the Northern Territory and working at the gallery.

The gallery had a program at the time to collect around twenty major indigenous works over the next ten years to cover all indigenous art, but in 1991 the policy was dramatically revised, thanks to a visionary curator and a very generous benefaction. Soon a new full-time indigenous curator was appointed to the AGNSW and development of the indigenous collection began seriously.

A timely survey at the gallery revealed that international visitors actually wanted to see indigenous art as a priority. Armed with this outcome, gallery director Edmund Capon was able to convince the state government to find the funds to support the renovation of the gallery, to form a new permanent home for indigenous art. (That this new space is on the lowest level of the gallery reminds me of old times.)

With the aid of Mollie Gowing’s visionary philanthropy the gallery eventually added more than 400 indigenous works to the permanent collection, including a significant group of works from Papunya Tula Artists.

This trend towards dedicated indigenous spaces has been followed by many. In 2002 the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) gave the whole ground floor of its new building in Federation Square to indigenous art. Most recently, a new wing has been purpose-built at the NGA to house its indigenous collection. (In this case it’s up the stairs and a quick U-turn once off the escalators.)

Another development has been the appointment of indigenous personnel within art institutions. This affirmative action has been very positive as it has trained and positioned a whole group of young indigenous curators, educators and administrators, who are all working hard for their constituents. While the employment of indigenous staff was long overdue, I cannot think of one indigenous person filling a significant role in any public gallery in any department other than indigenous art. This is the next challenge.

Nevertheless, the development of indigenous art in our public galleries has seen some important exhibitions since 1988. In 2000 ‘Genesis and Genius’, the most extensive major survey of the Papunya Tula Artists, opened at the AGNSW. Timed to welcome the throng of international visitors to the Sydney Olympics, this landmark exhibition revealed an art movement that had been self-sustaining and self-generating for nearly thirty years. Leading artists were represented across the decades side by side with their peers.

This was a definitive, world-class exhibition, mapping the constant evolution, innovation and cross-pollination of this unique art movement. It was the most significant exhibition of indigenous art the gallery had ever staged. Thus it was a great and telling shame when the president of the gallery was unable to pronounce the words ‘Papunya Tula’ at the opening. This was a sad revelation of how, even at the highest levels, engagement with indigenous art had still not occurred.

So with all the advances in collection building, gallery building and curator, educator and administrative placement, it is timely to consider if this department building by gallery directors, while supporting indigenous art, has not at the same time separated it from the rest of Australian art.

Sadly I think it has, leaving those who do not wish to engage satisfied it has its place, and therefore requiring no more of their attention.

By the first years of the twenty-first century the market for Aboriginal art had grown in tempo with the economy. This was the long-awaited boom and it allowed for an expansion of art activities in many communities. For the Papunya Tula Artists it meant more large-scale canvases were possible, exhibition programs expanded and demand was strong. It also meant the PTA could find the means to build a dialysis centre and a swimming pool for their community.

Of course there was a downside: traders and dealers who thought they too should have a piece of this action flourished. Under the banner of free trade, a diverse group of speculators has sought to attract individual artists away from community organisations and in some cases used and exploited them. These traders have only destabilised the marketplace, mostly through ignorance and disrespect for the market in which they are working. When money replaces art as the motivation, quality falls and thus a broad range of second-rate artwork, even by big names, hit the market. It is true too that artists are often pushed and assisted by family members who seek to get a share of the only market in which they can participate.

The naysayers immediately got on their high horses, the punters quickly ‘invested’ cheaply and a lot of good people paid too much for poor imitations of the real thing. This could only happen because of the lack of opportunity most indigenous people have in remote regions. Art is their only currency. It was also possible because of the failure of those public institutions to recognise early on the value of Aboriginal art, to buy and exhibit it and to educate people about indigenous art.

We can only imagine just how far this art movement could have gone if not for the missed opportunities, misunderstandings and the opportunists who consistently undermined the very artists they claimed as their best friends. If an orderly market had been allowed to operate, many indigenous artists would now be internationally successful.

The focus of the good representatives during this time was to present the best possible exhibitions of their artists, leading the way, setting the standards. This has unquestionably seen positive outcomes, for as the economy tightened, the best indigenous art has continued to attract serious attention.

The NGV offers in 2011 an exhibition that focuses on the first paintings of the Papunya Tula Artists. This important exhibition, forty years on, allows a proper examination of the birth of an art movement. The best works have been gathered from the leading collections, giving the broader art community the opportunity simply to be amazed by these spectacular, unique works of art.

Who would have thought in 1971 that a bunch of cowboys and wild bushmen could have made such a contribution to Australian art and changed it forever.

The Piano Lesson

2012-02-14T00:00:00Z

The last piano lesson I ever had
ended in a drug raid on my teacher’s house.
Mum was waiting in the car as she did each week,
saw the cops pull up with their dogs.
When I ask her about it twenty years later
she has forgotten everything—the raid, the lessons,
begging me to practise, that we even had a piano of our own.
I want to ask her how, and keep asking, how
it is possible to forget all this, considering her devotion
to the black and white, the tunes of discipline and obedience.
I let it go because she blames herself for all she can
and can’t recollect. There is a chord
that she is an expert at playing—the guilt hammers,
the sustain of regret. So what now of this memory
if I can’t afford to share it? I want it to resonate.
But it stresses her frailties—a grand excuse
to keep pounding away at herself. It is a grey-scale art
every child must learn to master in these final years—
to force the duet or to recognise it is time
to learn both parts of Chopsticks for yourself.
Now my daughter plays and I wait beside her
turning the page when she nods, the metronome
tocking, her little hands, in reflection
all the right wrong notes.

The Book and Its Time

2012-02-09T00:00:00Z

It does strange things to your sense of time, to be in transition between two technologies of print: the new electronic one beckons you to step lightly on, into the future, but again and again confronts you with a wall, which has all the solidity of brick; while the old technology piles up its objects around you with such persistence, it is as if the past had developed an unstoppable momentum of its own. For all its promise of change, therefore, time appears not just to be standing still, but to be going backwards.

The image of this state of affairs that I find most compelling comes from a book that is itself now just a decade short of one hundred years old, Arnold Bennett’s novel Riceyman Steps. Bennett has suffered from the long-standing comparison with his contemporary Virginia Woolf, as the representative of a materially laden realism that is the antithesis of the penetration and the lyricism that modernism claimed as its superior strengths. But Bennett’s objects have a tendency to take on lives of their own, in a manner not dissimilar to Woolf’s, and in this respect, and in terms of its psychological penetration, particularly in relation to the condition of miserliness, Riceyman Steps has come to be regarded as one of the unacknowledged classics of the first part of the twentieth century. In the novel the object that expresses the pathology of miserliness, or hoarding, most powerfully, through its oppressive accumulation, is precisely the printed book.

Riceyman Steps revolves around a bookseller in the London borough of Clerkenwell in the 1920s, a man called Henry Earlforward. His shop displays popular novels in the window that faces the busy Kings Cross Road, but in the window around the side of the shop old books, first editions, and the works of writers who have ‘passed through decades of criticism into the impregnable paradise of eternal esteem’, look out on Riceyman Steps and beyond them, to the old and decrepit lodgings of Riceyman Square. Both the shop and the square embody a past that has been left behind by developments in the present. ‘Evolution has swirled round it, missed it, and left it.’ There is a certain prescience in Bennett’s focus on the printed book as the embodiment of a past marooned by the passage of time, gathering dust in the dim recesses of a miser’s shop.

The shelves of books in Earlforward’s shop become darker and darker, and more and more untidy, as they recede into gloom. ‘The effect was of mysterious and vast populations of books imprisoned for ever in everlasting shade, chained, deprived of air and sun and movement, hopeless, resigned, martyrized.’ But this isn’t quite right; at least, it doesn’t give the whole story. It doesn’t capture the printed book’s capacity for multiplication, accumulation. The floor of Earlforward’s office, at the back of his shop, is also thickly strewn with books, which pile up over the desk and chairs. The left-hand half of every step to the first floor is stacked with popular romances, and the landing also. In the dining room there are more books, settled on the dining table, the sideboard, the mantelpiece, the chairs, the floor; in the bedroom the wardrobe is stuffed with books; in the bathroom the bath is full to the brim and overflowing with them; upstairs, they are in each room on the second floor too.

In his recent eulogy to the phenomenon of book-collecting, written as he says ‘from a continent which is about to be lost forever’, Jacques Bonnet acknowledges the unstoppable progress of the book, once it has been gathered in numbers: ‘We can only stand and watch as it invades all the walls of the room, climbs to the ceiling, annexes the other rooms one by one, expelling anything that gets in the way.’ Like Bennett’s Earlforward, Bonnet admits to having a bathroom full of bookshelves, which made it impossible to have a shower, and books in the kitchen as well.¹

Bonnet is of course proud of his library, which runs to some 40,000 volumes. It is the repository of his emotional life and the expansion of his memory; it protects him, and gives him an extraordinary sense of power, as if he were a potentate at the centre of a vast world, since the books concentrate time and space, offering their long perspectives to him at his command.

I wish I felt like that, but I don’t. I find myself fighting off a constant sense of oppression, brought about by the accumulative power of the book. Perhaps this is a crankiness peculiar to editors and publishers, who are habitually the recipient of books they haven’t asked for, or haven’t been able to sell, and are too respectful of the object itself, in which they invest a lot of time and energy, to welcome its destruction. (I’m probably speaking about small publishers here—bigger publishers have warehouse managers to do the job for them.)

My study is full of books, on shelves, desks, couches, floor, and they have spread through the house. I have two offices full of books, two storage units, my distributor’s warehouse. In how many places is that: five! What if I were rid of all of them, if the transition to the electronic book were so complete there would be no need for the physical book at all? Would I feel free, unencumbered, happy?

We are obviously not at that stage yet, and perhaps we never will be. Right now, if I embark on a path of reading, such as the one stimulated by the preparation for this essay, I can only progress swiftly by electronic means to a certain point. Newspaper and journal articles I can access relatively easily through my university library. Arnold Bennett’s works are all out of copyright, and are available in electronic form, as are the recent print editions. No problem there with Riceyman Steps. But M. Bonnet’s Phantoms on the Bookshelves is no phantom itself. Published in 2010, it is only available as an expensive little hardback. This must be a common experience for those who take wing on a line of thought only to be stopped soon after setting out by a reference to a book that remains obdurately physical, and out of reach of their electronic reader. This is the wall I referred to earlier, as impenetrable as if it were made of bricks.

Nevertheless it is worth asking the question, what would a space without any printed books be like to live in? There are demographic and ecological imperatives that require us to imagine how we will accept restrictions on our living spaces and the resources we use in the future. For all our sentimentality about the printed book, it is fundamentally a mechanically produced object, generated in numbers that usually far exceed the demand for it, and read only partially if at all by many of those who buy it. It is a wasteful process.

But then so is the tree’s production of blossoms and seeds.

Nor is the collecting of books a good use of resources when considered from a practical point of view. Of the books in my personal library I have read only a fraction, and a large proportion of that fraction I would not have opened for twenty years or more. For example one, Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s General System Theory, which I read early in my doctoral research, I haven’t looked at for almost forty years. It stands in my mind as an example of the impossibility of discarding books that have played a role—however minor—in one’s life. Yet when I go to the bookshelf, I can’t find it. I remember a half-hearted attempt at culling a few years ago; perhaps I made the hard decision on its fate then.

Now I experience another twinge. The book was one in a series of attractive black-covered Penguin University Paperbacks, designed by John McConnell, who would go on to implement the redesign of Faber’s paperbacks in the 1980s. The book represents the intellectual milieu of the 1970s for me both because of its design (that is to say, as an object in itself), and because of the authors published in the series, who included Piaget, Lévi-Strauss, Althusser, Goffman, Marcuse, Berger and Luckman, and Wellek and Warren (their Theory of Literature). The book has such a strong presence in my mind, I believe I have it even when I don’t. For this reason, I don’t really need to have it at all. But would it have had this presence if I had read it first in electronic form?

I have some of my father’s books too, hardbacks necessarily, most of them in the Everyman or Modern Library editions of his time. I remember particularly the American realist writers, on whom he was very keen—Theodore Dreiser, James T. Farrell, John dos Passos. Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms. Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, which I read one summer under the spreading willow tree in the garden of my grandfather’s holiday bach in Rotorua. One of his ‘sexy’ books too, Pierre Louÿs’ Aphrodite, which carries the inscription: ‘To Comrade Jack, On his becoming mature. From Alan.’ I guess that would have been in 1942, at the time of his twenty-first birthday. Later, when my father married my mother, he changed his name from Jack to John, and left his Communist days behind him.

I see now, from the notes all over it, that I read Arnold Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale in my father’s Everyman edition, since it has his signature and the date 1944 on the flyleaf. On the next page, a blank, I wrote at some point ‘das fruchtbare Bathos der Ehfahrung’. Amazing, since I don’t speak German! A Google search reveals that the quote came from Kant—his Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics that Will Be Able to Present Itself as a Science—by way of Samuel Beckett’s Watt, which I had read closely for my undergraduate honours dissertation in 1971. It must have been fresh in my memory when I read The Old Wives’ Tale with Riceyman Steps in late 1972 or early 1973. At the same age my father would have been in 1944. The fruitful bathos of experience!

This is where I stick (and pretty quickly too) when it comes to virtual books and virtual libraries—what will happen to the book as gift, or to those that are handed on, between the generations? The quotes and notes are allowed for carefully in electronic editions; the date of purchase will be recoverable too. But how to give an e-book as a gift in a way that preserves the physical nature of the gesture, and more importantly, its resonances? The gift economy is vital to booksellers and publishers alike, since most of their books are sold in the period leading up to Christmas. What will it look like if the only books printed are those that might be given as gifts? Aren’t all books, except technical and academic titles, in this category?

I don’t know how feasible it will be in the long term to have small print runs of the physical book to accompany its widespread distribution in electronic form, so as to allow for the giving of gifts and other special uses. This co-dependency is often proposed as the way of future, and in response to falling demand, printers have become extraordinarily adept at printing or reprinting small numbers of a book while maintaining quality and—apparently—commercial viability. I am suspicious of compromises like this—won’t the more efficient and profitable of the competing forms sooner or later devour the other? But since the prospect of a world without physical books is hard to imagine, even if it is technically possible or desirable, there may well be imperatives working in the print–electronic compromise that render it immune to the logic of profit.

As a literary publisher, I like the idea of shorts—short print runs, short books. For too long, success in the literary world has been measured by the best-selling novel. The economy of literary publishing is such that it is almost impossible to go broke publishing books up to, say, 150 pages long, if you have an eye for quality. Poetry collections are the best example of this logic—they have virtually no presence in the market place, where their quality is irrelevant, but they can usually meet their costs on a small number of sales due to their ability to attract literary subsidies. Rather than try to meet the market—this amorphous, anonymous and largely illusory herd of readers for whom one prints thousands of copies of a book in the hope that they might feed on it, usually in vain—to go short is to assume from the outset that there will only be a few readers, and you may already know most of them by name. You can call to them, and if they like the book, they can call to others. Going short like this may actually restore value to the printed book by creating a sense of scarcity or specialness, just as it sinks under the weight of its own multiplication. It also has the effect of crystallising out of that anonymous entity ‘the reading public’ a group of readers small enough, and connected enough, to constitute a community in a real rather than an abstract sense.

How short is a short print run? In one respect the answer is obvious: one or two copies, since printers have machines that can produce a single copy on demand, without a significant drop-off in production values. But I would prefer to put the question in another way: how many physical copies of a new literary title are required to establish its presence in the minds of its likely readers? I would put the figure at 300 copies, allowing that up to half of these might go to reviewers (most of whom will ignore it) and libraries (where it may remain unread). Our literary communities are small, and you don’t need many readers to ensure the survival of a literary title from one generation to the next.

Both of these uses of the physical book—the book as gift, the book as the expression of a community—have reciprocity as their common property. It is this reciprocity, this embodiment or anticipation of recognition, which gives them life. Their antithesis is the book that has been thrown aside, abandoned by time, hoarded, stacked or left unread. It is here that you sense the pathological aspect in the accumulation of books. Bonnet describes his collecting habit as a ‘gentle and inoffensive obsession’, though he also refers to it as a mania. Bennett goes further when, in Riceyman Steps, he takes the uncontrolled hoarding of books as the sign of miserliness.

Books are particularly suited to express the pathology of hoarding because each contains a world, the idea of which may be cherished without ever being realised. Bonnet compares a book to a safe. ‘Every time you open a book for the first time, there is something akin to safe-breaking about it. Yes, that’s exactly it: the frantic reader is like a burglar who has spent hours and hours digging a tunnel to enter the strongroom of a bank.’ Bennett’s bookseller is fearful of theft. His books remain closed, except to disclose their price. What the miser hates is expense of any kind: this includes eating, feeling and anything that enhances the sense of passing time. As the books take over the shop and the house that contains it, they come to resemble an unstoppable cancer—and it is just such a growth, blocking the entrance to his stomach, that kills the bookseller. The physical presence of the unread or the once-read book, which is what makes it so attractive as a sign of unspent potential, reveals its morbid aspect when present in large numbers. The overstocked library or bookshop resembles a graveyard. All those obsolete and unwanted books in their rows. Inert, uncirculating.

Bennett believed in collecting books. He wrote a book on the topic in 1909, Literary Taste: How to Form It, with Detailed Instructions for Collecting a Library of English Literature. He exhorted readers to surround themselves with books. ‘The merely physical side of books is important … The eye must be flattered; the hand must be flattered; the sense of owning must be flattered … buy—buy whatever has received the imprimatur of critical authority. Buy without any immediate reference to what you will read. Buy!’

So it is not for him the simple accumulation of books that renders them harbingers of deathliness. It is their removal from use or circulation or reciprocity, their association with obsolescence, that makes them weigh so heavily. After Earlforward’s death, Bennett sends his books off to a new life—or as it really seems, a new death. ‘The entire stock of books was sold by private treaty to a dealer in Charing Cross Road, who swallowed it up and digested it with gigantic ease. The books went away quietly enough in vans.’ This is the prospect we face, if the electronic book, which is renowned for the ease of its distribution, and its promise of circulation, were to take the power of reciprocity from its printed counterpart too, leaving the latter to accumulate in unvisited warehouses and gloomy second-hand bookshops, or to take the road in vans to the nearest incinerator.

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An endnote, courtesy of the internet. In March 2010 the London Daily Telegraph reported that a copy of Riceyman Steps, which had been borrowed from the library in Great Yarmouth in 1948 by the late Dudley Frosdick, had been returned by his younger brother David, who found it among the belongings of their other brother, John, who had recently died. It seems strangely appropriate that a book about the hoarding of books should itself have been hoarded. But you could say that the book was asking for it. The adopted owner was liable for £2500 in accumulated fines.

The Kinder Tragedy

2012-02-06T00:00:00Z

IN THE EARLY 1860s the British public’s fascination with sensational accounts of murder and violence, seduction and infidelity developed a new self-consciousness in everyday metropolitan life: so much so that the entire decade came to be known as the ‘Age of Sensation’. Narratives of bloodshed and outrage had always been a staple of the daily news, but it was at this time that the public engagement with novel or thrilling events became incorporated into the ever more detailed and analytical reportage that covered real-life dramas as they unfolded, until at last—in the words of American literary studies scholar Richard Altick—‘sensation itself, so to speak, was the sensation’.¹

In his celebrated book Deadly Encounters, Altick traces the emergence of a sensation culture around scandal, fatality and violence from the history of popular writings on murder found in catchpenny pamphlets, last dying speeches and popular criminal biographies such as those published in the Newgate Calendar. What suddenly transformed this widespread public appetite into a craze, he argues, was a dramatic expansion in the capacity of the daily press to circulate details of the latest crime all around the country within hours. From the mid 1850s, readers were increasingly kept up to date with intimate details of the deeds of notorious criminals, their arrests and trials, such as the multiple murderer Dr William Palmer, accused husband-poisoner Madeleine Smith and the notorious child-killer, sixteen-year-old Constance Kent.

Mrs and Mr Bertrand, photographed by the Milligan Brothers. Published in A complete report of the examination in the alleged murder case of the late Henry Kinder, by Henry Louis Bertrand, 1865. Special Collections, Baillieu Library, University of Melbourne. Image courtesy of Photography and Digital Imaging, University of Melbourne.

According to Altick, however, it was not until July 1861 that this type of coverage reached a new intensity, with the obsessive reporting of ‘two mysterious, murderous attacks’ in the London area. Two strange stories: the life-and-death struggle of a Major Murray with an eccentric Northumberland Street moneylender named Roberts; and the violent attack by a French nobleman, Baron Alfred Louis Pons de Vidil, upon his stepson in a quiet laneway near Twickenham unfolded before an unprecedented audience. The significance of these cases lay not only in the many layers of mystery they offered, but also in the nature and extent of the news coverage they attracted. Descriptions of the crimes and their protagonists, the trials and the crowds that attended them, views on the credibility of the witnesses and background stories on those involved filled column after column of all the London papers.

But these two crimes made shock waves far beyond British shores as well, creating a significant (albeit belated) sensation in colonial Australia when news of their happenings arrived with the mail by the Northam on 17 September—nearly two months after the event. Planning for a telegraph link from Britain to Australia had begun in 1859, but it was not finally established until October 1872. In the meantime, the colonies relied for their supply of international news upon correspondence, newspapers and journals delivered by steamship. This delay in receiving the ‘up-to-date’ facts of the cases nevertheless did little to dampen the breathless enthusiasm with which they were met. While the sensational details of the Murray and Vidil cases provided welcome thrills and entertainment for readers in colonial Australia, there was also an explicit sense in which local journalists were eager to offer British readers something salacious in return. One contemporary commentator, writing of the Murray and Vidil cases for Hobart’s Mercury, noted that:

Human nature is the same all the world over; and, as the proceedings in the criminal courts of the colonies are now, through more frequent communication and increasing intercourse with the mother country, brought beneath the notice of the English public, we at the antipodes cannot as a community escape furnishing our quota of the like materials to gratify the curiosity, or afford food for the reflection of the readers ‘at home.’

The writer of the article then goes on to list a number of cases that had appeared on the ‘very heavy calendar’ during the recent assizes. But it wasn’t until a few years after the Murray and Vidil cases emerged to such universal acclaim that colonial Australia was able to boast of an international murder sensation of its own when, in late 1865, the story of the Kinder Tragedy first came to light.

News of the Kinder Tragedy began with reports of an inquest into the violent death of a Henry Kinder on 7 October 1865. Kinder was an official at the City Bank and lived with his young family in a comfortable home on Sydney’s north shore. Originally an Englishman, Kinder had arrived in the colonies from New Zealand with his wife, Maria, two years earlier. They were respectable and relatively affluent, though Kinder had lately been on leave from his position at the bank due to alcoholism. The inquest was conducted at Dind’s Hotel—Kinder’s local drinking place—and testimonies were delivered by Maria Kinder, a family friend named Henry Bertrand, an associate from the City Bank named William Cooper and a Dr Eichler, the medic who had tended Kinder’s injuries in the week before he died.

Mr and Mrs Kinder, photographed by the Milligan Brothers. Published in A complete report of the examination in the alleged murder case of the late Henry Kinder, by Henry Louis Bertrand, 1865. Special Collections, Baillieu Library, University of Melbourne. Image courtesy of Photography and Digital Imaging, University of Melbourne.

The evidence presented at the inquest was of a man who had been drinking, was restless and excitable, who sometimes experienced fits or seizures when upset, smoked heavily, was careless about his personal appearance and anxious about some unpaid debts. Maria Kinder stated they had argued on the evening Kinder shot himself, and that he had often threatened suicide. Bertrand, a successful Sydney dentist who saw the Kinders socially almost every day, deposed that Kinder had been drinking freely, that he had challenged Bertrand to a duel, and that he was jealous of his wife with every person (‘he was a monomaniac on that point’). William Cooper praised Kinder’s work at the bank. He said he was a heavy drinker but could stand a good deal of liquor.

According to Bertrand and Maria Kinder they had been in the Kinders’ drawing room with Henry Kinder and Bertrand’s wife Jane on Monday evening 2 October when Kinder suddenly shot himself in the head. Dr Eichler described having been called in around five hours later to treat a large laceration, which had caused Kinder’s ear to hang away from its proper place. The wound had torn his face open from the jaw to the temple. It was bleeding heavily and partly filled with clotted blood. Eichler described his treatments before offering his opinion that the deceased was an imbecile. Kinder was awake and remained conscious throughout the week, lingering until the Friday when he died.

The jury’s verdict that Henry Kinder had committed suicide during a fit of temporary insanity came as no surprise. Apart from the erratic behaviour assigned to Kinder by his wife and his close friend, his alcoholism may have suggested insanity: the two conditions were often seen as being linked in nineteenth-century medical and popular opinion.² The act of suicide itself was also sometimes viewed as evidence of insanity. Describing the forms of evidence that were legally admissible in proving lunacy in his groundbreaking Dictionary of Psychological Medicine (1892), English physician and mental health expert Daniel Hack Tuke noted that historically, ‘where the question under judicial investigation is the suicide itself, very slight evidence of derangement at the time will warrant a coroner’s jury in finding a verdict of insanity’.³

The inquest into the death of Henry Kinder was described in the Brisbane Courier as having caused ‘some sensation’ at the time. But this was nothing compared with the outpouring of public excitement two months later, when Henry Bertrand, his wife Jane Bertrand and Maria Kinder were charged with Kinder’s murder. Gossip about their involvement in Kinder’s death had been circulating in Sydney for some time before the arrests were made: ‘About a fortnight ago rumours that Bertrand and Mrs Kinder were implicated in the death of Mr Kinder excited great interest in Sydney,’ wrote one journalist in the Maitland Mercury, ‘but the matter seemed to be shrouded in mystery.’ Such speculation and mystery served only to escalate public interest in the case when it finally came to trial. Combined with the intense coverage by the press, this widespread sense of fascination saw the Kinder Tragedy grow into a sensation across the Australian colonies as well as in New Zealand (where the Kinders were well known) and even, to a degree, in Britain.

During the trial the Sydney newspapers had been requested not to publish the evidence presented until proceedings were complete, but this did little to dampen the enthusiasm of the reporters (or to diminish the publication of information and speculation about the case). Where evidence had to be suppressed, reporters filled their columns with background information and personal opinion. A correspondent for the Bathurst Free Press gave his views on the demeanours of the accused:

The two ladies were accommodated with chairs, and I must say neither one nor the other displayed any outward appearance of having been implicated in the awful crime of murder. More than that I am very strongly impressed with the belief that this appearance will be borne out by the facts when the case comes to a close. However, perhaps I have no right to say this, and certainly at present I know nothing of the evidence excepting from rumour … I did not like the appearance of the gentleman so well as the lady defendant.

It was only a matter of days, however, before the trial reports were added to the mass of material published about the case. In turn, these were recycled in chapbooks and pamphlets and accompanied by souvenir images of the protagonists.

When news of the case reached Britain, the story of the ‘Bertrand Kinder Tragedy’ was published in London’s Penny Despatch, and articles appeared in major metropolitan newspapers. A report in the Glasgow Herald compared the case to a recent story of cannibalism, granting it superior status in the register of heinous criminality: ‘Cannibalism, not unnaturally, makes one’s flesh creep; but such diabolical villainy and crime as appears in the Kinder case rouses every feeling of loathing and detestation in the human soul.’ The reasons for giving the Kinder Tragedy such precedence, the writer of the article explains, lay in the case’s shocking realism and authenticity: ‘The Sydney tale of murder and poison owes nothing to romantic pens, but comes to us as it was exposed in a court of justice, save where the reporters throw a decent veil over horrors too gross even to mention in a whisper.’

Such passing gestures to social and journalistic propriety were common: ‘I wish to skim lightly over this mass of moral ordure,’ wrote an Auckland correspondent for London’s Morning Post. ‘I envy not the man who would wish to probe it to its lowest depths.’ But this writer goes on, of course—as every commentator did—to mine the case’s darkest details. The available sources for this kind of excavation ran deep. A series of passionate love letters and a melodramatic journal kept by Bertrand had been found, and these were also published for widespread circulation—adding considerably to the intrigue surrounding the case and providing ample material for speculation (as well as titillation).

The sensation surrounding the case arose from the idea of ‘profligacy, and something akin to madness, [occurring] in a respectable circle’. Henry Kinder was a younger brother of a well-known Anglican minister and headmaster of Auckland Grammar School. But even beyond such conventional social connections, there was a sense of glamour to the case. Those involved were young, good-looking, affluent and fashionable. Their relationships were wildly unorthodox and almost everyone who had come within their orbit had strange tales to tell. Maria Kinder was invested with a kind of seductive malice and Henry Bertrand with a deep eccentricity and charisma. Racist stereotypes of his Jewish heritage were invoked: in one article he is referred to repeatedly as ‘Bertrand, the Jew’. He was cast as ‘a man of low grovelling appetites, conjoined with considerable force of character and an unbending will … [who] did not scruple to prostitute every faculty of his mind to pander to his lusts’.

Bertrand’s distinctive traits and peculiar behaviour added greatly to the case’s sense of intrigue, but perhaps most fascinating of all was his professed ability to control others using hypnosis. The place of hypnotism in the case highlights its status during the nineteenth century as being, in the words of cultural historian Daniel Pick, ‘on the cusp between tawdry theatre, mysticism and the medical curriculum; between erotic enchantment, spiritual mystery and salubrious scientific pursuit’.⁴ As a dentist who treated Sydney’s social elite, Bertrand had been successful in managing pain with hypnotism at a time when chloroform was one of the few alternatives. But he also brought its application into his social life, using it as a tool of seduction and malign influence. In this sense, he anticipated another well-known hypnotist, the malevolent Svengali from George Du Maurier’s novel Trilby—a book that created an international sensation of its own when published in 1894.

The emphasis given to hypnosis in the case was partly generated by Bertrand himself. Alexander Bellhouse (one of the witnesses at his trial) related his earlier claims that ‘he was a powerful mesmerist, and had great power over people that way; that he had great influence over his wife and could do what he liked with her’. Bertrand’s sister, Harriett Kerr, saw his efforts in mind control as part of his wider eccentricity, testifying, ‘he would imitate the roar of a tiger and had done it in the street; he always professed to have an idea that he could mesmerise people’. Maria Kinder, likewise, related Henry Bertrand’s tendency to dominance and brutality with his hypnotic powers, once revealing to another protagonist in the case, Francis Jackson (as he stated later in court), that ‘she feared Bertrand … and spoke of him as being able to compel her to do things against her will, having a sort of clairvoyance over her or mesmeric influence’.

But as the story of the months leading up to Henry Kinder’s death unfolded, Maria Kinder was viewed with little sympathy for all that she claimed to have acted under Bertrand’s spell. Bertrand ‘dabbled in mesmerism and clairvoyance’, wrote one commentator, ‘using, it is alleged, his gifts as charms to bring innocent females within his unhallowed influence. He met his equal in character, his equal in daring, and more than his equal in unscrupulousness in the bad woman Kinder.’

If analysts of the case loved to dwell on Bertrand’s dangerous powers of hypnosis, they were perhaps even more seduced by the idea of Maria Kinder as a femme fatale, whose passions had driven the men around her to insanity and murder. Perceptions of her magnetic sexuality, infidelity, gold-digging and cunning criminality coalesced with stereotypes of the evil woman that were circulating in the sensational popular fiction of the time, such as Lucy Graham in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s bestselling novel, Lady Audley’s Secret (1862).

Maria Kinder first met Henry Bertrand as a patient at his Wynyard Square practice, and their relationship quickly evolved into an illicit affair. They did little to conceal it from family and friends, who seem to have looked on with a peculiar level of acceptance. They called upon Bertrand’s young assistant, Alfred Burne, as messenger and he carried letters between them. He had often witnessed Mrs Kinder staying over at the Bertrands’ house. The two couples socialised together, but after a while Bertrand grew jealous. He confided to Burne that he was ‘in the habit of having connexion’ with Maria Kinder and that Kinder would soon commit suicide.

Shortly after the lovers met, Francis Jackson, another key figure in the case, arrived on the scene. He had been Maria Kinder’s lover in New Zealand and upon meeting again in Sydney, Jackson and Maria Kinder quickly rekindled their affair. During his testimony at the trial he described having orchestrated drinking sessions with Henry Kinder so that he could have his way with Maria when the banker fell unconscious. Meanwhile Bertrand sought to play his rivals, Jackson and Kinder, against each other. He tried to incite Kinder to violence and then threatened to implicate Jackson in Kinder’s death if he remained in Sydney. To get him out of the way, Bertrand offered to pay Jackson’s passage back to New Zealand and Jackson took the money and departed, but travelled only as far as Maitland in regional New South Wales.

Meanwhile, Bertrand was also plotting against Kinder. He bought a hatchet and asked his assistant, Alfred Burne, to drill a hole in the handle so that he could carry it under his jacket on a cord. He told Burne that he intended to knock out Kinder’s brains. He asked him to hire a boat, and they rowed to a wharf near the Kinders’ home on the north shore around midnight, intending to break in through a window. This was the first of three missions. Bertrand’s behaviour became increasingly bizarre with each attempt, but he failed to accomplish the murder.

Several weeks after these failed attempts Bertrand asked his assistant if he kept a pistol. Burne, who was an amateur theatrical performer, replied that he did, but that he used it for ‘conjuring—for wizarding’. Bertrand asked him if he knew where one could be bought, and they arranged to meet in the city. Bertrand would be disguised as a woman. That evening they managed to find some pistols for sale at Levey’s, a pawnshop in George Street. The next morning Bertrand asked Burne to buy a sheep’s head from the butcher. Back at his Wynyard Square surgery he cast his own bullets before testing them out by firing at the sheep’s head.

Just two weeks after these strange events, Kinder was dead. According to Jane Bertrand’s later testimony, she and Maria Kinder had been standing by the Kinders’ drawing room window arranging flowers when they heard a shot. They turned to see Kinder drooping in his seat by the piano, a pistol falling from his hand, Bertrand standing over him. Bertrand forced his wife to look at Kinder—‘to look at him well’—and tend to his gruesome injuries. Meanwhile, Bertrand and Maria Kinder ‘were acting in an improper manner, such as walking up and down the verandah with their arms around each other’s waists’.

Dr Eichler was sent for and arrived a few hours later. Kinder was conscious but sank into a wordless stupor when the doctor told him to put his affairs in order. Over the next days a Dr Wright, W.F. Dind, the local publican and a Constable Emerton, who had heard rumours of the incident, visited. Bertrand was present each time. Kinder told Emerton that he did not shoot himself but when asked who had shot him, Kinder subsequently refused to reply. The next day, 5 October, Eichler examined Kinder again and found him much improved. That evening at the surgery Bertrand showed to Alfred Burne a phial of white liquid, telling him it was the poison he would use to murder Kinder. On 6 October Kinder died.

Following the coroner’s inquest into Henry Kinder’s death on 7 October, Bertrand and Maria Kinder continued their affair. She came to live with Bertrand and his wife, who was sometimes forced to share a bed with the lovers—a salacious detail that generated nearly as much moral outrage as the murder itself: ‘What name shall we bestow on Bertrand, the Jew,’ demanded one commentator, ‘who compelled his own wife to share the bed with himself and the widow of his victim? The story would be incredible if the evidence were not overwhelming, that these three unnatural beings descended to this, the lowest depth of human infamy.’ For the most part, however, Jane Bertrand was viewed with sympathy. Bertrand had been increasingly brutal to her—once flogging her with Maria Kinder’s riding crop. He repeatedly threatened to murder her, a detail confirmed by Bertrand’s sister Harriet Kerr, who had come from Melbourne to live with her brother and his wife around 20 October. Kerr’s account of Jane Bertrand’s reaction to this abuse marks a continuum between Bertrand’s hypnotic influence and outright violence. She is described as somnambulant, catatonic: ‘She used to sleep a great deal … it was not natural … it was more like a stupor.’

Meanwhile, around 10 October, Bertrand received a letter from Francis Jackson attempting to blackmail him by threatening to expose his relationship with Maria Kinder and his involvement in Henry Kinder’s death. Bertrand went to the police. Jackson was prosecuted and sentenced to twelve months hard labour at Parramatta jail. Sensing the increasing likelihood of a scandal, Maria Kinder had left Sydney with her children to stay with her parents in Bathurst. Bertrand telegraphed the news of Jackson’s sentencing to her there, as well as expressing his feelings in the diary he kept for her to read when they were reunited: ‘It pleased me,’ he wrote, ‘I am satisfied. Thus once more perish my enemies.’ Along with Maria Kinder’s passionate letters to Bertrand, the diary became a centrepiece of the evidence at their trial.

Between dramatic declarations of love and expressions of violence Bertrand recorded details of his health, business and social life in the diary. After Maria Kinder departed for Bathurst, Mary Robertson was increasingly central to its pages. The wife of a naval captain who was away at sea, Robertson socialised with the Bertrands and afterwards Henry would walk her home late at night. He tried forcing her to kiss him and threatened violence against his wife if she refused. Eventually Bertrand confessed to Robertson that he had murdered Kinder, and then threatened to murder her also—looming over her in a stairwell with a sharpening steel.

Mary Robertson reported Bertrand’s violence to the police, and mentioned that he had confessed to killing Kinder. He was sentenced to fourteen days imprisonment for assaulting Robertson, and during this time new inquiries were made. Bertrand’s surgery was searched and letters and poems, his diary, a bottle marked poison, a pistol, gunpowder, caps and a tomahawk were seized. Bertrand was charged with Kinder’s murder, as was Jane Bertrand, for her supposed role in mixing the poison with which he was finally killed. Meanwhile, Detective Henry Wager travelled to Bathurst to arrest Maria Kinder as an accessory after the fact. He found in a trunk with her children’s clothes the pistol that had killed her husband. She was charged and taken to Sydney for trial.

A hearing was held at the Water Police Court in the first week of December to establish a case against the three accused. Kinder’s body had been exhumed and the stomach analysed for any traces of the belladonna that was supposed to have poisoned him. A long list of witnesses was called including Dr Eichler, Francis Jackson, Mary Robertson and Alfred Burne. But what was viewed as the most convincing evidence came from Bertrand’s sister. Harriet Kerr stated that Bertrand had come to her bedroom one afternoon and confessed to killing Kinder.

When the trial began at Sydney’s Central Criminal Court on 15 February 1866, William Bede Dalley, Bertrand’s lawyer (and later a politician and statesman), raised the question of his hypnotic powers as evidence of his melodramatic disposition and potential insanity. Bertrand’s claims to ‘power supernatural and physical’, he told the jury, ‘only the wildest maniac would pretend to exercise’. Meanwhile, the press raised the perceived dangers and possible forms of deviance associated with hypnosis. An editorial in the Sydney Morning Herald commented that ‘in the course of the investigation statements have been made of mesmeric influence, by which it is alleged that the minds of certain persons are captured to the will of others. We doubt if this subject can long escape the jurisdiction of the courts.’

Despite testimony that she had mixed the poison that had killed Kinder, the charge of murder against Jane Bertrand was dropped. Maria Kinder, likewise, escaped further prosecution due to lack of evidence. Bertrand was tried alone. The judge instructed the jury that though Bertrand was ‘steeped in wickedness and malignity scarcely equalled by the Tempter of mankind, the question to be decided by the evidence was “did he murder Kinder?”’ After deliberating for twenty hours without reaching agreement, the jury was dismissed. A second trial began on 22 February and was concluded the next day. This time the jury returned a guilty verdict after only two hours and Bertrand was sentenced to death.

The execution was set for 19 March 1866, but in the meantime a barrister named Julian Salomons (later Sir Julian Salomons, solicitor-general and chief justice) had become involved in Bertrand’s defence. He made appeals to the Supreme Court and to the Privy Council. These were successful, finally, because the evidence for the second trial had been read from the judge’s notes taken during the first, a decision subsequently viewed as a miscarriage of justice. Bertrand’s sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. Conspiracy theories soon grew up around this reprieve, with rumours that it was Bertrand’s Jewishness that had saved him. Stories of ‘the Jews’ subscribing money to assist Julian Salomons to ‘defend his compatriot’ persisted into the twentieth century. ‘Had Bertrand been a Christian and a poor man, the gallows would have claimed him for its own,’ concluded one editorial in the Queanbeyan Age in 1900.

The Kinder Tragedy was remembered as the ‘greatest criminal case on record in the Australian colonies’ as the century continued. Apart from the sensation it had created, a factor keeping interest in the case alive was the fact that Bertrand had evaded the death penalty. From time to time he was moved to a new prison, and a fresh spate of newspaper articles recalling the case would appear. New Zealand’s Wanganui Chronicle reported in September 1879 that he had been relocated to Darlinghurst, and was ‘considered a valuable acquisition to that institution’. Maria Kinder made the news just once after the trial had ended, in July 1867, when she announced her marriage to a Mr Stanley Williams of Greymouth, New Zealand. This hasty union led to comparisons with the celebrated English case of Madeleine Smith, who was said to have received numerous marriage proposals after being acquitted from charges of poisoning her husband.

During the twentieth century the Kinder case continued to appear in the occasional news article of old-time crimes and memories. By far the greatest rekindling of interest in the case, however, had come in 1894 with Bertrand’s release after twenty-eight years in prison—an event that was met with sensational headlines of ‘An old tragedy revived’. Maria Kinder was dead by then. After a night or two spent at the Hotel Metropole in Sydney, Bertrand left Australia for good. It was said that he had gone to live under an assumed name in Paris.

It is still the case that sensational stories of murder and violence can seem to dominate our news media, popular entertainment, and literary and cultural life. The gruesome discovery of twelve corpses slowly dissolving in drums of acid at Snowtown, South Australia; the search for the murderer of seven backpackers whose bodies were uncovered from shallow graves in the Belanglo State Forest; the mysterious murder of an English tourist on a remote stretch of highway near Barrow Creek in the Northern Territory; Melbourne’s notorious gangland killings: criminal cases such as these generate countless newspaper articles and editorials, media features and interviews, television re-enactments, documentaries, mini-series, films for television and even feature films such as Animal Kingdom (2010) and Snowtown (2011). They feed the publication of popular true-crime books with titles such as The Cruel City, Dirty Dozen and Big Shots as well as more literary efforts of reflection and understanding along the lines of significant works such as Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966) and Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song (1980). Local writer Helen Garner’s book Joe Cinque’s Consolation (2004), for example, looks at the trial and its aftermath of law student Anu Singh, who was convicted of killing her boyfriend with a lethal dose of heroin in 1997. Singh’s case also became the basis for Criminology, a play by Tom Wright and Lally Katz, which was performed at Melbourne’s Malthouse theatre in 2007. Chloe Hooper’s book The Tall Man (2008) likewise explores in detail a case that attracted intense media coverage: the death in custody of Palm Island resident Cameron Doomadgee in 2004 and the subsequent trial at Townsville of a police officer, Senior Sergeant Chris Hurley, on charges of assault and manslaughter.

The sense of public fascination that drives the proliferation of such sensational narratives of murder and bloodshed, crime and catastrophe—as well as some of the more literary and philosophical renderings that seek to unravel them—can seem like a peculiarly contemporary phenomenon, one partly driven by the frenetic pace of current-day communications and media technology. But a widespread taste for tales of death and destruction has long been with us—as shown by the popular murder ballads, criminal biographies, last dying speeches and their many variations that circulated in Britain and Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (and earlier). In her 1993 study Pictures at an Execution, cultural historian Wendy Lesser notes Plato’s reference to the unhealthy appetite for stories of murder in his Republic of 380 BC, quoting his objection to their ‘gratifying the soul’s foolish part’. ⁵ But the origins of the modern media sensation, as we know it now, might be more easily recognised in the sensational ‘newspaper murders’ of mid-nineteenth-century Britain. It was at this time in colonial Australia, too, that a fascination with the intimate details of thrilling and violent crimes such as the Kinder Tragedy was first elevated to the status of a national pastime.

Sources: All details relating to the case are drawn from contemporary newspaper accounts, in addition to the following publications:

Bertrand and Kinder Tragedy: Being the account of the extraordinary trial of Mr and Mrs Bertrand, and Mrs Kinder, and the subsequent trial and conviction of Louis Bertrand at the Criminal Court of New South Wales: for the murder of Henry Kinder, of the City Bank, Sydney: with portraits of Mr. and Mrs. Kinder and Mr. and Mrs. Bertrand; and a view of the residence of the former, T.A. Sidders, Melbourne, 1866.

A complete report of the trial in the alleged murder case of the late Henry Kinder: with all the correspondence, the diary, and four photographs by Milligan Brothers, 84 King Street, viz. Mr. & Mrs. Kinder and Mr. & Mrs. Bertrand, Caxton Steam Machine Printing Office, Sydney, 1865.

A Foreign Posting

2012-02-03T00:00:00Z

‘You’ve got to hang shit on the place,’ an ambitious journo mate urged me in early 1989 when I was sent to Brisbane to work as the correspondent for the Age. ‘Treat it like a foreign posting,’ said another who’d been there before me, adding I would ‘need a lifeline out’.

It wasn’t exactly New York. But Queensland, with its crime-commission-carnival atmosphere, rogues’ gallery of crooked cops, politicians and dodgy, white-shoe-brigade businessmen, was rich pickings—a page-three-one-day, page-one-the-next news story for a Melburnian journalist like me with a broadsheet pedigree and self-righteous sense of my home state’s superior cultural credentials. ‘It’s good to run away from the pack sometimes,’ the first friend, predatory wolf-journo that he was, had added sagely.

Former premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen, former police minister Russ Hinze, former police commissioner Terry Lewis and (then) soon-to-be-former Supreme Court judge Angelo Vasta: these men were caricatures of an undemocratic state political system riddled with cronyism and ‘a culture of corruption’, as Commissioner Tony Fitzgerald said in his report. We had our problems down south, but our institutions were, we were sure, of a better breed, although that proposition would later be found wanting when the Victorian Cain government’s economic credentials collapsed along with the state’s finances.

When I packed my bags and flew north, I got to view the circus close up as the courtrooms of Queensland’s capital became packed theatres of exposed bad behaviour on the part of officials both small time and big. Outside the sun shone daily as Queensland began to shed its scaly old skin. And it was a lawyers’ bonanza. There had been two and a half years of corruption allegations involving senior police, judges, cabinet ministers and favours paid for with cash-filled brown paper bags. Colourful criminal trials resulted. Some big fish went to jail.

In the lead-up to the election that would sweep away much of that corruption and cronyism, spring turned to summer and an atmosphere of expectation gathered. Angry people, expecting change, turned out in greater than usual force to demonstrate for nothing more than the right to demonstrate. I was there reporting but also half participating, swaying on a platform in the Queen Street mall with the crowd as, one by one, demonstrators were dragged into police vans and arrested while onlookers simultaneously celebrated and jeered in the certainty that the laws the cops were enforcing with what seemed a heavy hand would soon be trashed. Part of me was tempted to get arrested so I could write a story about what I speculated was certain to be my mistreatment by the Queensland police.

On 2 December 1989, when Labor’s Wayne Goss thumped to victory after thirty-two years of National Party government, I wrote in the Age:

Queensland is to join the rest of Australia. The state, it appears, is ready to ditch its defiantly maverick status in favour of a political philosophy that applauds and rewards educated decision making and accountable government.

Was Queensland really that different from the rest of Australia? When, at twenty-seven, I arrived to live in Brisbane, I stayed at the Sheraton hotel for a couple of weeks while looking for somewhere to live. Having found a room in a share house, I invited my new housemates, a film-industry couple from Sydney, to dinner at the hotel’s silver service restaurant. The woman had bought a dress for the occasion but the manageress took issue with the boyfriend’s pants, which she said were jeans and a breach of the dress code. We three women looked him up and down like a cattle-yard specimen, arguing for a while about the definition of jeans. Finally he and we were allowed to stay, a good business decision on the restaurant’s part since it was almost empty. What followed was a poor excuse for a silver service meal, in which I noted and later wrote (with what I now see as arrogant smart-arsery) about the gaucheries of those hapless hospitality workers who were no doubt just trying to do their job as instructed. For me it summed up Queensland at that time: so full of conservative ideals, so unable to live up to them, so reluctant to let go of them.

I grew up in Melbourne but something had always pulled me north. Put it down to being born in a place where smothered optimism is what you feel when the low grey-blanket sky quickly conquers the half-sunny morning, as it so frequently does, without a fight. The smell of wood-smoke or the sound of an Aussie Rules footy match on a radio can perk you up, but only momentarily. The landscape remains grey and flat, the shadows on the roads deep and long, the inner city’s tram-tracked streets still towered over by high-rise housing commission estates, from which people scurry and the more desperate have been known to jump.

Others, similarly weighed down by Melbourne, a famous example being playwright David Williamson, chose Sydney to liberate their minds and bodies from those six-month-plus winters in what Leo Schofield cruelly termed ‘bleak city’ before he changed his mind and took up a lucrative arts post there. Sydney sparkled and swaggered. Queensland was seen as an intellectual backwater as well as a police state. But for me it was a breath of fresh air—a fucking great story in a semi-tropical location.

There seemed no end to the people on the take, the crass money, the religious nutters, the bizarre crime stories—which were probably no more bizarre than anywhere else when I think about it. (Why are we always tempted to blame a crime on its location?) They contrasted with the sheer physical beauty of a place so full of exotic smells, trees dripping with mangoes and ramshackle wooden houses with vertical-join weather boards that rattled when you walked through them to outside decks with better-than-Bali sunsets.

But it was a beauty ever under threat from ugly highways and overpasses, fast-buck tourist developers with greedy eyes on the state’s natural wonders and city lunch outlets with dishes drenched in melted cheese and equally drippy hospitality. It was also a place where you could still fight for something like the right to march in the streets or to not be persecuted by police for being homosexual; or to save the Daintree rainforest. And it was a place where indigenous issues were close enough to touch your white consciousness if not your white conscience.

I visited an Aboriginal community at Yarrabah, south of Cairns, where I met a seventeen-year-old petrol sniffer who told me a doctor said he’d be dead in three months. He was so matter of fact about it, as though it were a calling. In May 1989 I flew to Murray Island in the Torres Strait to cover a sitting of the Supreme Court, one of the first court hearings of the Mabo case. On the small plane over, I met a local kid coming home after six months in jail for, from what I could gather, what was at worst a bungled, small-time break and enter (which the angel-faced teenager denied), and at best a complete miscarriage of justice by an overzealous legal system. Dressed in acid wash jeans, which he’d bought for $80 of the income he’d earned in the clink, the kid was jumping out of his skin as the plane descended over the azure water to the tiny island—known to locals as Mer—of his and Eddie Mabo’s birth.

‘See it, see it?’ he said as we hit 5000 feet. ‘Do you like it?’

He was worried what his dad would say about him getting into trouble in Cairns. But his excitement to be home outweighed it. We sat on a trailer hooked up to the back of a tractor that met our plane after we landed on a grass strip at the top of the island. Our transport rocked and wobbled down the hill, our legs dangling over the sides as locals chatted up a storm about their visit to the mainland.

We were four days on Murray, where people drifted in and out of a makeshift court in the community hall and where wigged and gowned barristers stood looking incongruous before a multicoloured bar table addressing Justice Martin Moynihan, who looked even more out of place at a red and yellow floral ‘bench’ in front of a joyous island mural. At the end of this historic far north Queensland Supreme Court sojourn, women with brightly coloured dresses and flowers in their hair and men in shorts and crisply ironed short-sleeved shirts farewelled us with gifts of hats hand woven from banana leaves and adorned with pink hibiscus. Even the gowned barristers got into the spirit and swapped their horsehair wigs for them.

On Murray Island I saw the fish traps on which rested part of the Mabo challenge to the colonial British legal concept of terra nullius. I watched the children dancing at the water’s edge as small sharks chased schools of sardines into the shore. I ate the day’s fresh catch with yam chips from the local fish and chip. This, it was hard to fathom, was Queensland too. It was also Australia.

At the opposite end of the vast state’s reaches were parts of northern New South Wales that may as well have been Queensland if atmospherics were anything to go by. One of them was the hot dusty dead-end community of Toomelah in the far north inland of New South Wales where the then president of the Human Rights Commission and now disgraced former judge, Marcus Einfeld, once wept as he walked through the place’s raw sewage in rolled up suit pants and later ordered an inquiry into the living conditions of indigenous people there. I flew there from Brisbane for his return a year later where not much, apart from a bit of infrastructure, seemed to have changed although constructive noises were made by all concerned. Just another of those going-nowhere places in the middle of Australia’s nowhere.

The thing I remember most about the Toomelah job is the storm our tiny plane flew into on the way back to Brisbane. As our aircraft bounced around like a cigarette butt in the surf, the pilot looked younger by the second, my guts leapt to my mouth at ever-decreasing intervals and I lamented that afternoon that this story was neither bad enough nor good enough to die for.

In Queensland, more than anywhere else I’ve worked, so much of a journalist’s life is about being on the road, driving fast, or flying in tiny planes, for hours at a time to get to some far-flung state or federal electorate, to understand what makes its people tick and why they will or won’t vote an incumbent back in, or visiting a remote Aboriginal community, the Barrier Reef or the Daintree. Blackfellas, barramundi, bananas, pineapples, sharks, crocs and extreme weather events: there is no need for contrivance. These are among the many motifs that parade through Queensland’s stories, a metaphorical mural of its life and culture.

On 20 October 1989 I chartered a two-seater and once again overcame my fear of flying to go with an ex-RAAF pilot from Brisbane to cover what was then the worst road crash in Australian transport history. A semi-trailer driver, full of ephedrine, had hit a Brisbane-bound passenger bus on the Pacific Highway on the North Coast of New South Wales near Grafton. Twenty-one people died and twenty-two were injured.

When we got there eight hours after the impact, the dead and injured had been ferried to a handful of regional hospitals. Huge skid marks scarred the thin track of road, a stretch of which was still closed. A toothbrush, false teeth and a small plastic doll remained. As I noted them, I shivered in the quiet emptiness and lush beauty of the tall green grass and misty hills beyond, registering the unspeakable irony that this scene of such recent hell now, again, passed for paradise. Away we drove at speed ourselves from hospital to hospital hunting like pack wolves for bus crash survivors with their tales of good and bad luck. One lost seven members of his family. My story, which appeared on page one of the Age the next day, below an aerial photograph of the ripped-open bus, said:

In the eerie silence immediately after the Grafton bus crash, Graham Wilson found himself lying in a puddle on the Pacific Highway. He counted 18 bodies around him. The 18th body he counted was that of a child he had befriended hours before on the bus to Brisbane when the victims of Australia’s worst road smash were watching videos and drinking pineapple soft drinks.

The juxtaposition of happiness or beauty with something darkly opposite would often haunt me that year in Queensland. When I visited the friend of a friend at an idyllic farmhouse on a hilltop inland from Noosa, a small crowd came to watch the shooting of a pig. It’s with embarrassment that I look back on even having been there, of knowing such people as these posturing middle-aged backwoodsmen, jack-of-all-trades Queensland locals both new and old.

‘Any of youse feminists want to cut off the pig’s balls?’ said one of the men who’d helped wrangle the beast. I made mental notes of the scene although I’d refused to watch the actual killing. I knew I would want to tell that story sometime. Is that what a journalist does or is it, I now wonder, just a voyeur’s alibi? Back then I believed passionately in the journalist’s role as societal watchdog. But now I am less sure, more critical of the profession and its ego and adrenalin-driven nature. And what of the motivations of the other onlookers there that day? There was a sense, again, that life in Queensland was different. More raw. More bloody. More real. But it was a pride of identity that felt faked up to me, a poor excuse for primitive entertainment.

Yet this was not the whole story. I remember too tours down the Daintree River with conservationists who inspired me with their passion for the World Heritage listed forest, its river and its ecosystem. One guide railed against the injustice of hunting crocodiles that had the temerity to eat swimmers who chanced it in the river after a few too many cans on a balmy night, or the stupidity of teaching crocodiles to jump up at meat dangled from boats by tourist operators to create a spectacle for their paying hordes. If you listened, there were many such voices to be heard in Queensland. It’s just that they lacked clout.

A week before the 2 December 1989 Queensland election, I wrote the following introduction to a feature story, the headline for which was, ‘Will Queensland be born again?’

About midday next Sunday, the whine of power tools in Brisbane’s suburbs will give way to the smell of barbecues. Bare-chested men will alight from cars carrying cartons of Fourex towards meaty celebrations of nothing in particular. Straw hatted women will trail behind them wearing colourful cotton dresses, carrying plates of food under plastic … The men will drink from cans of beer in cooling foam containers. The women will drink from glasses. Smoke will curl through Hills hoists, past stainless steel garages and station-wagons. Meat will be burnt and eaten. This will happen regardless of who wins the Queensland election next Saturday.

When that story was published, some of my Queensland-born journalist colleagues were pissed off at the way I’d portrayed their state. Even though I was a tourist on their turf, I’d been accepted as a fellow traveller of sorts in the battle for political change in Queensland. I’d been grateful for their help.

In my piece for the Age I’d referred to the drinking culture in Queensland and how, mixed with heat, it was a dangerous combination. I cited domestic disputes I’d witnessed in the back yard of a house a few doors down and within sight of the house I’d once stayed in for six weeks. I spoke of politicians engaging in crude jokes and lewd behaviour towards women. I talked of Queensland’s beauty but also of many of its small-town ways. I emphasised that these were one southerner’s view. Yet some of my Brisbane colleagues felt I’d gone too far.

Years later I was hired by one such critic, an ex-Brisbane journalist for whom I still have much respect and affection. She reiterated to me how she’d ‘hated that piece you did about Queensland’. I told her I thought it was one of the best I’d ever written. We still disagreed. But at least we could laugh about it. I didn’t tell her about an anecdote I’d self-censored from the piece.

Not long before I left Brisbane, a friend had a yacht on which, along with a bunch of journos, I went out sailing one Saturday. The women prepared the food while the men stayed on deck sucking from cans. As we sailed around Moreton Bay on that glorious early summer afternoon, one by one the blokes squashed their empties, broke them in half and threw them into the water: ‘It’ll make a reef,’ they told me. If I looked like I had a problem with that, the urge to express it was extinguished by a belligerent burp that seemed to say: ‘Fucking southern greenies. Think you know everything. This is our state and we’ll do what we like.’ Until then I’d mistakenly thought these Queensland journos and I were more or less of a similar mind. In the end Queensland, in my experience, really was that different—in all the good ways, but also the bad.

Balgo

2012-01-31T00:00:00Z

It’s not what you expect to find in the desert: a rustic sandstone church, complete with picturesque spire, rural gothic in style, incongruous and quaint in the flat, arid landscape. The church, with its picture-book statue of Jesus out front, is the most distinct and unlikely landmark in Balgo, a small indigenous community deep in the heart of Western Australia’s Great Sandy Desert, just south of the Wolf Creek Crater.

I had long wanted to visit Balgo, home to Warlayirti Artists, one of Australia’s oldest and most successful indigenous art centres. The town’s isolation, in my mind, added to its allure. A Google Maps aerial image of Balgo showed a compact, seemingly orderly town, looped around a heart-like, red-dirt football oval. Several unsealed roads led in and out, nothing but desert for hundreds of kilometres around. (The closest town is Halls Creek, 300 km north.)

The neatness of Balgo’s configuration, when viewed in that aerial photo, was vaguely disappointing. I was counting on an ‘authentic’ experience, already bringing my cultural baggage and expectations to bear. I would soon be reminded how much detail is excised by the map-like impression of aerial shots. On the ground, Balgo was bracingly ‘authentic’, my first experience of life in a remote indigenous town, with its riches and challenges, its starkness and beauty, its silences and laughter.

Balgo is an area associated with the ancestral kingfisher, the Luurnpa, a bird I never expected to see in the desert. But there it was, perching on power lines, a sacred sign of water in the desert, of life-giving rock holes and streams, teeming with fishes and mussels that materialise seemingly from nowhere.

Nor did I expect to find a structure as lovely and loaded as the Balgo church. As a lapsed Catholic, I was both drawn to and unsettled by this curiously romantic sight, which spoke of colonisation and the imposition of white man’s ways and beliefs. Balgo was founded as a mission in 1939 by Catholic Pallottine priests, and while the mission ended in the 1970s, the Catholic presence here remains strong. The church was built in 1965, when the mission moved from Old Balgo to its current location in Balgo Hills (Wirrimanu), forged from solid stone blocks carted in from Old Man Rock in Darbai, about a half-hour’s drive from Balgo, with the help of locals including two of the town’s best-known artists, Helicopter Tjungurrayi and Brandy Tjungurrayi.

The church stands as a symbol of the determination—some may say conceit—of Catholic priests, who brought their faith to the far reaches of this ancient continent. The people they were coming to convert had a deeply spiritual world view of their own, arising from thousands of years of intimate connection to their land and ancestral stories. During my week in Balgo I was struck by the counter determination—quiet and resolute—of indigenous people to maintain their culture and spirituality while accepting and integrating the faith, ideas and symbolism of the newcomers. Anthropologist Howard Morphy has described Aboriginal art as ‘dynamic and changing, responsive to new circumstances and challenges, influenced as well as influential’. It is inferred that so too are indigenous people, and inside Balgo’s small, beautiful church hangs a sprawling painting that is a moving testament to their ability to adapt, to embrace other modes of being and merge them into their own spirituality.

One sunny, winter afternoon the Balgo parish’s Sister Alice Dempsey unlocked the church, invited me into its cool, quiet interior and showed me that painting. Even after all these years, Sister Alice’s accent signals her Irish roots. She has lived in Balgo since 1981, having fallen for the town and its people on her first brief visit. She returned to Ireland for a time, but the desert, so different to her native Ireland, kept calling her back. ‘There is a great spirit here, there is a mighty spirit,’ she says, in her strong, evocative accent.

Her passion became evident when she began to explain the large painting hanging behind the altar. The painting looks as though it has been executed on a long sturdy canvas with hardy acrylics. Instead, it was created using simple poster paint, applied on two of the poorest, thinnest pieces of calico available, sewn together by Sister Alice.

In 1982, at her request, several local men began work on the painting. ‘I asked them to do it and they were perplexed because they didn’t really know what to do, and I didn’t know what to tell them. I said, “Use your own symbols.” When I saw them drawing birds and boomerangs, I was thinking, oh my Lord, what’s this going to be like?’ she says.

Jesus’ journey is symbolised by footprints along a meandering stream. Around this central, snaking stream the artists have painted a wild assortment of icons and images from two disparate worlds—the crown of thorns, a chalice, the nails with which Christ was crucified, the three crosses on the mount, boomerangs, spears, the paw prints of dingos and kangaroos, trees, fishes, snakes.

‘They have it all there, the whole world, the whole creation, so that’s a tremendous piece,’ Sister Alice says.

The contemporary Balgo art movement grew out of these early religious banners. Indeed it was Sister Alice who ran the first art classes in Balgo, at the adult education centre, at the prompting of a local man, Matthew Gill. ‘Matthew also did [paintings] of the Stations of the Cross where he depicted Jesus as a turkey. They’re absolutely daring, but they speak very loudly to you. He gave Jesus the totem of the turkey, so he was really taking Jesus into their culture,’ she says.

The longer Sister Alice talks, the more I am struck by how profoundly touched she is by indigenous culture and art. Daringly, I put it to her that Catholics came to change the local people, to ‘convert’, and yet in some ways they themselves were ‘converted’. She pauses for a moment and then says, ‘You can hold both, you can hold both,’ repeating the sentiment like a mantra.

A short walk from the church is Balgo’s famed art centre, housed in a functional, long and low-slung building, with an exterior of corrugated iron painted a rich rust-brown. To Sister Alice, this is Balgo’s ‘cathedral of beauty’. It is a fair description of the gallery, which is ablaze with the colours of the desert, accentuated by the Balgo artists’ pulsating, wild palettes and dynamic designs: the spontaneous, swirling loops and arcs of Eubena Nampitjin, the hallucinogenic sandhills of Geraldine Nowee, the network of creeks and waterholes, ceremonial poles and bush foods, painted in bold pinks, oranges and mauves by Miriam Baadjo, to name a few.

‘The beauty of those paintings cannot be overstated. Even yesterday when I was talking to you [at the art centre] I was completely distracted [by them],’ Sister Alice says. Her response is not unusual. I saw it again and again during the week as visitors to Balgo came face to face with the art.

The land and the luminous paintings that conjure it are the conduits between two starkly different cultures. It is through the paintings, and through the land, that whitefellas, or kartiyas, instinctively start to glimpse something of indigenous spirituality and culture. The paintings are a sacred evocation of the land, an aerial mapping far more mythic, cosmic and whole than could ever be achieved by a clinical Google image.

In her 1993 book Images of Power: Aboriginal Art of the Kimberley, Judith Ryan, the National Gallery of Victoria’s senior curator of indigenous art, put it this way: ‘A child is said not to reproduce what is seen but to construct a schema of what is known to be there. This is also true of the sophisticated art of Balgo.’

Aboriginal art’s ability to be ‘influenced and influential’ is a quality that seems so rare in these times of adversarial ego-politics, of hostility and conflict, of opponents sticking doggedly to their rigid points of view, political or religious, rather than finding a common humanity. After I leave Balgo, Sister Alice’s words linger: You can hold both. It should be a mantra for our times.

The Road

2012-01-25T00:00:00Z

Traffic is like nature. Traffic flows and banks up, it weaves and surges. Traffic makes shadows and streams. It hums and screeches and throbs. Traffic glows in the dark. Traffic can be heavy or light, like the rain. You and your car are part of the traffic yet you also observe this phenomenon, ‘traffic’, as if you were not implicated in it at all.

Over the past four-and-a-half years I’ve spent at least one thousand hours, in traffic, on the M80 Western Ring Road, driving between my home in Altona and my workplace at La Trobe University, Bundoora.

I can scan a line of cars as if they were clouds. I can anticipate a squall of cars or a dense fog of them, a welcome burst of speedy sunshine and space, the many moods of the road. I have learnt to read the road like a lover’s face.

Many days I spent more time with the road than I did with my partner and my children. I would often leave our house very early, at 6 am, to beat the traffic. Everyone would be asleep. I would tip-toe about the dark house, getting dressed, eating quickly, closing the door quietly behind me. Some mornings I would see the 5.58 am Flinders Street train pulling into the platform or moving off. The silver carriages glowed a joyful yellow and the level-crossing bells rang out across Truganina Swamp. But most mornings it was just the car and me, reversing into the dark, empty, silent street.

Our solitude never lasted long. We were soon joined by hundreds of other couples, driver and car, together alone on the slip-roads and freeways.

Like any lover, I was jealous of our moments together. I didn’t want to share my road with others. I hated the crowds. I wanted us to be alone, a foolish fantasy. But no matter how much I tried to time it right, we were never alone. Not at 6 am, not at 9.30 am, not at 6 pm or 7 or 8 either.

Even so, I planned our encounters carefully. I brought the road little offerings: a water bottle, a mixed berry muffin, a take-away latte. I selected mood music such as Gillian Welch, Black Mountain, Jolie Holland, The The, Public Enemy, Steve Earl, Iron and Wine, Lucinda Williams live, practice CDs for the various choirs I’ve sung in, epic concept albums such as Neil Young’s Noise or Mogwai’s latest: Hard Core Will Never Die but You Will.

Treat ’em mean to keep ’em keen. The road plays hard to get. The road is loose. The road is a hold out. There is never enough of the road to go around and there never will be, no matter how many extra lanes are added. And they are being added, right now. Have you noticed?

Stay calm, don’t react, don’t respond, stay in the left-hand lane, stick to the speed limit, ignore dickheads, drunks, speed freaks, the buzz of your mobile phone because ‘M8 it can W8’. Never ever give someone the finger or the fist.

The Western Ring Road, also known as the Metropolitan Ring Road, also known as the M80, also known as death valley, hoon central, bogan speedway, P-platers’ paradise, tailgaters’ testing ground, the Western car park or simply the Ring. The road is a place where Mad Max is not an old movie but a contemporary work in progress. ‘Set in the near future, MAD MAX presents a society descending into chaos. The forces of law and order are barely holding their own. The highways are terrorized by packs of lunatic speed demons,’ says the Twelfth Virgin Film Guide. True, true but where is the spunky, avenging Mel Gibson in black leather? We drivers have to make do with old fatties on Harleys.

The Ring Road has been there forever and you have been driving on it forever and the traffic jam will last forever. The Ring Road is only thirteen years old, a feral teenager. The Ring Road may be young and stupid but it is also democratic.

You might have a zooped up Nissan Skyline that can outrun any cop car. You might be a cop. You might be high up in a rig decorated with pictures of Sylvester Stallone in Rambo First Blood. You might have a Baby on Board. You might be driving a taxi or a cattle truck. You might be in a Ford Territory with a pair of metal testicles swinging merrily from your bumper bar. You might be a middle-aged lecturer behind the man with the big balls (three times, I’ve been in this position) and you are going to be late for your 9 am Tuesday JRN2CAJ tute even though you left your house at 6.15 am. You might be a student, commuting all the way from Geelong, who is going to be late for this tute also. You might be the handsome, suited driver of a lemon-green Mercedes Benz coupe with smoky windows and a number plate that reads CRUPT or you might be the older woman in the white Toyota bomb with a number plate that reads SOME 1. You might be Tupperware Jase in your hot pink hatchback on your way to a morning party in Greensborough. You might be about to miss your flight. You might be the driver of the Tarago with half your house in the back. You might be a dog-man who spots for the crane driver on the $980 million M80 upgrade or you might be the guy who drives the crane but so what, sucker?

The road doesn’t care who you are because you’ll all have to wait. And wait. And wait.

Roads were supposed to be paths towards modernity. Roads promised speed, progress, efficiency and power. Yet even in the birthplace of the big road, postwar America, there were people who doubted this vision right from the start. A young Marshall Berman watched machines crash through his part of the Bronx, ripping out houses, shops, whole neighbourhoods, to construct engineer Robert Moses’ Expressway and then he grew up to write All That is Solid Melts into Air, a vigorous, exciting critique of the destructive impulses that are part of modernity. Cultural theorist Stephen Muecke’s No Road (Bitumen All the Way) is about indigenous Australia but there’s a similar message about roads as structures that inhibit knowledge and destroy communities.

There are competing visions. In gospel tradition, emancipated people go ‘walkin’ down freedom road’ but for Cormac McCarthy, The Road is a pathway through the end of the world to the end of the world. In one of the best-selling self-help books ever, Scott M. Peck uses the road less travelled as a metaphor for change, hope and renewal.

The Western Ring Road is a little more Cormac than Scotty. As of mid 2011, 142,000 vehicles drive it every day. What are we doing all those hours on the road? What was I doing? What did I look at? What did I think about? What did I learn?

The road, my road, does not invite reflection, introspection or meditative stillness. To manage a long commute on a dangerous, crowded road that is constantly being rejigged and improved, a driver needs to suspend ordinary judgement. To drive on the road you need to forget some things (the beautiful children you have left at home, for example) and block out others (the carbon emissions that your car makes, the death or disfigurement suffered by fellow drivers in the many accidents you drive past).

But it takes time to reach this stage—alert zombiedom—and in the early days of my commute, my personality and character stuck with me in the car and my thoughts would run in both directions, like fast, free-flowing traffic without any median strip.

Outbound: This is terrible! What am I doing! I have become the person I used to pity and despise! I’m not even giving anyone else a lift. Emit! Emit! Emit! If I keep this up, soon the whole world will look like the road and there will be no trees, no birds, no grass, only powerlines and Sexylands and deserted Pipeworks fun parks and long bridges over dry gorges and limp wind socks and terrible defeated public art like those listing pale pink slabs of concrete like tombstones for a gigantic, wasted Barbie. Help me! Help me! Help … Oh, look at that, here’s the little ring road at the end of the big one and here’s my exit and here is car park number seven and here I am at work. How did that happen?

Inbound: Reality check! Life wasn’t meant to be easy (Scott Peck). That’s correct, I used to take part in Reclaim the Streets events and I twice rode in Critical Mass peak-hour protests and attempted to lift my heavy hybrid bike above my head on the roundabout near Melbourne General Cemetery but that was when I was young and childless and now I’ve grown up and can see that being fierce and one-eyed is a luxury that I can no longer afford. Compromise is okay. Compromise is good. I still believe. Anyhow, I don’t have a choice! I’ve got a family to feed! Suck it up, princess! Others have got it so much worse. This is the price I have to pay for the tenured job, the big back yard, the good local school, the affordable house, the nice neighbours. This is the compromise, the only option, the necessary suffering. And don’t forget the 17 per cent super.

Exit here now …

For the first year or so, I tried to break up the distressing drive with a once-a-week commute on public transport. I would catch a train into the city and then a bus out to La Trobe from the stop on Russell Street. A good run, which was rare, would take one and a half hours each way. A good run in the car would be just under two hours all up.

The road won but I had to learn to manage my inbound and outbound thoughts. I was getting so tired. Much easier to listen to music or the radio and just forget about everything. I would take myself off when I got into the car and put myself back on when I got out.

If I could get a customised numberplate to commemorate my time on the road it would simply read: AMNESIA. It is disturbing for me to admit that I remember very little about any of it.

Imagine driving for a living? Not taxis or buses or trucks but something really glamorous like formula 1 racing cars. Imagine being someone like Senna, the handsome, intense Brazilian formula 1 champion. I loved that documentary. I loved Senna’s soulful brown eyes and I loved watching him put on the soft white balaclava that went under the helmet. What a knight. Lots of the footage comes from a camera mounted next to his steering wheel. Senna’s car swallows the jumpy road. Corners loom then disappear. The buzz of the engine is awfully tinny and there is a vomit-inducing swell to it all, as if the car were driving over water rather than bitumen. In one such scene, Senna speaks about what happens to him when he drives. Senna says he is not really there. He is in a tunnel, on a different level of consciousness. Soon enough it becomes clear that this different consciousness is a form of prayer and that being in the racing car brings Senna closer to God.

I did not find God on the road. I found advertising. Billboards were able to pierce my amnesia. I would ruminate on the billboards. They were signs of things I did not want to think about.

For a significant period in about 2009, I found myself focusing on the long, brown thighs of the woman in a bikini who lay on her back in a sparkling swimming pool. I would look up at her as I drove towards an overpass out there by Essendon airport. The woman was both ecstatic and tranquil. Perhaps she was drugged? I would like to be drugged. The billboard surprised me because it was not advertising a getaway in Bali or Thailand, as you might expect. The billboard was for a new housing estate. The word ‘Mandalay’ comes to mind but perhaps that isn’t right. There have been many similar signs over the years, advertising new housing estates at the end of the road or on the diminishing slices of vacant land on either side of it. The bikini woman was the most bizarre but the others were strange too: the guy in the suit hugging some kids; the blond woman in jeans and a T-shirt walking some other kids to school; and, most unrealistically of all, the very young, unsupervised children frolicking on a swing made from a rubber tyre tied to a big old tree.

There are few trees on either side of the ring road. There are no cyclists, no footpaths and no pedestrians. There are sound barriers and houses and cranes and tractors and minarets and factories.

I did see a man walking along the road once, in the portion out towards Pascoe Vale where there is a small body of water that I will not call a lake. His car must have broken down but I had not seen it. I don’t know if he had car at all.

Another day I awoke from my driving slumber as I approached this body of water and saw a small sailing boat on it, with a pleasing red sail and a little tiller at the back and a boy crouched there, steering. I only saw a boat that one time.

On another day still there was a thick layer of mist across this water, an undulating layer it was, over the water and up over the gorse-covered hillocks on each side and I recalled how, as a child, I had fervently believed in little people at the bottom of the garden, naughty elves and grumpy gnomes, devious fairies and other dainty sprites who lived in the bluebells and hyacinths and wisteria and japonica and camellia and roses and daffodils and buttercups that flourished in our big, untended gardens.

Good trips: on 13 February 2006, squirming and writhing in the passenger seat, amniotic fluid running down both legs, Furlong Road exit, Sunshine Hospital car park. On 15 February 2006, wrapping the beautiful, bony baby in her cream crocheted rug (spider-web pattern), carrying her to the car, putting her in the capsule, sitting next to her in the back seat, watching the daylight pass over her delicate new face.

Bad trips: A semi-trailer in an outbound lane jack-knifes and hits concrete median strip at Thomastown. Two lanes are closed in each direction. Traffic reports advise drivers to expect delays of up to two hours. It takes two hours and fifty-five minutes to drive the 38 kilometres. The trailer has melted over the median strip, like icing down the side of a cake.

A truck jack-knifes, slides on its side for fifty metres and then collides with a car near Boundary Road, Laverton North, at 4.50 am. Immediate bottleneck. Inbound traffic banked back for five kilometres. Peak-hour drivers squeeze through one emergency lane. There is another nose-to-tail crash too. Rubber-neckers. Traffic reports advise drivers to expect significant delays. Journey takes two hours.

The three times I was behind the guy with the Territory and the metal testicles. Every trip I made in our old car when the window was stuck half open and we had tapped several layers of Glad Wrap over the gap where the glass should be.

The time the brakes went.

The time when the outbound and inbound journeys both took more than two hours due to accidents and roadworks and I got into our driveway, prised my hands off the wheel, stepped onto the concrete and found that my silly old legs wouldn’t even hold me up.

The time I’d driven out to uni with the oldest two in the back because I had eighty assignments to pick up. The baby was now at school but both the others were off sick. One had been spewing half the night. The other was hot and squeamish when we left home yet when we got to my office admitted that there were also ‘quite a few’ lumps on her body. An inspection confirmed this, a doctor’s appointment was made but the road was even more jammed than usual. A long journey, that one, made even longer by guilt. What kind of mother drags two sick children all the way to the far side of the moon to collect some blimmin’ assignments?

That was a very recent bad trip, in June 2011. Two days later I resigned.

On my last trip, the day of a farewell afternoon tea, I willed myself to stay awake, to take notice, to honour the road with my attention this one last time. The outbound run was a gratifying quickie but coming home was dreadful, more than an hour and a half. I was almost pleased to endure this, to pay a price one last time.

I saw two new billboards for two new housing estates. ‘Resort style living’, said one. ‘The good life is just round the corner,’ said another one. That was the actual wording and the picture showed a beautiful young girl riding a bike.

I had given up a tenured position in a university and I was now unemployed and yet all I could think about were these billboards. They inspired tenderness in me. I felt a pity, tenderness and solidarity for all of us on this road. The billboards were obviously ludicrous and untrue but every driver needs to dream.

The Sonorous Roar of Cannons: National Feeling in Mexico and Australia

2012-01-23T00:00:00Z

In September 2010 my partner and I celebrated the bicentenary of Mexican independence at the embassy in Canberra alongside about 300 others, most of them Mexicans living temporarily or permanently in Australia. Rocío, who has a PhD in ecology from Mexico City and is studying in my hometown of Brisbane, was formally invited; I was just a gringo gate-crasher. We flew down from Queensland for the weekend, hitched a ride to the embassy district and soon found ourselves in a garden full of revellers in fancy dress. Mariachis and day-of-the-dead skeletons sipped tequila beneath a shady gum decorated with paper masks that would have been familiar to any Mexican schoolboy, but were unknown to me: heroes of the nineteenth-century War of Independence. A blue, star-shaped piñata dangled from the branches, foil covering twinkling in the late-afternoon sun, while children scampered on the lawn below. A generously stocked bar and the promise of a slap-up meal kept the interstate guests happy and gradually set them mingling with embassy staff and their families. By the time black beans and tortillas were served on paper plates, a crowd had gathered beneath the gazebo. Still eating, the guests clustered eagerly around the lectern and temporary stage where the show was to take place.

The performance that followed presented a potted history of Mexico through folk dance. First, a troupe of bare-chested Aztec warriors in headdresses flailed their limbs to the beat of drums. A sequence of sentimental pieces for couples in Spanish colonial dress followed: women with flowers in their hair in the style of Andalusian peasants flirted with handkerchiefs, evading their partners’ advances with clever footwork. Finally there came a military sequence in which dancing Adelitas, female revolutionaries wearing ammunition belts, whirled in circles. These final dancers belonged rightly to the iconography of the 1910 revolution rather than to the War of Independence that had begun 100 years earlier, but nobody saw any problem with conflating the two. Indeed, this slippage was characteristic of the 2010 celebrations, which were bicentenary and centenary at once. Two months later, outside military headquarters in Mexico City, I would observe a billboard that took this tendency to its logical extreme. A triptych of army images from 1810, 1910 and 2010 sought to connect legendary conflicts of the past with the present military struggle against Mexico’s powerful drug cartels. But nobody wanted to talk about that at the party.

After the dancing, the crowd grew more vocal. Miniature flags were distributed and the ambassador came to the podium to perform el grito, the independence cry that traditionally ends the ceremony. According to legend, it was the priest and revolutionary Miguel Hidalgo who gave the first grito and who launched the struggle against the Spanish. Ringing the cathedral bells in the town of Dolores, he gathered his supporters together and inspired them to rise against the colonial regime with a fiery speech. His precise words are disputed but the sentiment sounds clearly across the intervening years: ‘Long live the independence of the fatherland! Down with foreign kings! Long live Mexico!’

The ritual hasn’t changed a great deal since then, although the early twentieth-century dictator Porfirio Díaz decided it should be shifted a day earlier to coincide with his birthday. Now, every 15 September in the evening, the Mexican president rings Hidalgo’s bell on the balcony of the National Palace, imitating the priest’s famous gesture. He recites a modified version of el grito, and the masses gathered in the square roar it back to him.

The sound reached Canberra in September 2010, thousands of kilometres from Mexico City’s iconic central plaza, the Zocalo. This time, though, the protagonist was the ambassador to Australia, the extravagantly named María Luisa Beatriz López Gargallo. Resplendent in a crimson jacket, she led the guests through a fire-and-brimstone version of the himno nacional:

Mexicans give the war cry
Prepare steel and horses;
Let the earth shake
To the sonorous roar of cannons.

A handful of out-of-place Anglo in-laws and I were the only ones not singing. We stared at our shoes while the rest bellowed with hands on hearts. In marched a pair of young army officers bearing the flag, their boots cracking smartly against the parquet dance floor. The emblem on the Mexican flag shows an eagle perched on a cactus devouring a snake, the prophetic symbol that led the Aztecs to found their capital on the site of modern-day Mexico City. Every element of the design carries some allegorical significance, right down to the segments of the cactus, which are said to stand for the five phases of Mexican history. In Canberra, naturally, nobody but me was concerned with decoding the emblem’s thorny semiotics. The crowd cheered Ambassador López, a tiny woman who initially struggled to support the weight of the oversize flag. They applauded wildly when she eventually succeeded in heaving it back and forth over the lectern. El grito soon began in earnest, opening with a long list of independence heroes.

‘Viva Hidalgo!’ came the cry and its echo from the crowd.
‘Viva!’
‘Viva Morelos! Viva Josefa Ortíz de Dominguez!’
‘Viva!’

The ambassador’s voice grew hoarse and distorted as the recitation went on, her vocal chords and the cheap speaker system both struggling to cope with the increasing volume. ‘Viva the bicentenary of independence!’ This was a mouthful but she made a good effort. ‘Viva one hundred years of the revolution!’

She was shouting now, along with everybody else, their voices cracking at the climatic cry. Three times it was repeated for emphasis and symmetry, a warlike, uninhibited, upward-inflected sob that brought a lump to my throat: ‘Viva México! Viva México! Viva México!’

Family members in the crowd embraced, couples kissed and, as the flag was carried away, I found myself uncharacteristically moved. No longer looking at my shoe laces, I flailed my miniature Mexican flag and grinned.

Only afterwards did I become aware of the sadness of the occasion, when I felt a tightness in the chest that I was left trying to understand for days. It was partly the pathos of knowing that most of those who had made such an extravagant show of their love for Mexico now lived in exile, forced to look abroad for a better life. Perhaps even more stirring than el grito itself was the moment when the crowd sung the mariachi, ‘México Lindo y Querido’ (Beautiful, much loved Mexico), a lyric with particular resonance for those abroad:

Beautiful, much loved Mexico
If I should die far from you
Let them say I’m only dreaming
And carry me here.

But the sadness was personal too: like an orphan invited to someone else’s family gathering, I was suddenly aware of something missing from my own life. The reason the ceremony made such an impact on me, I think, was that I have never experienced a similar outpouring from Australians. Indeed, it had never occurred to me that something, some energising fire, might be missing from our national life. Since we have no War of Independence or revolution to celebrate, perhaps it’s natural that our patriotic occasions tend to be less exuberant affairs. Who could sing ‘Our land abounds in nature’s gifts’ with the same gusto as ‘Let the earth shake to the sonorous roar of cannons’? Perhaps it’s natural that Australians express love of country with less pomp and ceremony than others; perhaps, as Don Watson has suggested, it’s even a good thing, a bulwark against fanaticism and a vital element of our stable political culture. Nevertheless, I couldn’t help feeling, there in Canberra in a crowd of homesick and emotional Mexicans, that we were missing something special.

The Mexicans’ expressiveness seemed to emphasise our lack of it, the self-conscious quality of most of our patriotic occasions. It also set me thinking about how similar ceremonies here tend to avoid the question of national origins; we much prefer to celebrate the present—material well-being, fresh air, freedom, and cricket. Shortly after the party at the embassy I travelled to Mexico and found that national celebrations there work in the opposite direction, focusing on glories past to the exclusion of the troubled present. Many of the Mexicans I spoke to, viewed the noisy and expensive bicentenary celebrations staged by President Felipe Calderon’s government in 2010 as little more than an attempt to distract them from the here-and-now, the profound security crisis affecting their country.

Two months on from the Canberra party, Rocío took me to a less festive but no less absorbing celebration of Mexicanidad (Mexicanness) at the Palacio Nacional in Mexico City: an exhibition of relics from the War of Independence and the Revolution. Upstairs, we were able to visit the balcony where President Calderon had performed el grito three months earlier. From our vantage point, we had a view over the Zocalo, Mexico’s answer to Red Square. To the north is the colonial-era cathedral. The stone, blackened by four centuries of grime and air pollution, and the crooked towers tilted by years of earthquakes, lend the building a magical, slightly warped aspect that feels very Mexican—Europe rebuilt on unsound foundations, sinking into American soil. Next door is the Templo Mayor, the ruins of a pre-Hispanic holy site that the Aztecs held to be the centre of the world.

In 2010 the Zocalo was again the centre of Mexican civilisation, at least the state-sanctioned interpretation of it staged for the bicentenary festivities. Rocío and I had watched the show online from Brisbane: the angel of independence was projected onto the cathedral while a spectacular fireworks display by Ignatius Jones, the Australian maestro responsible for the closing ceremony of the Sydney Olympics, burst overhead in the Mexican tri-colour. Despite the surrounding spectacle, el grito itself was a muted affair that couldn’t match the intensity of its smaller cousin in Canberra. The Mexicans who had chosen to leave the country, paradoxically, made a greater show of their love for it than those who’d stayed home. In beautiful, much loved Mexico the unpopular Calderon, whose security policies are widely blamed for inflaming drug-related violence in the country, could only incite polite applause. Three months on when we visited, a group of technicians were busily installing an ice-rink for the festive season.

Nothing remained of the bicentenary spectacular but a macabre public exhibition in the palace. The bones of heroes from the 1910 revolution were on display. Here, in the same building where Calderon had cried viva Mexico for the cameras, school groups, families, couples and grandparents filed past the mortal remains of Francisco Villa, Emiliano Zapata and other revolutionary heroes, displayed in glass cases. Disinterred especially for the 2010 celebrations and brought from many different sites around the republic, the loose bones were placed in black chests and were illuminated brightly by footlights so that they shone, ghoulish white, in the darkened palace chamber. I was struck by the smallness of these containers filled with the bones of great men, scarcely larger than a shoe box. Here was Mexico’s other face, death-obsessed: the same culture that shouts in praise of the heroes of the revolution puts their bones on show. At the Australian bicentenary in 1988, no bones were displayed and no independence cry was uttered—it’s hard to imagine Bob Hawke digging up remnants of our early colonial governors or legendary outlaws for exhibition. But we too celebrated with a massive public spectacle that was ambivalently received. In Australia, as in other new-world immigrant nations, commemorative occasions meant to foster social cohesion often only highlight ongoing patterns of exclusion that privilege the settler population over indigenous peoples and ‘newer’ immigrant communities. Organisers of the Australian bicentenary ceremony struggled to reconcile the point of view held by indigenous groups and their supporters—who saw the occasion as a celebration of colonial conquest—with those of Anglo-Celtic traditionalists. The 1988 re-enactment of the First Fleet sailing into Sydney Harbour on 26 January was memorably overshadowed by protests calling for a formal treaty with indigenous Australians.

If our bicentenary has any legacy at all, then, it is the invasion-or-settlement debate rehearsed every Australia Day. At the risk of repeating a familiar argument, 26 January is, by its nature, incapable of producing a sense of national togetherness. It can never have the dynamism of independence celebrations in Mexico (or elsewhere) because it marks the arrival of a colonising power rather than its expulsion. It’s interesting to contrast Australia’s divisive myth of origins with the way Mexicans now regard their colonial experience. In Mesoamerica, because the land was populated more densely, and because most indigenous groups, including the dominant Aztec and Maya civilisations, lived in urban centres and practised settled agriculture, there could be no fraudulent narrative of peaceful colonial settlement. This was openly a military conquest, the clash of swords and the boom of artillery a prelude to ‘the sonorous roar of cannons’ in the later War of Independence.

The difference between Spanish and British attitudes on the question of sex between coloniser and colonised is reflected in the national celebrations of their former colonies. In Mexico, where military conquest reduced the indigenous population to 5 per cent of what it was before the Spanish, sexual conquest produced a mestizo society. To this day the majority of Mexicans are of mixed European and indigenous descent. The narrative of decolonisation, then, is one of an anti-colonial Mexican ‘us’ overthrowing a Spanish colonial ‘them’. How different the play of pronouns commonly encountered in Australia, where a relatively small percentage of the population identify as indigenous. Here, even an expression of regret for colonial excesses such as Paul Keating’s 1992 Redfern speech—‘It was we who did the dispossessing. We took the traditional lands’—refers to a colonising European ‘us’ and a colonised non-European ‘them’. In Mexico and in Australia, commemorative days and national celebrations nearly always reflect the needs of the government footing the bill. The tendency is to emphasise shared qualities and downplay conflict. But conflict, whether in the form of the protests coinciding with the re-enactment of the arrival of the First Fleet in Sydney Harbour or the half-hearted response to Calderon in the Zocalo in 2010, refuses to remain concealed.

At the Palacio Nacional in Mexico watching the public pay homage to the bones of the glorious dead, I couldn’t help wondering whether any of them thought of the other dead—those dying today. For even as Calderon orchestrated the massive bicentenary celebrations in 2010, he was also directing a virtual civil war against Mexico’s powerful drug cartels. Rocío and I had taken advantage of a ceasefire over the Christmas and New Year period to stroll along Acapulco’s famous beaches. Only days after we left, fifteen decapitated heads were found piled in a shopping centre in the tourist zone—the first drug war deaths of 2011. Shaken, we cancelled a trip to the hometown of Rocío’s father, Patzcuaro, in the state of Michoacán. There, narco gangs were imposing a self-described ‘reign of terror’, blockading highways and threatening to assassinate President Calderon.

Despite this, Calderon denies that a war is taking place in Mexico. He claims that he has always used the word lucha (struggle) rather than its stronger alternative, which has undesirable resonance with the detested Bush regime’s ‘war on drugs’. Whatever the term used, an armed conflict of extraordinary ferocity is taking place. In January 2011 official figures recognised 34,000 drug-war deaths since Calderon came to power four years ago. Nearly 90 per cent of these were classed as ‘executions,’ murders perpetrated by members of one gang against members of rival organisations; the remaining 10 per cent were the result of clashes between armed forces and organised crime. Calderon’s predecessor Vicente Fox, also a member of the right-of-centre PAN (Partido Acción Nacional), sent small numbers of troops to the worst-affected border areas, but the militarisation of a large part of national territory has come under the present regime.

Under Calderon, the government has deployed nearly a quarter of the Mexican military, some 45,000 soldiers, to combat drug gangs. The results have been mixed at best: an increase in drug seizures and arrests of high-profile criminals, marred by a massive spike in the number of deaths. In 2010 Mexico registered its highest annual body count yet: 15,273 deaths linked the drug war. Large tracts of the country are now more or less controlled by organised crime, with many local governments intimidated into collaboration or acquiescence. Twelve Mexican mayors were murdered in the nation’s bicentenary year; not surprisingly, it has become difficult to find willing candidates. Corruption too is a major headache for the Calderon government; it has been uncovered at the highest levels of the security forces. In 2008 the chief of the Federal Police, Victor Gerardo Garay Cadena, was deposed and prosecuted for his links with narcotics-trafficking gangs.

Under these circumstances, who would want to be in the Mexican security forces? During the current administration, more than 30,000 army officers have deserted. The figure makes a mockery of the billboard outside military headquarters in Mexico City. Today’s troops are by no means the successors to Hidalgo’s independence fighters: they are frightened young men enforcing a policy that many argue is only in the interest of the United States. President Obama’s May 2010 ‘New National Strategy on the Control of Drugs’ looked a lot like Bush’s ‘war on drugs’ by another name. The Americans still favour targeting the supply side of the industry through policing, and still refuse to countenance decriminalisation; Calderon sends still more troops; illegal arms sold over the northern border still take lives south of the Rio Grande. What has become of Mexican independence two hundred years on?

Without a radical shift in paradigm on drugs, the security situation in Mexico looks unlikely to improve until the end of Calderon’s term in 2012 (Mexican presidents are not permitted to run for re-election under the constitution installed after the revolution). His party, the PAN, is widely tipped to lose office at the next election, but its fortunes could change if it is able to find an outstanding candidate. In December 2010, as the year’s commemorative fever subsided, just such a figure emerged.

The link between narco-violence and electoral politics was a topic of conversation at dinner as we celebrated Australia Day 2011 with friends in Mexico City. Veronica and Dave, another young, Mexican-Australian couple, had invited us to a barbecue at the Sedano family home. The last time we had encountered Veronica’s father he was recovering from a massive heart attack that struck while he was visiting his daughter in Brisbane. Six months on, a slimmer Dr Sedano greeted us, looking relaxed in shorts and long socks. He was a convivial host, pleased to have at least one of his three daughters temporarily at home in Mexico (all three live abroad), and eager to celebrate in style the national day of his daughter’s adopted country. He served us mezcal from a bottle in the shape of a giant glass worm, speaking mainly English for the benefit of his Australian son-in-law. The floods in Queensland were discussed first; they had menaced his daughter’s apartment in the riverside Brisbane suburb of West End, but had now receded. After a couple of glasses of mezcal, though, the conversation turned to Mexican politics. It’s a topic that is usually introduced in sophisticated company with a long, melancholy sigh. After introducing his theme in the appropriate fashion, Dr Sedano filled us in on the latest conspiracy theory.

‘Did you see the Christmas spectacular?’ he asked. ‘What a piece of theatre!’

Once a strapping figure of a man, he now barely filled his T-shirt; his shoulders were caved in, his beard white, and his movements slow as if he was conscious of conserving energy. Veronica had told us that, in addition to his clinic, Dr Sedano worked long hours as a consultant on health policy to the federal government. Despite his own poor health, he spoke with the authority of a man used to being heard.

‘This Fernández de Cevallos story, it’s all a soap opera, you realise? It’s a set up.’ He was referring to a massive news story that had broken in late December. Just days before Christmas, Diego Fernández de Cevallos, a former PAN senator and one-time presidential candidate who had been kidnapped and held for seven months by a mysterious criminal gang, was released alive. In May, a group calling themselves the misteriosos desaparecedores, had seized the high-profile politician at his ranch. They posted photos online of a blindfolded Fernández de Cevallos naked from the waist up, and threatened to take his life if their demands were not met. Rumour ran that the politician’s family had paid a US $20 million ransom for the release of the man known as Diego the boss. His first media appearance as a free man made front pages worldwide. A thickly beared Fernández de Cevallos appeared outside his home and publicly offered forgiveness to his captors: ‘Thanks to God I’m strong and my life will go on as before. As a man of faith I have already forgiven the kidnappers; as a citizen I believe the authorities have a job to do but without abuse, without violence.’

After uttering these statesman-like words, the 69-year old, a senior figure in the conservative PAN since the 1970s, then rushed inside to present his attractive young girlfriend a bouquet of flowers.

‘They’re setting him up to become president,’ said Dr Sedano authoritatively. ‘I’m sure of it.’ His theory makes sense. Who better to continue Calderon and the PAN’s offensive against organised crime than Fernández de Cevallos, an experienced political operator seen to have suffered personally at their hands?

‘Did you see him when he came out?’ said our host. ‘He looked like he’d been on holiday. Kidnapped? It’s all a production. A show.’

The conversation had followed the pattern of many discussions of contemporary politics in Mexico, moving in a flash from melancholy resignation to paranoia. It was hardly the ideal topic for an Australia Day barbecue. Luckily, Dave and I had a secret weapon, a sure-fire way of lightening the mood. We wanted no flag-waving, no folk-dancing, and certainly no formal recitation to rival el grito. Rather, we produced a cheap, plastic cricket set lugged across the Pacific in a suitcase and insisted that everyone take part in a vigorous back-yard game. In a blow for the classless society, Dave even dragged the Sedano’s live-in housekeeper outside to bowl a plastic ball at her employer. Initially reluctant, she soon embraced our strange, antipodean overturning of social hierarchies and sent her boss’s off-stump tumbling.

This was our answer, a very Australian answer, to the outpouring of sentiment by the Mexicans in Canberra: zero reflection on our country’s history and very little by way of real emotion, just a funny old British game, a colonial inheritance incorporated into our performance of Aussie blokehood. Although attuned to laconic Australian tastes, our game of back-yard cricket was every bit as much of a performance as the Mexican grito. ‘Australians are self-conscious if they have to take part in a ritual,’ wrote Donald Horne in The Lucky Country. And so we were. Playing up to our Mexican audience’s expectations, we drank beer, ate hamburgers with beetroot for the main, Tim Tams for dessert, and spoke in an exaggeratedly ‘Australian’ way natural to neither of us.

In what is perhaps the Mexican equivalent to Horne’s classic study of Australian identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, the Mexican Nobel laureate Octavio Paz characterises his people in a way almost diametrically opposed to Horne’s description of Australians. ‘We are a ritual people,’ he writes. ‘How could a poor Mexican live without the two or three annual fiestas that compensate for the narrowness and misery of his life? Fiestas are our only luxury.’ In Australia, where luxury is not so hard to come by, most of us have less need for such compensation, less of a taste for elaborate patriotic and religious ceremonies. But we are not without our own distractions and our own peculiar narrowness of intellectual horizons. Can drink, cricket and a vague belief in the universal right to a comfortable life really substitute for the powerful tradition of national emancipation celebrated by the Mexicans every September?

For me, taking part in these different but parallel celebrations a few months apart—two national days staged far from home—seemed to underline the differences between the two cultures. The warlike mood of el grito could scarcely have differed more from our low-key game of back-yard cricket. But perhaps the differences are less significant and less interesting than the similarities. Mexico’s and Australia’s national celebrations might be seen to illustrate two tentative and incomplete solutions to the quintessential new-world problem, that of forging a mature culture after colonisation: to celebrate dead war heroes while denying the present war exists; to celebrate the present rather than confront a tarnished colonial past. Are these not equal and opposite reactions to the same challenge?

The First Day of the Season

2012-01-20T00:00:00Z

The Districts’ cricket clubhouse was a dark brick bungalow at the edge of a large suburban oval. Though the approaching summer would soon dry the grass to a stubbly hay and force spectators onto the marginally cooler cement verandah, on this spring morning the ground was still damp and green under Brian Gerrity’s shoes. Sliding his key into the door of the clubhouse, he smiled as the heavy weights of the lock shifted at his touch.

Months earlier the trusty deadbolt had been replaced by a PIN-pad system after Bev Hammond, the club’s match-day kiosk manager, complained about boxes of jelly snakes and packets of Twisties being lifted from behind the counter. The new electronic system had been the brainchild of their fellow board member Paul Selby, who used words like ‘synergy’ and ‘brand management’ and basically wanted to turn the clubhouse into a licensed bar. The rest of the board, blinded by his capped teeth and shiny new Prius, had voted in favour of the new security, while Gerrity made sure his objection was noted in the board’s minutes.

Vindication came not two weeks after the technology was fitted, when someone gained unauthorised access to the building. Flouting the new system, the perpetrator stole a twenty-four pack of Coke and took a rich dump in one of the boardroom chairs. With the entry code compromised the board hastily met in the change-rooms, where the stink wasn’t so bad, and voted to have a new lock fitted.

Gerrity felt a wash of familiarity as he stepped inside. He’d played for Districts for twenty-five years, and the clubhouse was his home away from home: the peeling lino kiosk his kitchen, the windowless boardroom his lounge, the display cases his memories. Unbeknown to the rest of the board, at his lowest the place had actually become home: during the cold May nights after Joanne kicked him out he’d slept on one of the battered couches with an open yearbook held over his face, turning the link-armed photo of his first Seniors team into a crinkled grey smear. In the boardroom the soiled seat had been replaced. Gerrity took the new chair, the only one that didn’t expel air from cracks in its vinyl the moment weight was lowered onto it. Though no-one else was around, he had consciously appropriated the ceremonial air he associated with the new cricket season—the smell of bore sprinklers on mown grass, the breezy sensation of untrousered knees—and he didn’t want to spoil it by sinking into a chair that farted. He settled into the new seat and exhaled with relief.

Gerrity didn’t know what he would do without the cricket club. He’d been a lover of the game from a young age, hitting a tennis ball against the shed with a plastic bat while in the house his dad captained the Aussies from his armchair. Gerrity liked to sit back with a coldie in front of the TV as much as anyone, but his preference was to be involved, to feel the solidness of the ball in his hands and the cut of the willow through the air. It was the classiness of the game that he loved: the perfection of its geometry; the devoted strain for the ball; the respect each team afforded the other, that harked back to a more genteel time. He’d never made it to any sort of professional or representative side, but he now felt this was a good thing. Instead he did his nine-to-five at the Department and in the evenings traded shirt and tie for the formal whites of the most beautiful sporting uniform in the world.

Their league had fixtures from mid October to mid April, and during the off-seasons Gerrity was untethered. This year had been particularly bad—all the time he was looking for a new place and begging Joanne’s sisters for her new phone number. Later, finally meeting with a lawyer, he had ached for a return to the simple life of meeting and coaching and keeping. A calendar tacked to the wall of his one-bedroom rental had the days to 16 October crossed out with a thick black marker, and now the morning had actually arrived he felt sick with excitement. Just two hours until the season opened with the traditional intra-club match. Sitting in his new chair, Gerrity could almost feel himself crouching deep into the warm grass behind the wicket, the faint rushing in his ears becoming the roar of an out. Turning to the sidelines to see Joanne under the eucalypts, clapping primly and smiling at him. It could happen.

There were voices in the main room. Max Hammond, chair of the board, appeared in the doorway first, his belly the exact size of a full-term pregnancy. The big man coached the under-18s, the most successful Districts team in the league, earning him the right to be chair. In reality the team’s success was due, Gerrity had calmly calculated, 49 per cent to the star bowler, Brent Ryland; 49 per cent to their best batsman, Robbie Miller (whose one-day average was a very Bradman-like 99.9); and only 2 per cent to Hammond’s coaching, which consisted largely of whooping like a demented crane every time Miller hit a six or Ryland sent the bails flying. Max Hammond smiled with one side of his mouth. ‘Morning, Brian.’

‘Max.’ Gerrity nodded as Max stepped aside for his wife. ‘Bev.’

‘Hello, Brian,’ Bev Hammond said brightly, sliding an apron over her head. ‘No problems getting in?’

Bev had been thrilled by the glowing numbers and merry welcoming beeps of the short-lived PIN system. She and Paul Selby had been the two to vote against the new deadlock, and she now claimed its heaviness made her wrist hurt.

Gerrity fixed a smile. ‘Easy as pie.’

Max settled into a chair, which raspberried as he lowered his right buttock. He pouted. ‘Nightmare, Brian. Absolute nightmare.’

Bev immediately looked concerned and Gerrity’s guts wrung in preparation for the sentiment that was sure to follow. For the past five months people had been dispensing sympathy and advice to him in grave tones, their expressions twisted as if they too felt his pain—it was like a cricket bat to the chest. (They weren’t far wrong.) They told him ‘These things happen’ and that ‘Some things weren’t meant to be’. He objected to the flimsy noun. His marriage had not been a ‘thing’; it had been meaningful, unlike their vague homilies. As if they knew this, the well-wishers tried to supplement their blather with touch. Men clamped his shoulder reassuringly and women had, unsolicited, hugged him, something that hadn’t happened since he was married. The foreign breasts pressed against him made him feel awkward and empty. He didn’t think he could bear the same performance from Max Hammond.

But as usual, Hammond was talking about himself. In September Brent Ryland had turned eighteen, which meant he could no longer ditch lethal spinners at the faces of knock-kneed teenage boys but would instead be joining the Seniors. Hammond’s lower lip drooped, showing aubergine gums. ‘It’s going to be a tough season,’ he moaned. ‘A tough season.’

Gerrity couldn’t help but agree as he heard clipped footsteps outside.

‘Hello, all.’

Paul Selby, self-appointed club marketing guru, environmental avenger and Seniors’ coach, stood surveying the room, thumbs hooked casually through his belt loops. This drew attention to the zippered area of his jeans, which were just a stitch too tight: when he stepped forward there was the tiniest hint of lumpiness, of weights rearranging behind his fly. Selby was built like a jockey and was as cocky as a game hen, visiting the houses of recently separated women in his easily identifiable low-emissions car.

‘Paul,’ Gerrity acknowledged stonily.

Selby strode over to the table and pounded his fists smartly against it. The sudden slam made Bev shriek a little in the back of her throat. ‘Big season! Best season!’ Selby announced, looking right at him.

‘I heartily agree, Paul,’ Gerrity said, trying to keep his tone even.

‘I’m glad you do, Brian.’ Selby glanced at the Hammonds. ‘Because there’s something we wanted to talk to you about.’

‘Of course,’ Gerrity said automatically, feeling sweat forming on his forehead. So they were going to be out with it. In front of the rest of the board, no less. Well, fine, he thought dizzily, massaging his collarbone. Not like it wasn’t a club issue. This was where he and Joanne had met in the first place; how the short-arse had got to know them. In fact, if Paul Selby was now fucking Brian Gerrity’s wife, and Gerrity strongly believed he must be, it really should go down in the minutes. ‘Bev,’ he began.

But Paul Selby deflated as the last Districts board member joined them: Tim Tynam, an excellent bowler but a complete idiot. With his wrists starting to deteriorate Tynam had been looking for a coaching position, but this was not a good idea. He was both a sore loser and a bad winner, and his cherub-like yellow curls and glossy Red Delicious cheeks made it difficult to take him seriously. The man was a giant baby. He’d be useless with the under-12s, who required the tight herding of a sheepdog, and the smart-arsed under-14s would rip him to shreds. All the other coaching spots were taken.

Not that Gerrity ever said any of this to Tynam. They all tried to avoid the sucking black hole of a conversation with Tynam.

Tynam nodded at them as he made his way over to the last empty seat. Two months previously, the seat in that same spot had cradled a turd. ‘How youse all going, all right?’

Max Hammond nodded but didn’t make eye contact. ‘I call this meeting to order. Bev, love, would you take the minutes.’

Despite the unresolved look in Paul Selby’s eye, Gerrity felt excited as the five of them righted their posture and assumed their board faces. This was the moment he’d been waiting for all those cold, lonely months of winter. For the first time since May, the withdrawal of his wife’s love and his eviction to the portside suburbs were no longer the most important thing: cricket was the most important thing. With his arse in the new chair and the faint tang of disinfectant sharpening the air he felt refreshed, renewed. Gerrity almost didn’t mind if the bastard Selby was sleeping with Joanne, just so long as he could still play cricket.

‘As we all know,’ Max began, ‘it’s customary to begin the meeting with a nomination of the board members for the current season.’ Bev’s pen scratched against her paper. ‘Five are required, with each nomination to be seconded. I nominate Paul Selby.’

‘Second!’ Bev trilled, copying the name down.

‘Carried.’

‘Thank you, Max,’ Selby said. He rested his hands high on his spread upper thighs, framing his crotch. ‘I nominate Bev Hammond.’

‘Second,’ Max said immediately.

Bev blushed and printed her own name in the minutes, then nominated her husband. Selby seconded vigorously.

Gerrity looked over at Tim, who was unusually quiet. In past years he’d stumbled all over the procedure like an excited foal, seconding names before they’d been nominated, calling “Carried!” when it wasn’t his place. Tynam crossed his arms and stared down at the table. Pouting about not coaching, probably. After a moment Gerrity said, “Well, nominate Tim.” Bev looked at her husband as if for confirmation. Hammond nodded shortly. ‘Second.’

Silence fell again, drawing out longer this time. Gerrity looked around the table expectantly but couldn’t meet anyone’s eye. The scent of disinfectant bit his nasal passages and made his eyes water. He was beginning to get a bad feeling: the feeling of waking up alone in his bare flat; of meeting with the expressionless lawyer; of driving past the house on a Saturday night to see Joanne’s car missing from the garage. ‘Well, I know I can’t nominate myself.’

Paul Selby drummed his fingers against the table for a second and looked elsewhere.

‘Brian,’ Max Hammond began, leaning into the balloon of his stomach, which threatened to pop.

‘We wondered if you might want to take a break this season.’ Gerrity coughed. ‘I beg your pardon?’

Bev was no longer taking minutes. Her eyes were moist.

‘You’ve had a tough time of late. What with Joanne—leaving …’ Hammond faltered. ‘Maybe you need some time to yourself.’

‘I’ve had the whole bloody winter to myself,’ Gerrity responded, trying to keep his voice even. ‘What I’d like is to get back into it.’

‘Oh, we’d still like you to play,’ Hammond interrupted, as if Gerrity himself had suggested otherwise. ‘And coach.’

‘The under-16s are doing fantastically under your stewardship,’ Bev told him, reaching across the table and gripping his wrist. This too was an action women had been performing on him of late, and like their hugs it made him feel trapped. He pulled gently against her grasp and she released him, frowning a little.

‘Well, if someone would nominate me …’

Selby opened his mouth, paused, then spoke. ‘We just think you’d be more comfortable steering away from the board for a while.’

‘Why?’ Gerrity asked, anxiety eroding his tone into a yelp. ‘Why is that, exactly?’

Selby glanced at Tim Tynam for assistance but Tynam was still hunched over, hands buried in his armpits.

Gerrity could feel his chest pumping with shallow breaths. He knew what he would do if Selby forced the issue: he would confront him. Have you had sex with my wife? Have you had sex with my wife, you little shit-licker arsehole?

Selby let out a deep sigh and dropped his hands back into his lap. ‘All right, fine.’ He frowned.

‘Nominating Brian Gerrity.’

Gerrity waited.

A grunt came from Tim Tynam. ‘I second.’

Selby sighed again.

Gerrity’s windpipe loosened with relief. ‘Thank you,’ he told Tynam weakly.

Tim looked up. ‘Next bit of business.’ His eyes were flat and still as dead grass on an airless day.

‘I want to coach a team this year.’

Opening the season with a barbecue and an all-age intra-club match had been Gerrity’s idea, and unlike Paul Selby’s whiz-bang security plans, this one was a success. That afternoon Bev’s troupe turned sausages while the two team captains, Selby and Max Hammond, stood at the side of the oval and picked names from an upturned cap. Gerrity tried to remain calm as player after player was selected, and finally Max waved the last slip and shouted his name.

Sagging with relief, Gerrity slid in next to Hammond as the team gathered. ‘Thank goodness for that, Max. I don’t know if I could handle being sidled out of another thing today.’

Hammond’s look was so full of concern that Gerrity had to force laughter. ‘Only joking. Only joking.’

Over at Paul Selby’s bench Tim Tynam stood with his arms crossed, a faint smile tightening his round cheeks. He should be pleased. That morning the board had named him the new coach of the under-16s, four votes to one. It wasn’t clear why a peevish Paul Selby had voted against; probably because Tynam had thwarted his plan to have Gerrity kicked off the board. It had needled Gerrity to vote for the change, but if these bastards with their faux-sympathy were going to wrest one of his club positions from him under the guise of ‘concern’, let it be the one with the least glory. The under-16s were crap.

Selby’s men won the toss and fanned out across the oval. Hammond offered Gerrity the fourth batsman’s slot and gripped his shoulder as he sat on the bench. ‘You were a brave man today, Brian.’ Gerrity didn’t want to turn around for fear there would be tears in the chairman’s eyes. ‘A very brave man.’

‘Well, you know, the board’s very important to me.’

Hammond squeezed him harder. ‘To give up the coaching, though.’

‘No-one’s in charge of the under-12s yet.’

As if sharing the vision of toothy preteens swinging bats into one another’s faces, Hammond sucked in a breath and gave Gerrity a final reassuring slap. ‘You’ll be fine.’

But he wasn’t. As soon as Hammond moved off Gerrity took the opportunity to turn his head against the cramp in his shoulder and saw what Hammond’s wide frame had blocked: his wife, Joanne, standing in the shade, floral dress lapping against her thighs. Just as he had imagined. She was watching the action on the field. Forgetting the painful twist in his neck, Gerrity stared. Stared as Jo took a step forward. Stared as she reacted and clapped. Stared as she set off around the perimeter of the oval for where Paul Selby stood, frowning into the midafternoon sun. Gerrity stood up.

A seventeen-year-old leaving the field scowled as he dodged around him. ‘Jeremy isn’t out,’ he muttered.

Gerrity looked at him blankly.

‘You’re not batting yet,’ the kid squeaked. He put a hand to his face before anyone saw, but Gerrity recognised the proud kid bowled for a golden duck in the very first game of the season, and he sympathised. Right now he felt about the same way.

He was distracted by cheers from the fielders as Jeremy also left the pitch, his bat held shield-like in front of him. He shoved it at Gerrity. ‘Tynam’s a dickhead,’ the teenager seethed, and stomped off towards the change-rooms.

Gerrity took the bat and looked over at Tim Tynam, who was gazing at the other side of the field. As Gerrity watched, the bowler pressed his hand to his mouth, then held the palm in the air. Gerrity looked across the oval, confused. For a second he thought the gesture was aimed at Selby, who had his hands in the pockets of his jeans and his crotch thrust outwards. When Selby didn’t react, Gerrity shifted his gaze two metres over to where Joanne stood, so pretty in her summery outfit it made his heart hurt.

Jo had a hand to her own chest. The fist was closed tightly, as if gripping something precious. She was staring back across the oval at Tim Tynam as if he was holding the Ashes high above his head.

For a moment the ground seemed to move under Brian Gerrity’s feet. He swayed a little and put his foot out to steady himself. This step taken, he kept going, moving automatically over to the spot where two young men had just been bowled out, cuckolded in front of the entire club. Taking up his position, Gerrity felt oddly calm. The spring air was soft at his cheeks and the sun warm on his forehead as he hunched into the bat. It was a beautiful day for cricket.

Tim Tynam was still looking over at Joanne, and when he finally resumed his concentration he seemed surprised by the appearance of the new batsman. Gerrity gave him a lizard smile and ground his bat into the dirt.

Tynam’s first ball was wide and Gerrity didn’t flinch. The wicket-keeper belted off to retrieve it and Gerrity saw Tynam’s Adam’s apple bob uncertainly in his throat. Good.

The next delivery was perfect and as it loomed in his vision Gerrity was overtaken by grace. His dance down the pitch was elegant; the arc of the bat perfect. A ringing crack sent the ball back along its trajectory, and there was an echo as it connected with Tim Tynam’s nose, turning it into a glorious crimson spout. Gerrity’s gliding follow-through felt like freefall.

He hadn’t felt so good in ages. It was even better than taking a shit in Paul Selby’s chair.

Letter from Japan

2012-01-18T00:00:00Z

The grocer smiled at me then glanced down at his tray of peaches. They were succulent, flawless, tinged with scarlet, the size of cricket balls.

‘Would you like one?’ he asked. ‘They could be radioactive. I’m not sure. I certainly wouldn’t feed them to my grandson, but you’re an adult so the radiation can’t hurt you as much.’ I politely declined, muttering something about an allergy to stone fruit. I then scuttled away.

You’ve got to admire the honesty of the people of Fukushima. While their political leadership dithers and disintegrates and the operators of the nuclear plant conceal and confound, the residents of this contaminated prefecture are either getting on with their lives or getting out of Dodge.

It was during my fifth visit to Fukushima that I realised most were adapting to life after the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. The wonderfully named hamburger chain Surprised Donkey does a roaring lunchtime trade in Fukushima City, but as I walked in it wasn’t the hum of diners or the sizzle of burgers that caught my ear. It was that familiar clicking, that unremitting reminder of how close this community of 300,000 is to the twisted, oozing carcass of the nuclear plant. Then I started to spot the squeaking Geiger counters. Two men in the summer salaryman’s uniform of long pants and short-sleeve collared shirts were waiting for a table in front of me. Dangling from straps around their wrists were Geiger counters. A young woman paying her bill at the counter had one stuffed into the back pocket of her denim shorts. These are the new fad gadgets of post-meltdown Japan. In Tokyo there’s a four-week wait for Geiger counters. The towering electronics shops in geeky Akihabara district ran out months ago. In factories throughout China, Russia and Japan technicians are working around the clock to meet the demand.

For Michiko Saito, the Geiger counter she wields is a frightening symbol of the nuclear industry’s arrogance towards nature and the Japanese government’s unhealthy obsession with nuclear power. Every day principal Saito takes her radiation reader out into the playground of the Sakura Nursery School in Fukushima City to check contamination levels. Weeks ago she made the decision to remove the topsoil when it was found that the playground was one of the twenty-six most contaminated sites in all of Fukushima Prefecture. I watched as she waved the Geiger counter around the permanent play equipment. The synthetic turf beneath the monkey bars hadn’t been removed, and the needle of the device swung off the scale.

‘We’ve had five kids taken out of school by their parents,’ principal Saito said. ‘And other mothers who are expecting babies may also leave soon with their children. But we are working hard to ease the anxiety of parents.’

But the anxiety will last as long as the tasteless, unseen radiation lingers. Just 60 kilometres from the nuclear plant, the Sakura Nursery School has banned the children from playing outside. Their only exposure to the great outdoors is brief. Covered in long sleeves and swimming caps they’re given five minutes to splash about in the school’s small pool. The water is changed every day. Their five minutes up, the children are whisked back inside. It’s like a hit and run commando raid. Not surprisingly, the parents and teachers here feel forgotten, isolated and contaminated.

‘Children and babies are said to be vulnerable to radiation, but the authorities have moved too slowly to help schools,’ principal Saito told me. ‘There are so many kids living in so-called radiation hot-spots but not enough is being done to look after them.’ She began to cry.

Whole communities were also left to fend for themselves. The people of Namie, just a few kilometres from the plant, were led north by town officials who believed the winds would be blowing south, sweeping any radioactive fall-out in the opposite direction. For the next few days they holed up in the Tsushima district, where an investigation by the New York Times found the children played outside and the parents prepared rice using water from a mountain stream. But the winds weren’t blowing south. They were blowing straight towards Tsushima. This was known in Tokyo, but government bureaucrats said nothing.

It’s not just the air or the topsoil people fear. Milk, spinach, mushrooms and rice have been found to contain high levels of radioactive iodine and/or caesium. There are contaminated cattle in Fukushima, as well as toxic tea in Shizuoka, which is more than 300 kilometres south-west of the shattered plant. The 35 million people of Greater Tokyo are much closer to the frothing reactors of Fukushima than the tea fields of Shizuoka are.

My wife asked me about the milk we buy, concerned we were poisoning our three daughters, the youngest of whom is just twelve months old. So I took a photo of the milk carton and emailed it to one of the ABC’s Japanese staff. She wrote back:

Hmmm, many people are writing on the internet that the name of the processing centre has disappeared from the package. Suspicious. It doesn’t seem like dairy companies are required to have it on the package. If you’re worried I recommend you buy milk from Hokkaido.

Then the operators of Fukushima finally revealed just how bad things were inside the rotting corpse of the nuclear plant. They uttered the dreaded ‘M’ word—meltdown. I wondered if I should pack up my family and take them back to Australia. Thousands of foreigners living in Japan fled after 11 March and never came back. The tension between the stayers and the fly-jin (a new take on the Japanese word gaijin, meaning foreigner) started to simmer. One group of sneering expats vowed to get shirts made up declaring, ‘We Stayed.’ Two days later, spooked by the ‘M’ word, they all packed up their kids and jetted out. Business class, of course—to Singapore, to Sydney, to London.

Within days of the March meltdown the internet began pulsating with apocalyptic rumours. Don’t go out in the wet, you’ll contract cancer from the nuclear rain. Don’t let your kids play in the park, the radiation settles in the dirt. Don’t drink the tap water, it’s contaminated (which turned out to be true according to a couple of Tokyo samples). I started to think I wasn’t doing enough to protect my family. So I hired a water dispenser and began hoarding large plastic containers of water. We now only buy milk with little maps of far-off Hokkaido on them. At the park the kids are only allowed to play on the swings. The sandpit is off-limits.

But back to those succulent peaches. If you think I escaped a taste of this forbidden Fukushima fruit, you are mistaken. After lunch with the Geiger-counter set at Surprised Donkey we went to interview Akiko Yoshida. Just weeks after the Fukushima disaster she’d given birth to her second child, a baby boy she called Keigo. Living in a community close to the nuclear plant, she’d moved away to live with her parents in the suburbs of Fukushima City. We’d come to talk to her about her fears for her young children, and her anger at the lack of information and support coming from the government. Before we’d set up the cameras Akiko’s mother appeared from the kitchen. Smiling in welcome she clutched a large dish. Glistening from the dish were large slices of juicy peach.

‘We are proud of our beautiful peaches here in Fukushima,’ she declared. ‘These are for you. Please eat!’

Cultural Development and Creativity in the Digital Revolution

2012-01-16T00:00:00Z

Books and personal (and cultural) development

The book, originally as a scroll, then as a codex has been critical to the transmission of ideas, narrative, information, beliefs for 2500 years, from the time of Homer, Gilgamesh and the Pentateuch. Judaism, Christianity and Islam were all ‘faiths of the book’. Printed books have been important in religious practice, learning and recreation for 500 years. Books, whether in traditional or electronic form, are a vital part of our culture, a metaphor for individual, autonomous learning, in which the reader can stop, annotate, ponder, start again, re-read an earlier passage, reconsider and continue at an appropriate rate. This capacity is now available in some forms of eReader device such as Amazon’s Kindle, Apple’s iPad and tablets running Google’s Android operating system. These new devices, however, could have the capacity to transform the nature of writing, reading and learning.

Reading, especially of books, has a profound influence on personal development from infancy. According to Sir Michael Marmot, an eminent Australian health researcher in England, parents’ reading to children contributes to happiness and longevity. It remains to be seen how far this practice will survive or flourish in the Digital Revolution.

Reading has been central in growth, self-discovery, cultural transmission, literacy, aesthetics, values, creativity, personal development, narrative power, cultivating the imagination, pursuing the poetic, achieving psychological insights, encouraging evidence-based judgment, preservation of memory — both personal and collective, and acquiring essential knowledge. Traditionally, books were central to the creative process, involving writers, artists, designers, editors, publishers and support staff, then printers, distributors and booksellers. The book became deeply significant for readers, in schools, universities, libraries, and at home, for recreation, stimulation or instruction, especially after literacy rates rose in the 19th Century.

It is essential to make sure that in the name of the revolution we don’t clear-fell the old regime. Irreplaceable aspects of traditional publishing should be identified and preserved.

We live in a cultural, economic and political context where creativity seems to have fallen out of the lexicon and our approach to issues is increasingly managerial, instrumental and material — and this situation is characteristic of most advanced economies. We look for instant communication, instant responses and instant gratification, in which Twitter speed is central.

Book culture operates in a longer time frame with its emphasis on reflection. Books are read, but not consumed and have the capacity to become a permanent element in our values, our understanding and how we view the world, sometimes decades after the first reading.

‘Deep reading’ and ‘skimming’

Surveys suggest that as reading online has increased, reading of print has declined, especially for people in the 25-34 year age group. In the US and the UK, book sales, including eBooks and books bought online, have been flat-lining for a decade. Malcolm Knox speculates (Sydney Morning Herald 2 April 2011 ‘Driven by Distraction’) that this may be more than a mere market variation but a response to the changing nature of work and leisure in which ‘deep reading’, the concentrated pursuit of linear stories and thought, ‘is being trained out of us’ and may reflect a ‘rewiring the human brain’. Norman Doidge argues a similar case in his book on neuroplasticity, The Brain That Changes Itself (2008).

The English neuroscientist Susan (Baroness) Greenfield predicts a generational change from linear reading to non-linear skimming. The web teaches us to process information very quickly but also inconsequentially.

Seth Godin, an American on-line marketing guru and prolific author, argues persuasively that readers comprise two distinct personality types: ‘farmers’ and ‘hunters’.

‘Farmers’ are committed to deep reading and serious time commitment, concentrating, reflecting, with long attention spans and avoiding distraction. They are likely to remain committed to print books and to enjoy visits to bookstores.

‘Hunters’ are more likely to be ‘skimmers’, taking in material diversely and discursively. They often ‘multi-task’ and move rapidly between a variety of electronic forms, with limited time investment; the intake is wide but shallow and dependent on a diversity of external stimuli. They are less likely to be serious users of the traditional book. Of course, some readers will have characteristics from both categories. Older consumers are more likely to be ‘farmers’, younger ones ‘hunters’.

As Knox observes, the isolation required by serious reading is interrupted by constant distraction, including ‘email, digital news alerts, SMS, phone calls…RSS feeds, tweets, blogs, social networking pokes.’ The American writer Nicolas Carr estimates that office workers check their emails 30 to 40 times per hour. We read and write differently on screens: to read and write on them exclusively might have a profound effect.

Jason Epstein, the veteran editor of The New York Review of Books, asserts: ‘Far more than any other medium, books contain civilization, the ongoing conversation between present and past’.

Responding to the Digital Revolution

Historically, Australia has generally been slow to adopt new technologies but, once adopted, the take-up rate is very rapid. Often, we have been rather passive in the development of new technology, preferring to adopt existing technology from overseas. Black and white television transmission became common in the US and Great Britain after World War II but began in Australia as late as 1956. However, the adoption was unprecedentedly rapid. Colour television, relatively common in the US and Great Britain in the mid 1960s, only began regular transmission in Australia in 1975: by 1978, 64 per cent of households in Sydney and Melbourne had colour sets. Although Australia had its own large stored memory computer (CSIRAC) by 1949 and some pioneering capacity in transistors, we failed to exploit either and were late to adopt mainframe computers or — decades later — personal and then portable computers.

If precedents are followed, it is reasonable to assume that even if the take up of eBooks has been relatively modest until 2011, it may well be very rapid in the immediate future. There have been exceptionally rapid transitions in the retailing and production of videos and recorded music – from 78 rpm discs, to LPs to CDs to MP3s and now to online stores that allow the purchase of individual tracks, rather than the complete performance.

The impact of globalisation and technology (quite apart from the Digital Revolution) on the book industry, from authors through to readers, and the complete supply chain in between, remains entirely speculative. However, we must find ways to change production that will stimulate and grow the opportunities for creativity, rather than stunting them.

A series of important technical changes will transform the book industry as electronic processing or creation becomes cheaper and more ‘user friendly’. Currently it costs around $1.50 per page to digitise a printed novel, but more for textbooks with illustrations. Similarly, electronic publishing services are being established to help produce eBooks more easily.

Higher labour costs and relatively small production runs in Australia are serious, if not fatal, impediments to overseas competition – exacerbated by a strong Australian dollar.

It is significant that people are rising to the challenges presented by the digital revolution and trying new ways of communicating and story telling, in an age where many people think information should be free. That raises the question, ‘What is a fair price?’

Price and Choice

The high price of books in Australia is an elephant in the room, compounded by the VAT/GST factor, subsidised postage on books from overseas, small production runs and the high $A.

When the VAT was introduced in the UK in 1973, books, newspapers and magazines were specifically exempted because of their contribution to education, culture, personal development and literacy as a social good.

For most commodities — food, fuel, low cost clothing, toiletries — purchasers expect immediate availability at point of sale. This is not true of books, and is of decreasing relevance with newspapers and magazines. Booksellers report that potential customers enter their shops, photograph publication details of books on their iphones so that they can order them, VAT and GST free, by computer, either a physical book online (with the benefit of subsidised postage) or downloaded as an electronic book. More technologically advanced customers may also use freely available software such as RedLaser and Booko to scan the ISBN of the book into their iphone or Android and check price and availability from online suppliers (both domestic and international) and often find a supplier with a more competitive price than the bricks-and-mortar shop offering a range of titles.

Some commodities — shoes, designer clothes, jewellery — are being bought online but they attract VAT or its equivalent in Europe at point of sale. In no product area is the gap so wide -30 % (–20 + 10) in the case of books imported from the United Kingdom.

Implausible as it sounds, importing an Australian book online from the United Kingdom can be cheaper than buying it from a local bookshop. A striking example is The Cook’s Companion (Viking/ Penguin) by Stephanie Alexander: the hardcover edition sells in Australian bookshops for $A130.00. The Book Depository in England offers it, airmail postage included, for $A92.83. If Australia imposed 10% GST on books ordered online from overseas, then the price to an Australian purchaser would be about $A101.25 – still a substantial margin against the local bookseller.

Books and the Digital/ Information Revolution

James Gleick’s The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood (Pantheon, 2011) is sold in bookshops in Australia for $65.00 in hardback and $35.00 in paperback. Amazon offers the hardback for $US17.43 (plus postage) and it can be downloaded on Kindle at $US14.15. It is not difficult to decide what is the quickest and cheapest way to get the book.

Gleick’s The Information is a valuable overview of the Information Revolution. Gleick refers to Claude Elwood Shannon (1916-2001), the American mathematician who pioneered information theory and promoted the term ‘bit’ (from ‘binary digit’) for the basic unit of information. In 1949, Shannon calculated that the US Library of Congress contained about 100 trillion bits of information and could be regarded as the sum of acquired knowledge at the time. By 2011, an equivalent amount of information can be stored on a disc drive selling for less than $A1000.

An encyclopaedia might be regarded as the perfect example of a non-fiction reference that would survive in print — with regular updates of new material. However, in barely a decade, Wikipedia has displaced Encyclopaedia Britannica, The Columbia Encyclopaedia and other paper-based reference works. Wikipedia has, as Freeman Dyson observes, ‘… become the biggest storehouse of information on the planet and the noisiest battleground of conflicting opinions’.

Gleick (p. 409) sees the digital revolution as a ‘symptom of omniscience’. It is what the critic Alex Ross calls the ‘Infinite Playlist’, in which all recorded knowledge can be accessed by the touch of a button, a mixed blessing which brings ‘anxiety in place of fulfilment, an addictive cycle of craving and malaise. No longer has one experience begun than the thoughts of what else is out there intrudes.’ Gleick comments: ‘The embarrassment of riches. Another reminder that information is not knowledge, and knowledge is not wisdom’.

The book industry and cultural development

In addition to their content, books have been important as possessions, as physical objects, important mementos of childhood, as gifts or for display, collectors’ items distinguished for beauty or rarity, the treasures of great libraries.

According to Don Watson, ‘[b]ooks are objects of love, especially among children. What they draw from them therefore probably cannot be replaced by an iPad, which they may love as a piece of technology but not as a book, an object of enchantment or knowledge in itself.’

Publishing provided careers opportunities for designers, binders, illustrators, photographers, but it is not yet clear what new professional opportunities will be created in electronic publishing.

Public libraries, physical depositories of books, journals, magazines and newspapers, were essential elements in community education, especially self-education, for three centuries. They were places where readers were exposed to chance encounters with unfamiliar material and – if they were lucky – the assistance of librarians. But the very concept of a public library is under threat and may appear to some readers as remote as the medieval monastery, especially when they can access the contents of the Library of Congress from their iPads. The Fisher Library at Sydney University plans to eliminate 500,000 books from its collection. The University of New South Wales Library is converting library space to lounges, more user friendly to eReaders. It is difficult to imagine any government in 2011 committing large capital sums to the construction of new libraries.

In publishing, many books are printed and promoted even where there is a low expectation of profit because publishers want to encourage younger writers and because a large success for a few titles — the Harry Potter, Twlight, and Girl With the Dragon Tattoo phenomena — can enable publishers to survive even where many books with small print runs do not recover cost.

Finding out about books and book content will change: theoretically access will be much wider, but without person-to-person contact in a library or bookshop. The future of literary journals such as The Australian Book Review (now available online) will be challenging, as will the book review pages in our major newspapers. Book shops, word of mouth recommendations and access to libraries will remain significant for older readers, while electronic systems will dominate choices by younger readers.

The intellectual challenge of the digital revolution

Australia, like every other advanced economy, faces confronting challenges to how we perceive the world, learn, communicate, work and form relationships at every level, from the personal and intimate to the public and global. If we are to peer into a dimly illuminated future, what can we see? When we look at computers, Moore’s law has relentlessly increased the computing capacity in ever smaller and cheaper chips. But we still have mainframe computers, minicomputers, personal computers, tablets and smartphones. They all co-exist in their own niches. So it may be with books. The taxonomy of books may become better defined and in some areas printed books may thrive. eReading is not an either/ or choice. People with eReaders are likely to continue buying printed books.

We must encourage creativity, or as the dynamic English educator Sir Ken Robinson calls it, ‘applied imagination’. If something as new as email can be reimagined in the 21st Century, it is not a big stretch to think that the book industry can be transformed by creative Australians. Where do we find these creative Australians? We grow our own, from native or imported stock, in schools (and universities).

As Watson has argued, ‘[w]e should be teaching a love of words and ideas from the very beginning — that, and training teachers to do it, is the best guarantee of a healthy publishing industry — and a more than useful contribution to a successful economy and a richer culture.’

The Digital Revolution should be welcomed, and the publishing industry should be moving fast to adapt and take it up. However, we should not be looking at publishing in isolation, but in its relationship to culture and education in general. Publishers, governments and institutions should be looking for imaginative links between them. Perhaps Australian universities should combine to create a major academic publishing house, using both digital and traditional modes.

Knowledge is an area of the economy that will still be crucial long after the mining boom is over. Whatever else the 21st century brings, we will still need imagination, art, civil society, comforts beyond material consumption. Indeed the countries that will do best overall are likely to be the countries that do best at these.

Books are more than an industrial output, as conventionally defined. The book culture needs to be encouraged rather than protected, transformed rather than subsidised.

Adapted from an article published by the Book Industry Strategy Group, 2011

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from Meanjin

2011-12-21T00:00:00Z

2011 has been a big year for Meanjin (though does anyone ever say that a year hasn’t been big? “Well, it’s been a mediocre year and not much has happened…”) we’ve launched the new website, redesigned the print journal, bid farewell to one editorial team and designer and handed over to another.

We will be taking a break over Christmas and the New Year, but while we’re gone, take the opportunity to explore some of the brilliant writing that we’ve published online since the new site launched in September.

Essays:

Get an insider’s perspective on the move to recognise Indigenous Australians in the Constitution in this crucially important essay on the history and future of the issue by Marcia Langton. Read now…

Now featured in Best Australian Essays 2011, read Maria Tumarkin’s searingly insightful essay on the Orlando Figes scandal, and the morality, or lack thereof, in public academia. Read now…

Richard King argues against the growing currency and power of ‘offendedness’ in public discourse, and tells why it’s such a dangerous phenomena. Read now…

The authors of the City series discuss the things they learned and sometimes had to unlearn about their cities in this revealing conversation. Read now…

Fiction:

David Mence gave us a cycle of stories of early life among the sealers of Portland Bay with Denmaar, Boxing Match and Dutton’s River.

The Office of Icebergs is an original and darkly comic story of bureaucracy, office politics and our perilous environmental future. An absolute must read from Rebecca Giggs.

Peggy Frew’s novel House of Sticks came out this year, but so did this perfect short story, All the Love in the World, which you can read now.

Poetry:

The winners of the Meanjin Dorothy Porter Prize were announced recently. You can not only read their poems online, but hear recordings of the poets reading their winning poems aloud. Absolutely beautiful work from Stephen Edgar and Fiona Britton. Read and listen now…

Pam Schindler offers a subtle, heartfelt reflection on Black Saturday in After the Fires, Kinglake (2).

Elizabeth Smither writes of the small things that speak so much about a person in My Mother’s Fingernails.

We will be back on January 16th with more new writing, but in the meantime we wish you a Merry Christmas and holiday season from everyone at Meanjin.

A Critical Mind: On Sam Goldberg

2011-12-21T00:00:00Z

‘I’ve changed my attitude in fighting the name “Leavisite”, ’ Sam Goldberg told Richard Freadman in the 1980s. ‘As I’ve said it’s like the word “Jew”. Name-calling is the stupid person’s substitute for reason and argument; and I now take the line that if you want to call me a “Leavisite” call me a “Leavisite”. Why should I be ashamed of learning from such a man?—or reject the other names you might call me—Arnoldian, say, or Joycean? I take the same view about “elitism”. In my belief that some people are finer in spirit, deeper and more intelligent, more creative and courageous in action, than others, I am an elitist: in my belief in democratic institutions, I am not. But why repudiate or run from the name, as though it as unspeakably vile to be any sort of elitist?’¹

At a time when deconstruction and postmodernism were considered cutting edge in English departments across Australia, such an open expression of admiration for the Cambridge critic F.R. Leavis was deeply unfashionable. Australia was never really comfortable with the evaluative, elitist critical approach delineated by Leavis. But Professor Samuel Louis Goldberg was always provocative, and not easily reduced to a disciple. Combative, challenging, ‘at times imperious’,² in the 1960s Goldberg was considered ‘the most brilliant academic teacher of English in the country’.³ His distinctive, humanist voice survives in The Classical Temper, An Essay on King Lear, the posthumous Agents and Lives, and the essays he wrote in the Melbourne Critical Review, the journal he founded and edited from 1958 until his death in 1991.

In the 1970s he left Melbourne for a research position at the ANU, yet teaching rather than writing was always his most powerful medium. Goldberg thrived on dialogue, argument and collaboration, and as a young lecturer at Melbourne University in the 1950s he was at his most dynamic: the full force of his intellectual energy was felt by a singular generation of students, many of whom, such as Ian Donaldson, Wilbur Sanders, Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Margaret Walters, Germaine Greer, Jenny Gribble and Phillip Martin, would in turn become academic teachers of English and go on to distinguished national and international careers.

Although a sustained examination of the interplay between the life and work must wait for the biography that Goldberg’s intellectual contribution so richly deserves, it is necessary to touch on some of the tensions that continue to unsettle his reputation. For, literature was ‘a distinctive and irreplaceable form of moral thinking’.⁴ He believed it to be more suited than philosophy to the exploration of moral codes and principles and to the expression of the unique, individual experience of being human that his conception of the moral encompassed. If Goldberg never presumed to see his own life as exemplifying the finer spirit of what he termed ‘conduct morality’, by today’s uncompromising standards of pedagogical ethics he is in many ways a troubling figure.

Former student and later colleague Chris Wallace-Crabbe thought Goldberg was driven by a ‘kind of intellectual Eros’. While Goldberg’s love for the intellectual was a mark of his vocation as a teacher, he gave far more attention to students he thought worth encouraging than to others. The overlooked and intimidated kept quiet, moved to other courses, or dropped out. Some students, in the process of developing their own critical voices, found his authority and influence too insistent. Increasingly, students felt alienated by the Melbourne department’s narrow focus on the moral and frustrated by the absence of political and historical perspectives. For James Simpson, Professor of English at Harvard and a former student of the Melbourne department in the early 1970s, ‘every class became a ghastly test of the students’ moral probity’.⁵

‘Intellectual Eros’ might also be an interesting way of engaging with Goldberg’s infatuations with female students over the course of his career. Smaller classes made for a more intimate relationship between teacher and student, and further charged by the intensity of the literature they were reading there was bound to be some blurring in the boundaries between the professional and the personal. For Goldberg, as for other intellectuals and artists, Eros may well have been an aspect of the creative drive. Goldberg was a complex man. If in the end he is by no means a heroic figure, as he wrote of Antony in ‘The Tragedy of the Imagination: A Reading of Antony and Cleopatra’: ‘To see in him only a man weakened by self-indulgence and divided attentions is to miss the greater part of the truth. His stature is larger than that and his fate correspondingly more complex.’⁶

Goldberg was born in 1926 to Jewish immigrant parents and grew up in then working class Carlton and Brunswick, suburbs that before the Second World War had a strong Jewish presence. Later Goldberg told Freadman that ‘Jews have been traditionally far more readily embedded in Australian culture than they have been in America’ and that he’d ‘never found it necessary or even helpful to think of myself as a specifically Jewish intellectual in this country’,⁷ and yet what he felt about growing up Jewish is unknown. Anti-Semitism, albeit in a far less violent and more casual form than in Europe, was also embedded in 1930s Australia, and it seems unlikely that the boy would not have experienced it. His intelligence certainly marked him as different from his peers. Educated at Faraday Street Public School, Coburg High and University High, Goldberg’s final school year examination results were so brilliant that, according to Ian Maxwell, ‘the Scholarship Selection Committee set him up as a standard—the sort of man one might expect to find in the whole Faculty of Arts only one in six or eight years’.

His undergraduate results were equally impressive. As Maxwell recalled, Goldberg was ‘no mere pot hunter, or champion examinee, but followed his intellectual interests where they led him—often well beyond the syllabus’.⁸ Goldberg was such a serious student that in his final year Maxwell had to ‘restrain’ himself from telling the young man to leave some of Dr Johnston to ‘read after his final year examinations’.⁹ He was also reading James Joyce’s Ulysses, at that point banned under Australia’s strict censorship laws and very difficult to obtain. In 1947, two years after the war, its humanism resonated deeply. While Goldberg would come to see the novel’s exiled protagonist Leopold Bloom as an everyman, in an early essay, ‘The Conception of History in James Joyce’s Ulysses’, published in the student-run journal Present Opinion in 1947, Goldberg yokes Leopold Bloom’s exile more forcefully to his Jewish heritage. The essay’s struggle to reconcile ‘the nightmare of history’ with an ‘affirmation of life’ also suggests that Goldberg was already reading Leavis’s journal Scrutiny in the university library.

Joyce and Leavis were formative influences operating on the young Goldberg but reconciling them would be complex. For Leavis, great literature was marked by a moral seriousness that affirmed human life. He excluded Joyce from his literary canon, writing of Ulysses that ‘the extraordinary technical devices … and exhaustive rendering of consciousness for which Ulysses is remarkable … is rather I think a dead end, or at least a pointer to disintegration’.¹⁰ Drawing on the more sympathetic understanding Goldberg found in the American critics Harry Levin and Richard Blackmur, Ulysses would be a major focus in the decade that followed. His study of the novel, The Classical Temper, was published in 1961.

In 1947 Goldberg graduated from his combined honours degree in English and History with first class honours and was invited by both departments to tutor the following year. Mentored by the ‘eccentric, wilful and charismatic’¹¹ Ian Maxwell, he chose English. Maxwell would be a steadying influence on Goldberg, responsible not only for his first permanent lectureship in 1953 but later in the 1960s, after Goldberg had resigned from the Chair at Sydney, smoothing the way for Goldberg to return to a Chair at Melbourne.

Maxwell was ‘conservative but not bourgeois’.¹² As a young law student at Melbourne he was foundation president of the student Liberal Club before deciding to study for a BLitt at Oxford and pursue an academic career in English. Despite his political conservatism, Maxwell was a pluralist who in the early 1950s would be an outspoken opponent of the Menzies government’s attempts to ban the Communist Party. He was equally tolerant of the intellectual divisions and positions that would emerge in his own department. The Friday evening sherry parties where Maxwell delighted in singing Border ballads and Australian folk songs not only encouraged a more relaxed atmosphere in the department, but also closer social relationships between final-year students and their teachers; as did the camping trips he took students on at Howqua near Mansfield, where on at least one occasion Maxwell’s claim to know all of Paradise Lost by heart was put to the test.

He liked Goldberg, whose sharp sense of humour was perhaps surprising in such a serious young man. And yet, fond as he was of Goldberg, he was alert to the young man’s self-absorption and the difficulties he had relating to people not on the same intellectual plane; qualities Maxwell thought incompatible with being a good teacher. ‘So young and so brilliant,’ Maxwell wrote of Goldberg as a tutor in the late 1940s, but ‘a bit wrapped up in his affairs and apt not to notice that older people did not have a chair when he had’.¹³ At twenty-two, Goldberg was ‘a superficially self-confident but really diffident young man’. Although Maxwell was very impressed by the lectures Goldberg delivered on James Joyce, the young tutor was ‘not genuinely popular’, and did not ‘easily bridge the gap with most of his students’.¹⁴

Goldberg could be distant, but his personality was not the only reason he had problems engaging with students. In the late 1940s, his classes were very large and filled with a particularly challenging group of students. Between 1946 and 1948 returned servicemen and women taking up government scholarships at the university more than doubled the population to 9000 students. These students were older and more experienced than many of their tutors. Some held strong ideas about what sort of society should emerge in the aftermath of the war and demanded a great deal of their education. As Maxwell noted, Goldberg ‘was intelligent enough to realize his shortcomings and to take advice from more experienced people and soon learned to show his real friendliness in consideration for others’.¹⁵ Goldberg’s insecurities, however, would not be so easily resolved. Perhaps he was partly talking about himself when he wrote of King Lear needing ‘others to respect his external “authority”, the “marks” of his familiar self’. It wasn’t ‘self-ignorance’ Goldberg saw in Lear ‘but rather of self-mistrust, as if he cannot believe, fully, securely and patiently believe, in his mere self as worth the love and respect it needs’.¹⁶

In 1950 the proper destination for Australians in pursuit of an academic career in English literature was Oxford or Cambridge. Although Melbourne had introduced the degree of PhD in 1945, a combination of prejudice and a focus on scholarship in a discipline defined as English maintained a steady exodus of postgraduate students. As late as 1958 Maxwell boasted that the department had never had ‘a PhD because I have succeeded in deflecting them’. In Maxwell’s opinion ‘the main point of a PhD is the work done in the great libraries while the thesis itself seems to me likely to kill criticism, and do some damage to scholarship. So often it means combing over a “field”, pigeon- holing the results, and stunning the examiners into acquiescence—instead of flowing out an interesting thought and writing to entertain and instruct the educated public.’¹⁷

Maxwell was not alone in thinking this aggressive breed of critic was antipathetic to the civilised good manners of the scholar. In 1950 his friend and colleague in the department A.D. Hope satirised both the English critic and the American researcher in the satiric poem ‘Dunciad Minimus’. In Hope’s tribute to Alexander Pope, the Cambridge critics are ‘Arnold’s nightmare children’, while the American PhDs are more grotesquely imagined as insect creatures spawned in second-rate universities: ‘There they pupate, and doctors all they lurch / Uttering their parrot cry Research! Research!’

Goldberg took Maxwell’s advice and left in 1950 to study for a BLitt at Oxford. Originally he had wanted to write his thesis on Joyce but his topic was declined on the grounds that someone else had very recently written on the author. Instead, Goldberg wrote on the Elizabethan historian Sir John Hayward. His supervisor was the retired Merton professor of English David Nichol Smith. It was at Oxford, Goldberg would later tell Richard Freadman, that ‘I became really interested in Leavis’s writing’ and began to see ‘appraisal, judgment, evaluation’ as the ‘key elements of criticism’. In the 1950s he read Leavis critically, disagreeing with him on Joyce and thinking much of the content of his social criticism as well as his idealisation of pre-industrial England ‘nonsense’.¹⁸ What excited Goldberg were ‘the general principles and structure of his thinking’ and their potential for developing a more rigorous and discriminating approach to literary studies in Australia.

Maxwell would later admit that Goldberg’s 1953 appointment in the Melbourne department was ‘premature’.¹⁹ Goldberg had not yet submitted his thesis when he applied, and Maxwell thought him too young. He believed strongly that Goldberg needed the experience of working in an English university, both for ‘scholarly opportunities’ and more pressingly for ‘personal development’.²⁰ Candidly, Maxwell wrote, ‘I don’t think Sam is the man for us.’ While he wanted someone ‘warmer’ and ‘a bit more man to man and hail fellow well met’, he also feared that Goldberg ‘might be a little bit above the pass man’s head’. On the other hand, Maxwell recognised that Goldberg had ‘very great lecturing ability’ and noted ‘that Nichol Smith seems quite sure of his academic quality’.²¹ Already Maxwell felt a great sense of responsibility for Goldberg. He would later say he appointed him because ‘I wanted to keep him with us’,²² but as Maxwell noted in private correspondence, academic jobs in the early 1950s were extremely hard to get and he realised Goldberg’s chances of obtaining a position elsewhere were slim.

The English department Goldberg returned to at the start of 1953 was not quite the genteel enclave of scholars he had left behind. Although Vera Jennings, Gaye Tennant, Bill Scott and Associate Professor Keith McCartney with his ‘amazing stammer’ and his very ‘entertaining’²³ lectures on drama and language remained, Leonie Gibson (later Kramer) had departed for Oxford and Alec Hope to the University College in Canberra. Goldberg would form close friendships with the two newer and younger members of staff, senior tutor Maggie O’Keefe and lecturer Thomas (Jock) Tomlinson. After their marriage the Tomlinsons would be loyal supporters of Goldberg, their more straightforward admiration for Leavis contributing to the Cambridge feel of the department that students would soon start to observe. It was, however, the discussions Goldberg was having with the young senior tutor Vincent Buckley that would have the more profound influence in defining and refining his own critical approach.

Many of their conversations were on Joyce. Buckley would write his thesis on Joyce at Cambridge and later consider Goldberg’s The Classical Temper the best study of Ulysses he had ever read. The young Buckley was also interested in Leavis, while Goldberg—lecturing in Renaissance literature and thinking deeply about Shakespeare—was beginning to see Leavis’s ‘moralistic-humanistic’ approach as ‘inadequate in addressing’ tragedy. ‘Vin Buckley and I (partly under his impact) were more interested than Leavis was in the ways literature opened up large, as you might say metaphysical, questions,’ Goldberg told Richard Freedman. ‘We wanted to take tragedy more seriously, or at least to explore it more than he had.’²⁴

In the 1950s Buckley was another dynamic force in the department. As Ian Donaldson, a student in the department between 1954 and 1958, remembered, Buckley ‘would suddenly be engaged by the complexity of something which you had thought was quite simple. And he would say “this is diffeecult”, he had a particular way of pronouncing that word and suddenly you realised it was much more diffeecult then you had ever realised.’ Donaldson found Goldberg equally challenging: ‘a lot of things he would worry about, a lot of good questions that would be asked, but not fully answered’, which led to ‘those loose ends and … the intellectual excitement’.²⁵

‘Dialogue was essential’ to Goldberg, Jenny Gribble reflected. ‘I now think his famous combativeness was a way of thinking aloud, and an invitation to show him where he was wrong.’²⁶ In Joanne Lee Dow’s opinion ‘nobody else in the English department was subtle in the same way he was … What you saw in lectures was a mind making propositions, asking questions, raising counter points of view, the inner dialectic of the lectures’, while Chris Wallace-Crabbe saw in him ‘a kind of charisma … the charisma of intellectual edge that drew people in’.

Goldberg demanded ‘solid preparation’²⁷ and brought an uncompromising rigour to discussions. Fourth-year poetry seminars often started in silence. Everyone was smoking, ‘the air was thick … it gave you a chance to get your thoughts together as you became very busy with a match’. Goldberg was ‘tough’, Ian Donaldson recalled.

He was tough in a way that no other tutor I had was tough in that he treated you as an adult, there would be no concessions and he wouldn’t help you at all at getting a conversation started … he would say,it is up to you, you can start this any way you like … It was very intimidating because when you did get going very often he’d slam you down for saying something facile. But facile seemed better then long silences.

Tensions soon emerged between the older and younger members of staff. Ian Maxwell had little time for the Cambridge school of evaluative close readings unanchored to historical scholarship that were being promoted by the ‘young bloods’ in his department. The lean English tradition defined by Leavis, which discounted Milton and traced the novel’s line of significance through Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad and D.H. Lawrence, was anathema to a professor who ‘preferred to treat established authors with as much sympathy as I can muster’.²⁸ Maxwell’s own taste ranged across Old Norse sagas, Milton and Izaac Walton to the modernist poetry of T.S. Eliot and a ‘very Scottish menu’ of Burns, Scott and the Border ballads. The historical novel The White Company by Arthur Conan Doyle was one personal favourite that he would often refer to in lectures. ‘We read some funny stuff, such as George Borrow’s Lavengro,’ Ian Donaldson reflected. ‘It was usually because Ian found something to like in them … He would give you an intriguing lecture, and then you would struggle with the book and wonder what you were going to say about it.’

Donaldson ‘was dimly aware that there were parties in the department and that the Ian Maxwell approach was being viewed rather sceptically by the Cambridge people and that they didn’t all agree amongst themselves’. As Maxwell observed, Goldberg ‘is a man both sensitive and deeply concerned with academic standards. This means he has sometimes trodden on the toes of older colleagues and even sometimes on mine, fond as I am of him’. Goldberg had in fact been extremely angry with Maxwell when he learned that changes had been made to the first-year English course without consulting him. These ‘minor clashes here and there’, Maxwell conceded, ‘were largely due to his abilities being somewhat cramped in a department which remains old-fashioned at the top’.²⁹

‘If there were confrontations between the generations they were more like standoffs than the wars the theory warriors brought on,’ David Moody recently reflected on the department at the time of his appointment as lecturer in 1958.

The establishment was rather vague about what it collectively and genteelly stood for; and the younger and newer just had some fairly strong and clear ideas about what should be on the syllabus and how they would teach it. There was co-existence of distinct spheres of influence, rather than aggression and belligerence. Differences were felt, of course, and occasionally sharply, even bitterly. But civilized manners, did, on the whole, prevail.³⁰

Leavis was an important marker of the generational divide. It was ‘almost impossible to write an essay, or get through a tutorial without trying to engage with Leavis,’ Ian Donaldson recalls. ‘Leavis would be worked into every semi- nar and after a while by us, because we felt we had to stay ahead of the game … One had the complete works of Leavis on the shelves, even as a student they were the holy texts … It did seem to turn the authors into rather different creatures. Lawrence became a very large moral figure … I couldn’t always get the Leavis lens. He seemed to me to be much more a vitalist writer.’

Joanne Lee Dow, who graduated in 1959, could see ‘a kind of orthodoxy’ developing in the department, and one student in her year whom she thought ‘not well served’ was David Johansen. His ‘natural impulses were towards the literature which was out of fashion … He had tried to argue for Tennyson in tutorials and realised there was no way he could do it.’ Looking back, Lee Dow thinks it ‘ridiculous … that if you were writing a defence of Milton you would have to write as well as if you were writing an attack on Shakespeare’. Some of Goldberg’s most provocative positions, such as dismissal of Spenser and Milton, came directly from Leavis. One seminar in which Ian Donaldson ‘felt very uncomfortable’ was on Spenser:

Goldberg obviously didn’t care for Spenser and couldn’t read more than a few verses. So the whole class for the whole hour concentrated on the first stanza of The Faerie Queene: ‘A Gentle Knight is pricking on the plaine’, and Sam’s line about this was that it was an absurd poem. Every adjective was a stock adjective, and he went through every adjective and every noun. I was too young and scared to say what I felt, which was: hang on, this is a much longer poem, it’s not just one stanza … you have to take the reader through it. Shouldn’t we be talking about something other than the adjectives? Aren’t there other narrative qualities? What about the allegory, or the politics? There are so many other things to this very rich poem, which Sam tried to destroy.

For Chris Wallace-Crabbe, however, Milton ‘was his weak point. I thought it was because Leavis’s early essay on Paradise Lost was hostile and he just fell in with it a bit lazily. Because Paradise Lost is so intellectually complex and debating with everything, I thought that it was a phony position. Whereas I thought that any number of other positions may have been combative but they weren’t as phony as that.’

Goldberg ‘tended to coopt rather than to fight’, Joanne Lee Dow observed. ‘He credited you with being righter than you realised and somehow you came of his party rather [than] he of your party.’ Being treated as an adult and intellectual equal by Goldberg was also, as Ian Donaldson recalls, ‘enormously flattering to a nineteen-year-old’. Donaldson would graduate with first class honours in 1958, a year that included ‘the formidably clever’³¹ Wilbur Sanders, who would ‘make history’³² when Goldberg awarded him twenty out of twenty for an essay; and ‘the fragile … very bright’³³ Andrew Deacon. All three would become tutors in the Melbourne department, and Sanders and Deacon would join Goldberg in Sydney as tutors when he was appointed Professor of English in 1963. Goldberg’s tenure in Sydney would, however, be brief: his decision to import the Tomlinsons, Andrew Deacon, Wilbur Sanders and another young Melbourne tutor, Peter Nicholls, would be seen by some as a Leavisite insurrection. By then Donaldson, feeling ‘the need for critical distance from Sam’, had already left for Oxford.

In the late 1950s, Maxwell noted that Goldberg had ‘kept up his eager, natural ranging interest in good books’.³⁴ He read obsessively. Nabokov and Saul Bellow were two of his favourite writers—each creators of sexually troubled protagonists. Goldberg the reader, as opposed to the critic, was also less discriminatingly drawn to detective fiction. In 1957, with a view to encouraging wider reading and debate, he was instrumental in re-establishing the University Literature Club. The monthly meetings in the Student Union, held in the evenings so part-time students could attend, were an opportunity for staff and students to deliver papers and, unlike the texts they were teaching and reading, the focus here was mostly on contemporary literature and criticism. For students it was also a chance to test arguments that would feed back into their academic work.

A paper Ian Donaldson delivered at a Literature Club meeting on a recent argument between the Oxford literary critic F.W. Bateson and Leavis would prove to be an intellectual turning point. English at Melbourne was ‘often curiously de-contextualized, absorbed in the New Critical fashion with the literary work as a timeless object of contemplation’,³⁵ and Bateson’s position that Leavis gave insufficient attention to the historical context of literature was persuasive. In Oxford, Donaldson would be closely associated with Bateson and his journal Essays in Criticism, working, along with Christopher Ricks, as a co-editor. Looking back, Donaldson continues to feel that Bateson’s critique of Leavis’s methods was in large measure justified, and that it might well have been directed with equal force against some of Goldberg’s own writing and teaching at this time.

In 1957 second-year honours student Jenny Dallimore (later Gribble) was secretary of the Literature Club and worked with Goldberg planning its meetings and conferences, which were held over weekends at Healesville and Warburton. The first conference in 1957 was on ‘The Angry Young Men’ and featured, Gribble thinks, the first Australian performance of Look Back in Anger, a year after its London première. Kafka, Arthur Koestler and Graham Greene were the subjects of the second conference, ‘Axe Grinding Muse’, while a later conference would include the first Australian play reading of Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape. Although Goldberg and Maxwell enjoyed ‘crossing swords’, for younger students the meetings were ‘intimidating’.³⁶ As Chris Wallace-Crabbe recalls, ‘one of Sam’s great tricks was to seem to fall asleep during the papers and then ask the first question when question time came’.

Goldberg’s interest in developing a more professional approach to literary criticism in Australia led naturally to his thinking about the need for a journal whose focus, unlike that of Meanjin or Southerly, would be exclusively on criticism. Great literature, he believed, would flow from more exacting criticism. The Melbourne Critical Review would be forged the year before Melbourne University established a course in Australian literature; the journal informed and shaped by the debates between Goldberg and Buckley over whether there was an ‘Australian Tradition’ and whether it was worth considering. ‘Even at its fin- est,’ Goldberg wrote, ‘our literature has very, very seldom achieved the intense penetration of its subject that demands expression in some vitally original form.’ Australia, he thought, was

so anxious to create art of our very own, so obsessed with counting every hair on our own cultural chest, that we have been too ready to forget that fundamental dependence. What is more, we have been too ready to forget the hard, uncompromising integrity of spirit, on which the highest artistic and intellectual achievement depends.³⁷

The Melbourne Critical Review would also foster a spirit of collaboration between staff and students and, for undergraduates and very recent graduates such as Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Jenny Gribble, Margaret Walters, Joanne Lee Dow, Wilbur Sanders and Ian Donaldson, a rare opportunity to hone their work for publication. Students were also actively involved in the production and editing of the Melbourne Critical Review. Between 1958 and 1960 Jenny Dallimore was credited as co-editor, although other students such as Joanne Lee Dow would also assist with editing.

The year 1959 was a difficult one for Goldberg. His divorce to his first wife Muriel (Hill) was in the process of being finalised, and in addition to a ‘hellish teaching load’³⁸ he was editing the Melbourne Critical Review and finishing the writing of The Classical Temper. Ambitious to have his own department to run, he was nonetheless ‘dithering’ about applying for the Chair of English at the University of New South Wales. As he told Maxwell: ‘At the moment, on the whole, weighing one thing with another. Looking at it all round, ceteris, paribus, mutabis, mutandis, interalia, without prejudice, with much said on both sides, and wishing someone would damn well make up my mind for me—I think I shall apply since I can always withdraw later.’³⁹

To Maxwell, Goldberg admitted that he was having trouble ‘keeping up’ with the fourth-year class and seminar, calling them ‘the best year we’ve ever had’.⁴⁰ The year was impressive. Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Jenny Gribble, Joanne Lee Dow, Philip Martin and Margaret Walters would all obtain tutorships in the English department. David Johansen would continue on in history rather than English, working as a tutor in the Melbourne history department and later lecturing at ANU and La Trobe, while Germaine Greer would move away to tutor in English at the University of Sydney before her departure for Cambridge.

Greer was a lively presence. Goldberg thought her ‘eccentricity’ both a strength and a weakness, and while he appreciated her ‘animated discussion’ and ‘remarkable perception’, he thought she relied ‘too much on her sharp chatty manner’ and ‘did not take the time to gather her thoughts into coherent shape’.⁴¹ His respect for her would deepen after she had worked for him in Sydney as a tutor; his influence on her perhaps also there in Greer’s own provocative, challenging positions. The Melbourne students, however, worked prodigiously hard. Poetry seminars were held every Thursday morning, and every Thursday evening the class would collect again across the road at Greer’s loft on the corner of Barry and Grattan streets where they would replay the tutorials without the staff and where, as Wallace-Crabbe recalled, ‘someone usually gave a reasonably serious introduction to our discussion there too’.

As a supervisor Goldberg was far less combative than he was in the seminars. While he recommended that Gribble ‘look at Women in Love in the context of Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus’, she felt ‘under no pressure to toe the line … he recognised that I didn’t know what I thought till I had said it, and he was prepared to let that form’. Nonetheless ‘Sam’s stringency and attention to detail could be inhibiting to the ways in which one was different to him. I could see I needed to build up strengths he’d enabled me to find in myself and listen to other voices.’⁴² Although Goldberg thought Gribble a ‘shade too self-critical’, he was impressed by her ‘originality, intelligence and scholarly integrity’⁴³ and included her long essay in issue 2 of the 1959 Melbourne Critical Review under the title ‘The Ambiguous Life of Doctor Faustus’, an issue that included work by fellow student Margaret Walters.

Overshadowed by the so-called theory wars, Goldberg’s legacy is not always easy to see. And yet, as Ian Donaldson’s intellectual trajectory illustrates, embracing the challenge Goldberg laid down ‘to show him where he was wrong’⁴⁴ is one of the most fascinating and significant aspects of his influence. In the culture of Melbourne University’s English department of the 1950s, the young Goldberg emerges as its galvanising force; the Melbourne Critical Review and the Literature Club vital expressions of the dialogue, collaboration and argument he saw as so essential to intellectual life. The Review, Lee Dow recalls, was put together in a room in the Arts Faculty ‘on two long big tables’ where ‘sheets were collected around the room and stapled’. The Club ‘was feeding into it … It was extraordinarily alive, and that meant that there was a huge interchange, and there wasn’t that kind of distance that there can be between staff and students: it was very much intersecting worlds.’

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in the March Meanjin 2010 (69.10). A draft version which differed from the print version was mistakenly published on this website in June 2010. The version posted here is the correct final version of the article.

The Poisoned Chalice: Genetic Heritage, Future Demise

2011-12-20T00:00:00Z

Some 150 years ago Charles Darwin enunciated the fundamental truth that underpins our understanding of the evolution of life on earth. Those individuals with the most appropriate genetic adaptations for a particular environment survive at the expense of the less well adapted, and reproductive success is just as important as survival, since it is the number of offspring that determine which species flourish and which disappear into oblivion.¹ His theory seems self-evident in hindsight, but in eighteenth-century England it was revolutionary, particularly in its implications for human evolution. Perhaps it was even more revolutionary than his detractors recognised: encapsulated in his theory are the seeds of our possible destruction, something we have chosen to ignore. Darwin could well have anticipated our present predicament.

For the first time in human history we are facing existential threats relating to sustainability, climate change, population growth and economic stability. While many are busy looking at proximate causes and technological solutions, we need to look to evolutionary biology for insights into the underlying causes.

Darwin understood that in the natural world, evolution works within an ecological framework. In most environments, thousands of species exist in a tenuous equilibrium—the web of life. Their levels rise and fall according to resource availability, climate change and predation. However, 99 per cent of all species that have ever existed are no longer with us.² Many were victims of catastrophes of global magnitude, others were out-competed by a species that shared the same ecological niche, or fell victim to an emerging predator or a new disease. Some reproduced exponentially while times were good, only to suffer a subsequent devastating population crash. Whatever the catastrophe, it was the end of the line unless a genetic variant existed that was better able to survive.

Humans, of course, are relative newcomers, evolving over the last four or five million years.³ While we are part of the ecological landscape, we have also introduced a new dimension. Our bipedalism, increased dexterity, and increased intelligence, language and culture have allowed us to become supremely successful by better exploiting our environment. Humankind flourished, particularly during the recent past, with the last 10,000 years being a period of benign climatic conditions that saw the development of agriculture.⁴ However, in time this led to centres of increased population, the overuse of resources and, ultimately, the collapse of many civilisations—from the early Sumerian civilisation in Mesopotamia to the cities of the Maya; from ancient Greece to Easter Island.⁵ But how could intelligent humans have failed to foresee the consequences of their actions? Or as Jared Diamond asked in Collapse, ‘What did the Easter Islander who cut down the last palm tree say while he was doing it?’

We happily celebrate the Industrial Revolution as a triumph of the human intellect. Certainly, it led to the harnessing of physical laws governing the natural world to increase food production, improve living conditions and to provide new modes of travel, entertainment and communication. However, the resultant burgeoning human population, increased use of resources and fossil fuels, and production of pollution, have been responsible for the global problems that threaten our way of life and have the potential to bring about the end of modern civilisation.

So it appears that we still haven’t learned. In spite of our intelligence, we have failed to behave in accordance with the fact that the Earth is a closed system with finite resources and a finite capacity to absorb pollution. We currently use more of the Earth’s resources each year than can be regenerated.⁶ More than thirty years ago scientists told us that our treatment of the Earth was unsustainable,⁷ and put forward the prospect of global warming.⁸ Books were written and summits were organised, but there was little action. Even now, little has changed in our behaviour. Why aren’t we dealing with these issues with the urgency they deserve?

It would seem that we are victims of our genetic and cultural heritage, a failure that flows logically from Darwin’s theory of evolution. How do we make decisions? What determines the way we behave? We are guided by two very different processes. The first is largely automatic and can loosely be termed ‘emotional’. It is dependent upon instinct or ‘gut-feeling’ and upon cultural beliefs we have accepted as children. The second process is ‘rational’; it depends upon reasoning and intelligence, and is informed by what we have learned.⁹ Both processes are underpinned by the ‘big five personality traits’, openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism, all of which have a significant heritable component of around 50 per cent.¹⁰

Darwin believed that evolution applied as much to our psychological adaptations as to our physical attributes. Evolution selected our personality traits and instincts in the distant past, many of our genetic traits pre-dating the evolution of primitive man; almost all of the others evolved during the 99 per cent of human history when we were still hunters and gatherers. Evolutionary Psychology proposes that many of our innate behavioural traits emerged in this Pleistocene environment.¹¹ Hence we instinctively fear snakes and spiders, while we lack innate fear of modern contrivances such as cars, even though they represent a far greater hazard in the modern world. These instinctive responses originating in the limbic system or primitive part of the brain are generally rapid, are very powerful and may result in good decision-making in many situations that have changed little since we evolved. They help us to make many of the important and complex decisions in life, like mate choice and where to live. They provide us with innate capacities for skills such as language acquisition. Significantly, the heritable component of human personality traits would also have emerged or become better refined as adaptations in this Stone Age environment.

In the Pleistocene world humans lived very much in the present and were rarely constrained by issues of sustainability. When resources became depleted in a particular area, bands or tribes were often able to move to new areas or to expand their home range, a behaviour that did, in many cases, cause the extinction of large game and promote extensive migration. As is the case in most mammals, males were the dominant sex. This was reflected in the strength and hunting prowess of men, together with competition for women, the limiting resource for procreation. In contrast, women were generally smaller and weaker than men, and it seems likely that they were often either pregnant or lactating, so were better suited to foraging and keeping the home fires burning. As societies became more settled, women would have been attracted to partners with material wealth and influence, as these traits contributed to reproductive success.¹² Our instincts therefore encourage us to procreate, to be competitive and to be materialistic, using resources with little thought for the future.

Our ability to use language, to learn, and to pass on cultural traditions evolved between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago. These advances in the ability to communicate and share culture, which mark the beginning of modern Homo sapiens, were selected because they improved survival or reproductive success. Ideas and techniques for doing things subsequently underwent cultural evolution, where the more successful ones were passed on more frequently, and different ideas were brought together to create new artefacts or techniques.¹³ Culture and genetic evolution progressed hand in hand, the flowering of these faculties and the ability to transfer skills underpinning mankind’s incredible progress.

Human obsession with fairness may well spring from the evolutionary origins of altruism. We recognise altruism towards kin as an adaptation that favours those who share our genes;¹⁴ altruism towards others may have evolved as a consequence of the invention of weapons, the communal hunting of large game and the subsequent sharing of food. It may also have been a means of gaining prestige, a valuable commodity for reproductive success. The development of specialisation and trade were probably also underpinned by cooperation.¹⁵ However, a preoccupation with ‘fairness’ would be a necessary corollary to cooperation since, in its absence, there would be nothing to discourage freeloaders. This has become evident in the many studies applying game theory, particularly the Prisoner’s Dilemma, to the emergence of altruism as an evolutionarily stable strategy.

It is clear that much modern behaviour is heavily influenced by both genetic and cultural adaptations. So, for example, the desire of many people to have a large family, and the drive to achieve an excessively high standard of living, are traits that were selected in our past and reinforced by culture and religion. The adaptation to defer to people in positions of power means that our behaviour is further influenced by authoritative people, most obviously in politics, religion and even advertising. Gender differences in behaviour are part inherited, part cultural.¹⁶ Our innate concern for ‘fairness’ is reinforced culturally and by the legal system, such that many of us avoid being the first to act, or doing more than our share. So our genetic instincts and cultural beliefs may work against our long-term interests and the values we need in a sustainable society. Indeed, many of them also work against our short-term happiness: the drive to work long hours and earn a high salary is often at odds with a happy and fulfilling life. We have evolved to seek happiness, but its pursuit is rarely successful in the longer term.¹⁷

With the adaptations of intelligence, culture and language came our improved ability for advanced reasoning. Yet even reasoning can let us down. Our general capacity for foresight is limited and we tend to discount future consequences;¹⁸ we often ignore evidence that conflicts with our view of a just world, and we lack the ability to grasp large numbers and to intuitively understand the implications of exponential growth. All of these underpin the concepts of sustainability and population growth. The ability to reason logically depends not only upon intelligence, but also upon the extent to which individuals are influenced by instinct, cultural heritage and their other personality traits. Darwin believed that the conscious mind is rarely successful in analysing its motives, which are often largely instinctive.¹⁹ Decisions about complex, long-term issues are particularly influenced by instinct and emotion, which may be at odds with rational analysis, frequently resulting in cognitive dissonance. We could well be described as ‘the conflicted ape’.

Since our genetic make-up was selected by survival of the fittest in a world that no longer exists, we are not well equipped to deal with the long-term global issues that we now face. Our fate could well be to exploit and pollute our world until the natural systems fail and can no longer support us in our current numbers and level of prosperity.

Clearly we must find a way around this. If we harness our collective intellect surely we can find strategies to over-ride our instinctive biases, and reshape our destiny. Climate change is the most urgent issue facing us, since we are fast approaching a number of critical ‘tipping points’ beyond which it may be almost impossible to turn things around. A successful solution might then become a template for tackling other global issues.

In relation to human nature, there are two basic requirements for the successful implementation of action against climate change. First, a majority of the public must accept the science, or at least believe that it is advantageous to take action; and second, they must believe the scheme is fair, nationally and internationally.

Many countries have already taken action in the expectation that others will follow, often in the belief that benefits will flow to those who lead. Other governments support measures to limit global warming to 2 °C but the translation of intentions into concrete action at the national level continues to be the sticking point. This underscores the fact that many people are either unconvinced by the science or are concerned about fairness. This is where some understanding of our genetic and cultural heritage might help.

The first imperative is to encourage rational analysis. The general public and politicians must be helped to understand not only the overwhelming evidence for climate change and sustainability, but also our innate psychology. We might ‘feel’ that everything’s all right simply as a consequence of our genetic and cultural inheritance, which encourages us to believe that our world is immutable and that we are omniscient. Meanwhile we seek an ever-higher standard of living, we might have four children when we know the sustainable number is two, and we temper our altruism with self-interest, taking no action before our neighbours. Unless we understand the implications of climate change and our own psychological limitations, we are unlikely to elect politicians with vision, to accept progressive policy to make the necessary changes in our lives.

The media must play a pivotal role by presenting facts and data couched in language we readily understand, by interviewing climate scientists, ecologists, behavioural psychologists and politicians, and by encouraging debate. The public must be reassured that scientists are working for the common good and that scientific research is evidence-based and subject to peer review. We must be encouraged to consider future consequences, and to be mindful of the ‘precautionary principle’: even if there is a small but finite chance that serious climate change won’t eventuate, we must take action urgently since it could become a runaway phenomenon with dire consequences.

There are also important roles here for evolutionary psychologists and sociologists, and those in education and advertising, as well as those in climate science, journalism and politics. It may well be necessary to employ rhetoric that appeals to the emotions as well as to reason, since inspired language and clever advertising might resonate with a wider audience. We therefore must choose politicians with the vision and commitment to make the hard decisions and with the charisma and oratory skills to sway the public. Since evolution has not endowed us with the ability to weigh up future consequences reliably, political candidates should present a clear vision for the long-term future. Advertising might help promote sustainable products, behaviours and attitudes. Philanthropy could also play a role in both advertising and education. Teaching children environmental science and critical thinking in schools is important if democracy is to become an effective system for dealing with these new challenges.

With respect to implementation of policy, the tragedy of the commons is the issue: all nations are contributing to a common problem that must be solved by cooperative action.²⁰ So why should we act first? Why should we do more than someone else? This innate instinct for ‘fairness’ can only be resolved by ensuring that everybody feels that they are making an equitable contribution. This will require a strategy that engenders trust within and between countries, for example by making incremental changes.

To have the confidence of the public it will also be necessary to have a coordinated global strategy with an umpire who is above politics, and whose decisions are based on reason. Rational decision-making might best be achieved by an overarching commission comprising expert climate scientists, economic advisers, ethicists and a range of political representatives, insulated from non-rational and parochial influences. It could determine long-term national targets that would allow comparable per capita emissions, by advocating curtailed emissions in the developed world while allowing the developing world to move towards an acceptable standard of living. Short-term targets could also take into account current national emissions, and dependence upon carbon-intensive industries.

So how might such a plan be implemented? It could incorporate incremental changes, and it could even be voluntary but coupled to incentives and disincentives to discourage freeloading. Such a commission could encourage fairness by monitoring performance and publishing outcomes. These might then inform trade agreements, countries choosing other complying countries as trading partners, or introducing tariffs on goods from nonconforming countries.

This may sound a little like world government, something that is anathema to many, but such a global commission need not have absolute power of enforcement, working instead as an honest broker. In the area of global sustainability we surely need a global plan.

At the national level similar strategies could promote rational decision-making, even within an adversarial democracy. Bipartisan think tanks would encourage rational discourse, driven less by emotion and party-political considerations. Such a body could include, or be advised by, the relevant ministers and shadow ministers, our top scientists, economists, sociologists and ethicists, with the opportunity to call upon other experts as required. The Climate Commission was formulated, in principle, along non-partisan lines, and demonstrated that such shared decision-making can indeed be a useful strategy.

The Climate Change Authority will be an independent body of experts that will put recommendations to government on future targets. This body might be considered analogous to the Reserve Bank of Australia, which is responsible for determining monetary policy, but is not beholden to any political party. Other independent bodies could pursue research and innovation. It is only through research that green energy will become sufficiently cheap and plentiful to enable us to avoid climate change, and also to deal with the consequences of diminishing oil supplies.

In each country, people need some assurance that any burden is shared, to satisfy the desire for fairness. An emissions trading scheme (ETS) and a carbon tax both seek to modify the behaviour of emitters so that they choose the cleanest way to conduct their business. Economists resoundingly endorse the ETS as the cheapest way to achieve this goal. To the extent that businesses have to pay for some emissions, this cost will generally be passed on to the customer who therefore has a price incentive to choose the cleanest product. The Labor government has proposed tax changes and increases in social security payments that will ensure that all but the wealthy are fully compensated for any such increases in prices. By combining the introduction of the carbon tax with recommendations of the Henry Taxation Review, the government has ensured that we will all be able to pay the cost of carbon emissions when we buy goods and services, thereby overcoming perceptions of self-interest and impotence. Some people will choose to reduce energy consumption in response to increased prices. The use of further incentives and disincentives could also lead to energy savings, for example by gradually moderating the excessive heating and cooling of many buildings.

To achieve long-term sustainability, the government should also consider policies that would decrease population growth and moderate consumption. Perhaps in future the taxpayer-funded baby bonus, paid parental leave and child support should only be extended to first and second children.

An effective strategy to decrease consumption would be to introduce cradle-to-grave costing of products, thereby encouraging quality and durability instead of planned obsolescence. Conspicuous consumption might be reduced by regulating advertising, by forgoing some future wage increase in return for shorter working hours, and by recognising status with something other than excessively high salary packages. Governments, professional societies and community service clubs could confer status by making more awards recognising excellence, philanthropy and public service.

A reduction in consumption would require a paradigm shift in economic theory, such that we no longer equate prosperity with an ever-expanding GDP, underpinned by a growing population and increasing consumption.²¹ We must recognise the value of natural and social capital, in addition to the traditional financial measures of prosperity. We should redefine prosperity to include quality of life, increased leisure, shorter working hours, lower unemployment, a healthy environment and a secure future.

Developed countries must moderate their standard of living, something that may well be achieved by taxes on carbon pollution and on resource use, and by changing attitudes to employment, leisure and community engagement. Meanwhile, developing countries must have the opportunity to lift their standard of living, with international assistance in renewable technology, adaptation to climate change, health, education and access to contraception. Such changes are not only equitable; they are also the only way to increase our chances of survival and avoid world conflict. The time has come to develop a new economic model, one that is not dependent upon an ever-expanding GDP, but is centred upon sustainability, fairness and quality of life.²²

It is fast becoming a case of ‘it’s now or never’. It is time for a new vision, a new cultural ethos; time to recognise that our genetic and cultural make-up is out of step with our current reality. Evolution may have allowed us to become the dominant animal on Earth, but it gives us no guarantee that we will be survivors. It’s now up to us to ensure that there is a sustainable future for our children and grandchildren. And the odds are stacked against us; evolution has not selected us to deal with a finite world. That is what Darwin didn’t tell us.

Hotels

2011-12-16T00:00:00Z

They live in hotels for a while, after he does that to her face. Not real bad, but bad enough for them to leave the same night. Frantically packing the car as though hoping to outrun some unknowable natural disaster. There’s sand in the bed, Baby, he’s saying. Back at the house, a million years ago in the suburbs. And she won’t tell him why. She’s letting him believe things. There’s sand in the bed, and they are a long way from the ocean.

He tucks a blanket around her shoulders and they drive for three hours, past the bedroom communities in the west, his hand on her thigh and the radio on. When he speaks it’s as though he is speaking to a child he hopes to befriend, and she answers as a child might, imagining her child-self running down the dark stretch of highway alongside the passenger window of their white Hyundai. Pushing her breath out ahead of her, never tiring. Never turning her head to meet the eyes of the passenger, who is unravelling a loose thread from her skirt and saying, no, I don’t suppose work would miss me for a little while.

At the first hotel she waits in the car while he speaks with the concierge. On the radio the Mills Brothers are singing about Sadie Green, twee twee twee twah twah, and she falls asleep briefly, jerking awake when he comes back for her and the bags. She follows him through the hotel foyer to the lift, her hair pulled down over one side of her face.

They drink steadily in the first few days. Glasses stationed around the room with dried half-moons of lime in the bottom. So hot out that the tint is blistering off the windows of cars in the street. But that is out in the great, dusty world that they are not a part of for the moment. The insides of the hotels are cool and stark, and there is nothing to remind them of themselves. Their luggage lost in the mirrored halls of wardrobes. The bed a vast white plane where nothing terrible has ever happened, where they lie naked on the bright sheets and he tries to lift the bruise from her face with remedies he has heard or read about. Butter, honey, kaffir lime. And although she knows none of it will work, she smiles and lets him. The bruise remains and blackens, but they wake each morning to clean light with only the slightest recollection of the dreams they have climbed out of.

When he goes out for fresh limes, for fresh bottles of gin and soda water, she watches his back as he moves across the car park. Already sweating, he looks back at the hotel every now and then, although it’s obvious he can’t tell which window she’s standing behind, which room is theirs.

A playground, she thinks, or a building site—she knows she could have said anything about the sand, that he wanted to believe her. Disasters with egg timers, he would have believed even that. But she’d panicked and said nothing, and he’d taken hold of her shoulders and shaken her hard, so that her head nodded loosely on her neck as he shouted why? why? why?

Now they are here, and his brother is looking after their dog.

After several days there is hair in the sink, stains on the sheets. Unwashed clothes piling up on the floor. This grittiness an emissary from their life before the hotels, threatening the equilibrium he has charged to the joint account. At these first traces of disarray they move on, packing their belongings with the same urgency as when leaving the house, only to arrive at another version of the first hotel. Only to fall onto another bed where no smell or stain of either of them is held in the memory of its sheets. These rooms are so sterile that nothing could fester. Though nothing could possibly grow, she thinks. She is inside a parenthesis where nothing matters yet, no decisions need to be made.

But she is always thirsty in these places, each night waking sticky-mouthed and sliding from beneath his outflung arm. Each night drinking from her cupped hands and watching her reflection in the bathroom mirror, sometimes dabbing at her cheekbone with wet fingertips. Under the halogen lights the bruise looks like bad theatrical makeup; two weeks now and it hasn’t rubbed away, and she’s lost count of the places they’ve stayed in. This could be the fourth or the fifth. The hotels fit neatly inside each other like matryoshka dolls, getting smaller and smaller. Half-size, quarter-size. The first hotel turned from a single piece of wood, solid as a nut and sealed up tight.

She saw a quarter-size hotel once; public art at the side of a freeway somewhere south of here. She had wanted to pull over, to crawl in there on her hands and knees and lay her head on one of the scaled-down beds. To sleep for a long time, dreamless and alone, in a place where no-one would find her.

If she could get back there. Take the keys from his jacket while he sleeps, and head south. Inside the quarter-size hotel it would be empty, just bracing and wires for the neon lights, but it wouldn’t matter. She could drive all night and be there by late morning. She would begin to remember. It would be as simple as that.

Graffiti on the Gates of Paradise

2011-12-15T00:00:00Z

These poems are a personal response to the etchings made by William Blake in 1793 to illustrate his ‘Gates of Paradise’ sequence. The titles in italics are quoted from Blake.

What is Man?
Whether in the office tower, the dockside gantry,
or the open, fluent, wheatfield:
love and fear and lust. Whether in Sydney or Mt Isa, Lisbon or Caracas:
joy and loneliness and forgetting.

Fire
It is not orange-red, not ormolu.
It is a still-warm floor, powdery white and grey.
It is black verticals, and a dream of silence
where were birds, where were people
with village nicknames.

At length for hatching
Awkward in my body,
I always wanted wings.
With your wise woman’s hands
you break me out of my clothes
and all my brittle philosophy.

The Female Martyr
This the danger of too much belief;
the semtex under the burqa.
Swapping the world for what she’s too certain
will be next, she blows out her spine
and five random innocents in the room.

My Son! My Son!
Where is he tonight? In the high desert?
In the jaguar forests? Roads of sun, roads of ice.
I pray for him, though I don’t know to what.
I pray for him on the mountain bends
and in the cities’ alleys.

I Want! I Want!
I haven’t learnt how not to want,
though the doctrines say therein lies peace.
I haven’t learnt how not to long,
because that aching gives me life.
This rickety ladder I lean on the moon.

Help! Help!
And who were they to pray to
when they saw no boat on the horizon,
no hand reaching down from the clouds,
only the waves preparing their trench
and hissing ‘Siev X, Siev X’?

Aged Ignorance
Waiting under my face,
there’s an old man who must resist
closing his eyes to the daylight,
must fight the urge to clip his own wings.
The world rubs him closer each day.

O Priest Professing celibacy
you stole childhoods.
Who can trust your gowns and hats and cloaks?
Now the child believes in fairytales
where the wolf gets away with it.

The Traveller hasteth in the Evening
The city trees shine with late, illusory gold,
and workers’ faces are lit by their mobile phones.
Epicurus says that death can be no worse
than the blankness before we were born.
But sunset quickens me—that foreknowledge of ending.

A Generation of True Writers

2011-12-14T00:00:00Z

We live in a decaying age. Young people no longer respect their parents. They are rude and impatient. They frequently inhabit taverns and have no self-control.

—inscription on 6000 year old Egyptian tomb

Kids today are not the same as when we were young. They are a generation of true writers and readers, and they’re using books to save the world.

The good news is that they are better read, more socially aware, more computer literate and more literate in general, than any other generation of young people preceding them. They have access to the Internet in some form or another — in Australia the digital divide has all but been erased. They have iPads and iPhones and PSPs and Ps3s and Xboxes and Nintendo Wii and Facebook. They are a lucky generation, with boundless opportunities open to them.

On the other hand, they are facing the most competitive university entrance market ever, and if they get in they will have to pay the highest fees. Those who choose to use the HELP system to pay for their education will face the highest rates of indexing, so it will take them even longer to pay back their loan. These kids are also growing up during one of the most difficult economic climates we’ve seen in the last half-century. Unemployment will be an issue for them. Global warming will be an issue for them. And so will the negotiation of the minefield of our new digital world, of digital rights management, intellectual property and copyright. These kids don’t remember dialup Internet, and they don’t remember a time before the GST. They’re are growing up in a time when we are closer to the future of Bladerunner and the second Back to the Future film, than we are to the time when those movies were released.

Teenagers today are the first generation of true writers. Text is their primary mode of communication — whether it be text messages, IMing or Facebook. When I was a teenager, I’d spend hours at school with my friends, followed by hours at home on the phone. Nothing much has changed, except instead of lying on the bed, getting a sore neck from holding the phone between shoulder and ear, today’s teens are peering at screens, fingers flying over keyboards.

Teenagers construct their identity through text and image. They are constantly describing and redefining themselves on their Facebook pages. Their most intimate of social interactions — flirting, falling in love, breaking hearts, lying, confessing, planning, announcing — are conducted using the written word. I think it’s important here to avoid a value judgment — it’s easy to say ‘text messages are facile and teens can’t spell’, and that may be true. I’m not saying that all teens are great writers, or even good ones (although there are certainly some very talented young people out there). But they are writers, nonetheless. And with writing, naturally, comes reading.

Teenagers are reading? Really?

Yes.

Young people read more, and more widely, than any other generation gone before. They read all sorts of things — newspapers, magazines, comics, graphic novels and websites.

But books. Do they read books?

Yes.

In the US last year, overall sales of fiction dropped about 10%. But sales of children’s and young adult fiction rose 14%. Bookshops are closing down unprofitable music and DVD sections and replacing them with sprawling Young Adult sections. Of the top 10 bestselling titles in Australia last year, in all genres, six of them were Young Adult. Sure, four of those were by Stephenie Meyer, but I never said that what they were reading was any good. Nor do I think it has to be.

There is an assumption that everything a child does must have some kind of educational benefit. They can’t watch a TV show or read a novel unless they’re learning something. I’d argue that any kind of interaction with narrative or media is an educational experience, whether it’s a biography of Shakespeare, or an episode of The Biggest Loser. But that’s not the point. Goosebumps creator RL Stine once said that ‘kids as well as adults are entitled to books of no socially redeeming value’, and he was right.

David Fickling has published writers including Philip Pullman (The Golden Compass/NorthernLights) and Mark Haddon (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time), but he started out publishing Goosebumps. And although he has moved on to bigger and better things, he hasn’t forgotten his roots. Fickling calls these books — Goosebumps, The Babysitter’s Club, Star Wars novelisations — readermakers. They’re easy books, accessible books. They’re like the white bread equivalent of books — light, insubstantial, and without much dietary fibre.

But if you’re a young person, and you’re a bit scared of this whole Reading thing because you don’t really get it, and everyone keeps telling you what a Big Deal it is, a readermaker can be a great thing. Because you pick it up. It’s easy to get into. The story rips along. Before you know it, you’ve finished. You read a whole book. A whole entire book. And it was fun. So you read another one. This reading thing is easy! And because you’re breezing along, you’re a reading ninja, you think about picking up something a bit longer. Something a bit harder. And your love of reading has begun.

There’s this terrible thing that adults say when they see kids reading commercial fiction. At least they’re reading something. Can you imagine anything more condescending? More insulting? US reading guru Patrick Jones suggests a comparison with the following scenario: Imagine you introduce your new husband to an old friend, and they raise their eyebrows, give you a sympathetic smile and say ‘well, at least you married someone’. We should be respecting the reading choices our children make. If you know a teenager who is reading Twilight, and you think it’s a thinly-veiled piece of anti-feminist ultra-conservative-Christian fan-fiction, then don’t tell her that what she’s reading is rubbish. First of all, read it yourself before you pass judgement. Ask her why she likes it. Talk to her about the bits that make you uncomfortable, and ask her opinions. You’ll be surprised, I promise.

Not to say that all YA books are readermakers. There is some heartachingly beautiful, complex writing out there for young people. Just pick up anything by Margo Lanagan or Ursula Dubosarsky. The brilliance and beauty of YA is that it spans every genre or level of complexity.

An article in the New York Times last year profiled Nadia, a teenager who struggles to engage with books. She read a book about the Holocaust that she enjoyed, but couldn’t get into the fantasy novel that her mother bought her. The article sadly states that ‘Nadia never became a big reader’. It then goes on to detail her obsession with Japanese manga comics and online fan-fiction, which she both reads and writes.

Is reading online the same as reading books? Does it have the same positive effects? Dana Gioia, chairman of the US National Endowment for the Arts, thinks not: ‘Whatever the benefits of newer electronic media,’ he says, ‘they provide no measurable substitute for the intellectual and personal development initiated and sustained by frequent reading.’

Well, maybe not. But I don’t think anyone’s suggesting one should replace the other. Spending time online isn’t a substitute for reading novels, but neither is watching TV, or getting plenty of exercise, or eating leafy vegetables. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do any of those things.

Nadia sounds like a big reader to me.

She sounds like someone who loves stories so much, consuming them isn’t enough. She wants to spend more time with her favourite characters. She wants to push them into new situations, beyond the ones they experience in the canonical world of the original text.

Every time Nadia reads or writes or watches or hears a story, it deepens her understanding of the way narrative works. And this understanding of story, of the mechanics of story, makes her love stories even more. It’s like breathing in. And when she writes a story, or a blog post, or draws a comic, or tells someone a vivid anecdote about that thing her little brother did with the cat and the jar of peanut butter, then she’s breathing out. Everyone who loves stories does this.

In my work with insideadog.com.au, the State Library of Victoria’s website for teens about books, we found that young people didn’t want to just review books. They wanted to engage with them, in creative and collaborative ways. We started an award called the Inkys Creative Reading Prize that encouraged teens to make a creative response to a book they loved. One teenager wrote an orchestral score to Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief. Another made a charm-bracelet, each charm representing a different aspect of Twilight. Video trailers, hand-stitched book covers, costume designs, book-themed cakes, stories, poems, music and illustration have all been submitted. The response each year is overwhelming and inspiring.

And here’s where it gets really exciting. Teenagers who love books are saving the world.

If a book (especially a YA book) is popular, it’s probable there are online activities involving it, whether they be forum-style discussions, fan-fiction, fan-art, video or craft. But there are literary communities springing up online that have loftier purposes — working with charities and activisim-based organisations to try and make the world a better place.

This link between fandom and social activism isn’t guaranteed. YA Author and activist John Green comments that he hasn’t seen any activism-focussed fandom surrounding the Twilight novels, commenting that ‘this may be because of the values in the books or because some lack of momentum within the community, but I don’t think it’s a universal or even very common phenomenon’. He sees literature as a kind of conduit — a space where people with shared sensibilities can come together to discuss and address the issues they identify as being important.

Green is one of the founding members of YouTube-based community Nerdfighters. He explains:

Nerdfighters are not about you and me. Nerdfighters are about a made of awesome book, made by a woman in Australia, going to a made of awesome baby in the United States. Nerdfighters are about raising money and awareness for important causes. Nerdfighters are about building a supportive community of friends… in my pants. Nerdfighters are about stupid beautiful projects and making each other laugh and think with T-shirts and pocket protectors and rants about the situation in Pakistan which sucks right now. In the contemporary world where things fall apart and the center cannot hold you have to imagine a community where there is no center… A lot of life is about doing things that don’t suck with people who don’t suck.

Through various projects, Nerdfighters have helped to get Democrat Daniel Biss elected to the state legislature in Illinois in a formerly Republican district; have purchased clean drinking water for villages in rural Bangladesh and Haiti; and have loaned over $100,000 through microfinancing organization kiva.org to mostly female entrepreneurs in the developing world.

The Nerdfighters community is not solely focused on activism. Their creative output is varied, incorporating music, fiction, video, art, education, craft and many kinds of play, including amusing challenges, punishments, pranking and games. Green explains that he and his brother decided early on that the community needed a kind of mission statement or purpose, something that was broad enough that members could take it in whichever direction they chose, but neologistic and therefore specific to their community. They settled on ‘decreasing WorldSuck’. The Nerdfighters project is dedicated to creating spaces that foster mutual respect, intellectual and philosophical thought, linguistic play and a fundamental desire to make the world a better place.

There’s also an online fan club called the Harry Potter Alliance (thehpa.org). It spans a network of over a million people, many of whom are teenagers. The HPA identify the ‘real world Dark Arts’ — genocide, famine, homophobia, bullying, illiteracy — and they ask the question, ‘What would Dumbledore do?’. And then they do it. Last year the HPA sent five cargo planes of aid and supplies to earthquake victims in Haiti. They donated 88,000 books all over the world and won a $250,000 giving competition to run a literacy campaign. They stage free ‘wizard rock’ concerts with bands like Harry and the Potters and The Moaning Myrtles, in order to get young adults in the US to enroll to vote.

But what about the kids who are too young to vote? In 2008, an online community of teenagers and YA authors sprang up, headed by US author Maureen Johnson. The community, calling itself YA for Obama, discussed strategies for young people to get involved in the democratic process, despite being legally excluded from it. Literary luminaries such as Scott Westerfeld, Holly Black, Cassandra Clare and Judy Blume wrote essays breaking down policies and finding the points that were relevant to young people. The teenage members ran letter-writing campaigns, helped the elderly and infirm reach polling places on election day, and door-knocked themselves silly. (In all fairness, there was a YA for McCain website as well, but it only had six members, and no authors.)

In a 2010 TED talk, game designer Jane McGonical outlined her theory of how video games might change the world. She explained that when you play a MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game) such as World of Warcraft, you are immediately trusted with a mission that’s perfectly matched to your current abilities within the game. Every challenge is achievable, and you are surrounded by hundreds of thousands of people who will trust and help you achieve your ‘epic win’. The problem is, people feel like they’re not as good in the real world. She elaborates:

‘Good’ as in motivated to do something that matters, inspired to collaborate and cooperate… Gamers are super-empowered, hopeful individuals. These are people who believe that they are individually capable of changing the world. And the only problem is that they believe that they are capable of changing virtual worlds and not the real world.

This is particularly applicable to teenagers. Restricted by their age and low disposable income, teens are excluded from democratic process and political debate, at the same time as being labeled as apathetic. It explains why novels like Harry Potter and The Hunger Games are so popular with teens — both books follow the journey of a disempowered protagonist, who seizes control from an oppressive adultcentric regime.

The pleasure and empowerment that McGonical describes is also experienced when we are immersed in fiction. And if reading a book can be compared to playing a single-person video game, then engaging in literary fandom is the equivalent of playing World of Warcraft. Except instead of slaying virtual dragons, these young people are embarking on adventures with real-life, world-changing consequences.

Young people have always cared about the written word. I know I wasn’t alone in writing endless reams of bad poetry, and copying down song lyrics to blu-tack to my bedroom wall. I passed notes, scribbled on desks, wrote diary entries and letters. Young people are the inventors of slang — they love to play with language and push it in unexpected directions.

But teens today are not the same as we were, because the world isn’t the same. In the past, the best access a teenager would have had to words was their school library. The average school library holds about ten thousand books, with an average total of 600 million words. Google Analyst Peter Norvig estimated in 2007 that the Internet contained 100 trillion words — a figure which, statistically, has probably doubled over the past four years. And those 200 trillion words are available to everyone with a computer, or with access to a school or public library. Young people are the custodians and the primary users of the written word. Some of them are using it to change the world. Others say ZOMG U R HOT LOL. But that’s okay. Just as young people have the right to read trashy books, they also have the right to cover the Internet in trashy words. There’s plenty of room.

Lili Wilkinson is the author of five YA novels, including Scatterheart, Pink, and A Pocketful of Eyes. She managed insideadog.com.au at the State Library of Victoria from 2006-2011, and is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne.

Offence Goes Viral

2011-12-12T00:00:00Z

As we’re charging our glasses this New Year’s Eve, and mulling over an extraordinary year—a year of civil war and uncivil strife, of natural disasters and unnatural acts of violence—we should spare a thought for the good men and women of the American Dialect Society, whose mission it is to select just one word from the multitudinous melting pot of English that will stand as a monument to this turbulent twelve months. Inaugurated in 1991, the ADS’s word of the year has been dominated in recent times by coinages of a technological nature. In 2010 ‘app’ took the honours, while in 2009 the laurels fell to ‘tweet’. Nominations for the word of the decade showed a similarly hi-tech bias. ‘Blog’ and ‘wi-fi’ both made the shortlist, while the winner, ‘google’ (the verb, not the noun), looks perfectly at home next to its predecessor, ‘web’.

Needless to say, these words are all neologisms, which perhaps tells us something interesting about our love of, or addiction to, the new. But according to the ADS’s guidelines, the word of the year doesn’t have to be new; it just has to be ‘newly prominent [and] indicative or reflective of the national discourse’. For that reason, I wonder if the ADS panel might dispense with its recent technophilia and pick instead an established word to which new meaning, or at least new force, would appear to be accruing every year. The word I have in mind is ‘offensive’.

An inoffensive little word, to be sure, but as a glance at the last few years will confirm, offendedness is now ubiquitous (or ‘viral’, as the modern parlance has it). Its manifestations range from the trivial: the forced resignation of a Kiwi broadcaster for poking fun at an Indian politician, outrage at an incautious tweet describing South African rugby fans as ‘faggots’; to the important: the sacking of several US journalists for allegedly overstepping the mark in racial or religious matters, the depressing furore over plans to build an Islamic centre in downtown New York; to the existential: the inexhaustible determination of religious extremists in the Islamic world to kill all those who insult their beliefs. Everywhere we look offence is being taken, sometimes for good reasons, sometimes for bad ones, but always in a way that seems to imply that offence is something terrible in itself.

This new mood of censoriousness—of self-pity and self-righteousness—goes beyond political correctness. When, as prime minister, Kevin Rudd criticised the actor and comedian Robin Williams for describing Australians as ‘English rednecks’, suggesting that Williams might want to spend ‘a little time in Alabama’ before characterising Aussies thus, he was not taking umbrage on behalf of an oppressed minority but a dynamic modern democracy with an international reputation for plain speaking. Similarly, when Bob Riley, the Governor of Alabama, took offence at Rudd’s remarks, he was responding to a stereotype aimed principally at the white population of his state and not at its black minority. No, the language of respect and offence is something more general and less defined than the project to engineer greater equality by avoiding such language and habits of mind as tend to entrench discrimination. And while it is often self-satirising (as the Rudd-to-Williams-to-Riley-to-Rudd controversy demonstrates), it is also very bad for democracy and for the quality of public debate in general.

For at the very least such finger-wagging is a distraction from substantive issues; important questions of who we are and how we should live are lost in the tittle-tattle about who said precisely what about whom, and in what tone of voice, and with the use of which epithets. More seriously, it allows official censorship to creep back into political life. For example, the UN General Assembly has passed several recent resolutions condemning the ‘defamation of religions’. Since it was in the teeth of religious opposition that the right to freedom of speech was established (in those areas of the globe where it has been established), this is a very sinister development.

In one sense, our current obsession with offence is linked to political correctness, which originates in a desire for social justice, as opposed to, or as well as, political rights. Such rights as we in the West enjoy—the right to vote, the right to a fair trial, the right to freedom of speech and assembly—have done much to alleviate the inequalities that have plagued humanity for most of its history. But rights, as Alexis de Tocqueville recognised, do not eradicate inequality. Nor, indeed, do they put a stop to racial prejudice or gender bias, and it was with this in mind that African Americans, gays and women took to the streets (and the lecture-room floors) in the 1960s. But while these movements were necessary, they also engendered a separatist mentality; people began to speak as if groups, rather than individuals, had rights. This was the beginning of ‘identity politics’, a phenomenon that received an enormous boost in the late 1980s and 1990s when, in the wake of the collapse of communism, sections of the traditional left began to refocus their ideological efforts away from issues of economics and class and towards the politics of ethnicity and gender. Training their guns on ‘offensive’ language in an effort to destroy deep-rooted prejudice, many institutions established ‘speech codes’ (lists of acceptable and unacceptable words), while in US universities some lecturers even began taping their lectures just in case they were accused of trespassing on racial or sexual sensitivities.

The problem with identity politics is that it tends to define people by one characteristic and prejudge their interests as influenced or even defined by that characteristic. Consequently, all subtlety is lost; whole communities become immune to criticism because any criticism of their individual members is taken as an attack on the group. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the liberal response, or lack of one, to the challenge of Islamic extremism. From the Rushdie fatwa in 1989 to the Danish cartoons controversy of 2005, many left-wing commentators have shown themselves unwilling or unable to defend the principle of freedom of speech when faced with a threat to that principle from members of a largely non-white community. Armed with a new term, ‘Islamophobia’—the perfect linguistic distillation of the current confusion of identity and belief—progressives play down reactionary attitudes in the cause of racial harmony, thereby neglecting their traditional anticlericalism and leaving the task of serious criticism to bumptious conservative commentators with their own anti-immigration agenda. Employing the language of respect and offence, liberals schooled in cultural relativism in effect make apologies for absolutist ideologies.

In his recent pamphlet That’s Offensive, British critic Stefan Collini identifies a ‘well-meaning condescension’ at the heart of this conspicuous failure. The assumption, often unconscious of course, is that members of minority groups are unable to engage in intelligent self-criticism, or to distinguish between an attack on their identity and criticism of their beliefs and practices. Free speech is just a Western piety; the important thing is to engender ‘respect’ for those who do not share our values. Because the most spectacular offence tends to occur in disadvantaged minorities, it is often assumed that the offence must be linked, or even reducible, to that disadvantage. Time and again we hear it said that it is the job of journalists and commentators to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

But this ignores the imbalance of power within the disadvantaged minority. Is Sheik Hilaly, the Australian imam who described women as ‘uncovered meat’, a member of a disadvantaged minority or a nasty little misogynist? The answer, surely, is that he is both, and we ought to be able to combine ‘respect’ for the minority from which he happens to come with outright contempt for his views on women, while also enquiring into whether such views are prevalent in the Muslim community. Too often Western commentators are content to let bullies pose as victims. Recently, Pastor Terry Jones of the Dove World Outreach Centre in Florida made good on his threat to burn the Koran. Subsequently, seven UN workers were killed by rioters in Afghanistan. Ignoring the fact that the pastor’s desire to give offence was more than matched by the desire of many others to take it, the head of the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, Staffan de Mistura, had this to say: ‘I don’t think we should be blaming any Afghan. We should be blaming the person who produced the news—the one who burned the Koran.’ Here, ‘well-meaning condescension’ becomes strenuous (and dangerous) apologetics.

But it isn’t only liberals who use the language of respect and offence. The phenomenon of conspicuous indignation encompasses much more than what the philosopher Pascal Bruckner calls ‘the tyranny of [Western] guilt’—the kind of liberal masochism that must always stress the Caliphate’s achievements while underlining Christendom’s crimes and that in Australia finds its clearest expression in the black armband view of history. No, the right too has its sensitivities, as Robert Hughes noted in his splenetic account of American society, Culture of Complaint. Running in tandem with political correctness, and ultimately traceable to the same Puritan heritage, is what Hughes calls ‘patriotic correctness’, the browbeating of political opponents for undermining national pride. And since national pride is the very thing that cultural relativism calls into question, the dragon slayers of the conservative press are never more exquisitely dyspeptic than when taking some pinko academic to task for failing to call a spade a spade. In one sense, both sides need each other. Political correctness and patriotic correctness are locked in an antagonistic tango.

However, the indignation of the right goes beyond the traditional counteroffensive against cultural relativism and political correctness. The way in which right-wing US politicians tried to exploit the controversy over the Park 51 Islamic Centre—by characterising it as a ‘monument’ to terrorism or comparing it to a Nazi sign placed outside a Holocaust museum—was the purest demagoguery, no less cynical than the Islamists’ attempt to engineer an international crisis by parading a handful of ‘offensive’ caricatures around North Africa and the Middle East. In the current feverish atmosphere of hyperbolic argumentation, offence means viewers and votes; it plays. Thus, when President Barack Obama compared the US economy to a car that had been driven into a ditch by the previous administration and suggested that the Republicans were now banished to the back seats, some Fox News blowhards chose to interpret it as a veiled reference to segregation, implying that Obama was settling old scores. Since to entertain such a ridiculous theory they’d have to be as stupid as they look, one can only assume that they thought the story would go down well with their regular viewers. Thus the media makes its own news in the process of reporting it, combining the weaponisation of offence and offence-as-entertainment in one hit.

Of course this is nothing but rabble-rousing. But what of the rabble’s apparent willingness, eagerness even, to be thus roused? This too is part of the legacy of the sixties. ‘[I]f the personal was political,’ writes Caspar Melville in Taking Offence, referring to the popular slogan of the Counterculture, ‘then wasn’t the political really personal?’ Alongside massive political changes, the sixties witnessed an assault on reticence—an assault to which the modern tendency towards ostentatious emotionalism is the heir. The hysterical self-exposure of daytime television, misery memoirs, the therapy culture—these are the bawling children of the sixties, narcissistic, blameful and, above all, noisy. The emphasis, as Hughes says, is always on the subjective, on ‘how we feel about things, rather than what we think or can know’. ‘Not in my name!’ and ‘No blood on my hands!’ screamed the anti-war placards in 2003—slogans that managed to reduce the decision of whether to go to war in Iraq to an advertisement for self-righteous indignation. Thus does feeling take its place at the head of our political priorities.

Such personalisation creates an environment in which everybody’s ‘truth’ is legitimate. Consequently, the very foundation of knowledge and objectivity is undermined. Even in academia, incompetent or dishonest scholarship is often allowed to pass unmolested if to question it would necessitate a challenge to its (racial or sexual) ‘narrative’. In short: ‘I feel therefore I am.’

In the seventeenth century, T.S. Eliot suggested, English poets lost the ability to think and feel at the same time; they experienced a ‘dissociation of sensibility’. We too are experiencing a dissociation of sensibility, though ours is political, not poetical. Increasingly, the statement ‘I find that offensive’ is taken as an argument in itself; the complainant is not called upon to justify his feelings. But without some debate about why it is that we find certain attitudes or words offensive, the quality of public debate is degraded. Indeed, we become so comfortable in our positions that we are in danger of forgetting why we are offended. This is a recipe for intellectual laziness. By engaging with other points of view, we call into question our own positions, refining them when they need refining and discarding them when they are shown to be flawed. That is why the philosopher A.C. Grayling says that the right to freedom of speech is the most important right of all because, without it, it is simply impossible to subject all our other rights to scrutiny.

To ban an opinion is to ban not only the right of a person to express that opinion but also everyone’s right to hear it. In such circumstances the claim to be offended is no more than an assertion of moral superiority—an article of political faith, which, like religious faith, will brook no challenge. When the biologist James Watson made some off-the-cuff remarks about race and intelligence in the middle of a book tour, he caused such offence that the tour was discontinued. But we cannot wish such issues away, and the more they are ignored the more toxic they become. Though not known for its intellectual rigour, the far right has its philosophical wing, and we had better get our arguments straight if the racist parties of Europe and elsewhere are not to continue their resurgence. With whom would you rather have the discussion about the link between ‘race’ and intelligence? The co-discoverer of DNA or the gentleman with the swastika tattoo?

What we need is a political version of cognitive behavioural therapy. We need to subject our feelings to scrutiny and ask if they are justified. Of course, this is often difficult to do. Recent research in neuroscience has thrown light on the relationship between feelings and beliefs, suggesting that the two are not as distinct as ‘rational’ human beings might like to think. But the ‘theory of motivated reasoning’ does not let Homo sapiens off the hook. No doubt it’s true that we human beings are adapted to respond aggressively to slights and challenges that undermine our status. But civilisation demands that we keep such feelings in check and consider the issues. The claim that we find something hurtful or offensive should be the beginning of the debate, not the end of it.

In Robert Bolt’s play A Man for All Seasons, Thomas More is dramatically transformed from the religious bigot he undoubtedly was into something like an Enlightenment martyr. The play is about the freedom to speak, or, more accurately, not to speak, since it is by exercising his right to silence that More attempts to protect his beliefs. In the end, of course, More goes to his death for refusing to take the oath of supremacy. But it is only by violating his ancient rights that his accusers are able to convict him of treason. The point of the play is that free speech is meaningless unless it means the freedom to offend. To forget that would be cultural suicide.

Dutton's River

2011-12-09T00:00:00Z

The whaleboat bucked across the face of the bay. Pull, boys! Come on! Rip your spines out! Henty stood in the stern, both hands gripping the tiller. The convicts squinted into the sun and heaved against the oars. Seaspray lashed their faces in thick torrents and clawed at their exposed arms.

There he is, men! There’s his river! Bring her in to larboard there!

As soon as the whaleboat passed into the estuary the convicts cast aside their blades and collapsed. Henty untied the dogs and with their leads clenched in his fist waded through the shallows. He clambered up onto the strand and surveyed the scene. On the riverbank stood Dutton and his black woman, straight-backed and rooted, like trees. The little patch of land they’d cleared was girt with whale carcasses: some, freshly killed, lay on their backs, their sides bulging with gas-bloated blubber; others were little more than bleached and bloodless skeletons, bare remains that towered up like pagan temples hewn from ivory. A crew of whalers could be seen going about their business. A skinny old lag wielding a mincing-spade taller than he was went at a vertical wall of whale-flesh, while a younger man fed the hunks of cut blubber into the mouth of a cast-iron trypot. From high up on a makeshift scaffold a third stirred the concoction with a ten-foot paddle and sang a tuneless chantey. The pall of smoke that veiled the camp was so thick and unctuous it made them seem apparitions pitted with infernal labours.

Henty approached and stood before Dutton and his black woman. He nodded and forced an awkward smile and said, My name is Edward Henty.

We know who you are.

Dutton spat on the ground. His face was striated, carved by wind and salt. His hair was black like bush pepper and full of oil and lay long and lank against the nape of his neck. Henty looked at the woman too. He ran his gaze over her adolescent hips, her slight breasts and skinny legs. She was pretty despite her hardness.

Ain’t you seen a woman before? she said.

No, I mean yes, I have.

What you lookin’ at then?

Henty wasn’t sure where to look. He offered his hand. It hung there like a piece of meat trying to swim in the air.

And what might your name be? he asked.

Me name’s Renanghi. And don’t pretend like youse fucken pleased to meet me unless youse one o’ them buggers what talks the opposite of what he means.

Henty tried to hide his embarrassment. He turned to Dutton, How are you finding the whaling? There’s talk in Launceston of the price per barrel doubling or even—

What’re you doin’ here, Henty? Dutton’s voice was hard and it seemed strange that his eyes were small and black, not blue or brown.

What do you mean?

What’re you doin’ out here? With them mangy dogs of yours?

Dutton was pointing at the convicts.

I am merely pursuing the conditions of our agreement.

I don’t remember that nowise.

Last time we met.

Yeah?

You said you’d show me the lay of the land.

Did I, now? Dutton looked at the back of his hand.

Things have changed?

I got quotas to meet.

You’re not so busy you’d break your word?

I never made no promises.

Well then, said Henty, perhaps if I make my situation a little clearer. He produced a carefully folded letter from his jacket pocket and offered it to Dutton. Dutton looked at it a moment but did not take it. He spat again.

You read it.

Henty cleared his throat. He was starting to enjoy himself.

It’s a title deed, Dutton. It says that I am the new owner of this whaling station and that you now work for me, all of you. In which case, I’m sure you’ll not mind taking a few days off to show me upriver.

The still gleaming of the stars was the only light as they packed up.

The convicts divvied up the food and cooking gear and untethered the dogs. Dutton sloshed a pail of river water into the billy-pit and watched as Henty handed out the guns.

How many you got?

One each. Why? Not enough?

Too many, I reckon. Dutton looked over to where Renanghi was pouring a stream of black tea into a row of cups.

You don’t want one? What if they attack?

Blacks don’t like guns, mate. They’re more like to put a length of wood between yer ribs if they see yer armed. Dutton’s eyes were small and sharpened to a point. Besides, you won’t need ’em if yer travellin’ with us.

What if we get separated?

What, if you fall behind? Dutton laughed. If that happens, mate, well, a few muskets ain’t gonna make much of a difference either way. Dutton cast a sidelong glance at the clustered Irishmen with their closely cropped heads. It’ll only make it easier for them to do you in.

Henty was about to reply—he was going to recite the numerous native attacks catalogued in the Launceston Gazette—but Dutton had already set off along the narrow track up the riverbank. The whaler strode a good distance out front looking not at his feet but at the dark recesses of the land. Every now and then he would stop and scan the pale boles of the eucalypts and the whispering curves of the river. Renanghi scouted even further ahead, patting the damp earth with open palms. At the rear of the line the convicts shuffled miserably, hunching under the weight of their heavy loads and craning their necks downwards into the dust. They spoke in tones of growing distrust, glancing furtively at one another from beneath the brims of their broad-arrow caps.

What’s to say he ain’t leading us into a ruse?

Too right.

What’s to say she ain’t in cahoots with them other blacks?

Too right.

As the morning grew long the sun started to sear, baking them through their heavy cottons and drawing thick patches of sweat from under their arms. The flies were all about and the men with beards were laughing at the ones who’d made the error of shaving. Occasionally the dogs would howl and go bounding off and the men would see snatches of a lone wallaby or kangaroo streaking through the bush. But the dogs came back with their tongues lolling frothy from empty jaws.

How far does this go? asked Henty.

This stringybark?

Yes.

As far as you want it to, mate.

They had just entered a clearing bounded on one side by a small stream. Henty and the convicts fetched out their pannikins and made for the running water. It was only then that they noticed the humpies, like mushrooms, huddled among the trees. Suddenly the dogs were baying and rushing forward. The black shape turned and ran but the dogs were much faster and they threw themselves and caught it about the legs.

It was a boy, sixteen or seventeen at most. By the time Henty got there he was on the ground defending his face from a whirlwind of snarling, snapping jaws. His legs were torn and his bare wrists bloody and punctured. Henty dragged off the dogs and helped him to his feet. He tried to find the right words to explain what had happened—to apologise—but the boy was already gone and suddenly it was extraordinarily quiet in that little glade with the sun falling in shafts around their feet.

Who undid the dogs?

The convicts stood there looking dumb and stony-faced.

I said, who undid the bloody dogs?

Henty realised he’d made a mistake bringing so many men. He gathered up the convicts and, except for McVea and Clarke, ordered them back to camp. They grumbled about getting lost in the bush or ambushed by blacks; but when Dutton pointed out that if they didn’t get moving they wouldn’t make it before nightfall they quickly picked up their packs and pots and pans and headed off.

Now a party of five, they travelled lightly through the bush. They tramped on through the afternoon, emerging from a monotony of stringbarks into a wide expanse of bosky country timbered with wattle and blackwood. There was very little dead wood, nothing on the ground and nothing hanging from the trees. Renanghi walked further and further ahead, stopping ever more frequently to listen and signal to Dutton.

At last they came upon a noisy little brook, which Henty proclaimed Clarke’s River since Clarke had seen it first. There was a collection of eel baskets hanging out to dry on a stand of tea-tree and a log still smouldering in a stone circle. It was well and truly dark and, as a solemn mass of cloud passed overhead, a hard rain started to fall. Henty glanced over to where Renanghi was pulling swathes off a paperbark and stacking them in a pile. Dutton got up and began arranging them into a pyramid of sorts with a couple of large branches sticking up through the midpoint.

Where do you suppose we’ll stay tonight, Dutton?

Right here I reckon.

The land was cool and quiet when they rose. The clearing shone innocently in the pre-dawn glow and the fallen rain was nowhere to be seen. This, according to Renanghi, augured heat.

If we make the second river before noon, explained Dutton, we can shelter through the worst of it and move on come dusk.

They struck out at once, the sun already level with the treetops. Soon great gusts of fire were washing over them as palpable as molten wax. Their legs were rivers of itchy sweat, which vaporised on freckled skin, or else ran over ankles and pooled in fetid boots. They walked hard and fast and took no rest until they reached the banks of the river. With the sun now streaking for its vertex, Henty and his two convicts ripped off their vestments and plunged into the wet reeds. Meanwhile the dogs drank like crazed beasts, pausing only momentarily to glimpse their master, who had reappeared in the midst of the gill.

The three men emerged cool and clean and settled down next to Dutton and Renanghi under the shade of a giant myrtle. Renanghi produced three eels she’d pinched and handed them around.

Can we eat this? asked Henty.

It’s an eel, mate. You can eat it, said Dutton.

But won’t they think we’re stealing their food?

We give them whale-meat, they give us roo and eel and other blackfella foods, that’s how it goes. But no two mobs’re alike, Dutton chewed the words, his mouth half-full with eel. Some don’t want us here at all. He spat into the dirt, moved his tongue around his mouth, over his teeth and spat again. He jerked his thumb over to where Renanghi was crouched feeding the eel heads to the dogs. Without her we wouldn’t even know they was here till we had spears sticking out of our chests.

After lunch McVea suggested that he and Clarke try to shoot something for dinner. Henty agreed, grateful to be rid of them. From his pack he retrieved his journal and opened it to a blank page. He intended to write in it every day, if only a few lines, to keep a record of the settlement. It was his grand venture, his risk, and he wanted it preserved for posterity. It was also necessary for legal reasons. The last thing he wanted was a run-in with the authorities. The written word had that sort of power, lying soft and serpentine within its outward appearance, to convince, persuade, offer up proof that this or that had actually happened, to posit a truth that others would swear by.

Henty looked out upon the river and the encroaching arms of the eucalypts. Entranced, he tore out a sheet of foolscap and wrote:

This is the place where I shall one day build my hut. A more lovely spot I never beheld. Sheep or cattle sides would soon shake with fat with a taste of the grass here. We have the water in its natural state without making a pond and swans and ducks without training.

A shadow fell lengthwise across the page and he looked up to see Dutton with an idiot grin on his face.

What you got there?

A note to my brother.

You got a brother?

Three actually.

Aye and what do you say to yer brother?

That the land is very fine.

Dutton seemed to be processing that. Will he be comin’ too?

Yes he will, and his wife.

And a great many more?

At that moment a crackle of gunfire reached them from upriver. It was followed hard on by a faint series of cries from the convicts. Henty leapt to his feet, the sheet of paper falling from his knees. The two men craned their necks into the silence; but it was merely a straggle of cloud-white egrets that came wheeling around the river bend and flew up over their heads in the direction of the sea.

The next section of river was far narrower. It was quartered in by prehistoric swale grown thick and tall on all sides. The five of them had to tramp in single-file, sinking into abscesses that sucked up boots, ankles, knees, whole legs at a time. The blistering heat had abated, leaving the afternoon air abuzz with the frantic wing-beats of a thousand bloodsucking insects. Henty discovered on his ankle an engorged leech the size of his ring-finger and when the other men rolled up their britches they found swathes of the bulbous creatures writhing in sanguinary delight.

You got to burn ’em, said Dutton, otherwise the jaws stay in.

But the tinder was packed away. And Henty did not want to call a halt. So they just ripped them off with their pinched fingers, leaving great gouts of blood dribbling down their white legs.

They climbed out of the fen just as the sun was starting to fade from view and were thankful to be back on well-footed land with broad patches of knee-high grass and tall canopies of red and yellow wattle. They were passing through clearings dotted with humpies, four and five of them here, two or three over there. The convicts were nervous and fidgety with their guns.

Where are they?

Must be hiding.

Where could the buggers hide?

Must be thousands of ’em.

Like rats.

Like bloody cockroaches, you ask me.

They ploughed on through the near dark, able to see no more than a few feet ahead.

Bridge! Bridge! came Renanghi’s voice from out front.

The bridge was strung between two weeping monoliths, a spindly thing fashioned from sticks and roots and hidebound flax all spun together. It was swaying gently from side to side. Renanghi crossed it with ease. But it was not a bridge for heavy-footed men with boots and packs. They took to it one at a time, oscillating above the torrent like pendulums incorrectly weighted. If you’ve a mind to build a bridge why not build it bloody proper, moaned Clarke.

Don’t fall in, Clarke! You’ll get wet!

McVea was flashing up his skirts make-pretend like some no-good lady from a Southwark gin hovel. Suddenly Clarke’s legs went out from under him and he was wrong side up in the water, his head gashing against a half-submerged rock. He was flailing and crying out and it was evident he did not know how to swim.

You gonna get your man out of that, Henty?

Should I?

Dutton stripped off and waded into the river. The convict’s head was not so cut as it looked. But his pack and all his gear was soaked and, worst of all, Clarke had been carrying a great deal of what they were due to eat.

By now it was night and any attempt to walk was just an act of wading arms and legs through flesh-stripping scrub. Renanghi herded them over to where a clot of lean-tos stood. She used her sinewy arms to push them inside, not harsh but firm, and the next thing Henty knew there they were—all five of them—side by side.

Not so bad is it, Henty?

Henty couldn’t see Dutton’s face in the darkness, Not bad at all.

Soon Renanghi had a little set of coals on the go, around which they huddled on hands and knees and gratefully received the last of the eel. Too tired to protest, Henty closed his eyes and slept a fitful sleep of dancing shadows and spears like sharpened teeth.

Henty woke shortly before dawn.

Dutton and Renanghi were already gone. The convicts lay together in a strange unconscious clinch. Henty stumbled out to see the sun come creeping up over the blue-fogged mountain at the base of which they were camped. Morning broke and the light came streaming in heavy sheets across the dewed grass. It glimmered and everywhere pooled in corrugated catchments which seemed to spell out an augury of hope.

Henty staggered partway into the bush looking for a place to piss. He pulled out his aching cock and breathed a sigh of relief. He looked up to see two boys, charcoal black, hunkered down among the bulrushes.

Good morning boys.

They didn’t move.

I said—he stopped himself. One of the boys held a length of rough-cut wood in his hand with a jagged point. Henty backed away slowly. He turned and hurried back to the hut, thinking any minute to feel the thud of the spear as it forced its way between his shoulderblades. He fetched his flintlock, tamped down a ball and wandered back over to the bulrushes, but the boys were gone.

Seeing him, Dutton approached with a quizzical look on his face. Henty did not mention the boys but merely pointed at the mountain.

That’s where we need to be. We can survey the land from up there.

It took the two of them an hour to reach the summit, by which time the sun was high in the monochrome sky. They marched under the arms of indifferent eucalypts, and through grassy reaches that swelled up to their waists, then climbed its flanks, treading a substrata of clay awash with cursive gravel and smitten rock.

Mt Clay, we’ll call it, declared Henty.

Spread below like a cartographer’s dream lay Portland Bay embraced by twofold arms of land. Verdant gasps of pasture and snake-shaped waterways could be seen converging at the river’s mouth. It was a spectacle unspoilt by human form, neither trails of rising smoke nor the roof of any dwelling.

Neither man spoke for a long time. Henty produced a spyglass and put it to his eye. After a while he started to chuckle quietly in his throat.

What’s so funny?

He offered Dutton the glass as if that were sufficient explanation.

I’ve seen the land afore, you know.

Henty could no more describe what he saw than speak in hieroglyphs. It was not a feeling but a knowing deep in his fibre that all of it would become his, would transform into something pliable, productive. He would master it, remake every boggy, soggy, sump-sawn morass, engender stolid, firming ground from every sucking fen. He would sweep this nothingness before him, this turf of nullity, break its heads in a hand-vice and mould the clay into a belt of industrious green. A sheep run here, a cattle trail there, every tree a source of fruit or shade for crops. He could already see the clod-booted shepherds trudging over the hills, the creamy sheep milling in the valleys, the fattened pastures giving forth the fruit of foison like freedmen swallowing liberty.

Way out over the gulf a giant rock sat squat and upthrust in the water. A cloud of mutton-bird circled, their wings buffeted by the sea breeze.

Denmaar.

Eh?

That’s Denmaar. Where the spirits congregate.

They believe that?

Dutton pointed down to where a mob of blackfellas were streaming up the beach. A number of them were gathered around what looked to be a black-backed rock, but soon enough it made more sense to see it as a beached whale. They were starting a fire, a mighty bonfire, tall plumes of smoke twisting up off the woodpile.

What are they doing?

Cooking up a feed.

They eat whalemeat? Henty wrinkled his nose at the thought of swallowing down a handful of blubber and guts. We’ll have to put a stop to that. He started to pick his way back down the mountain.

Dutton stood a moment longer, then turned to follow.

TOURNAMENT OF BOOKS FINALE: THE CHILDREN'S BACH VS GILGAMESH

2011-12-08T00:00:00Z

Welcome to the finale of the Meanjin Tournament of Books. It’s been one heck of a wild ride, and I think it’s fair to say no-one would have predicted Gilgamesh and a resurrected The Children’s Bach as our final pairing.

In this final round, a panel of previous Tournament judges, along with captain of the cheer squad, Lisa Dempster, give their choice for ultimate victor. Book with the most votes, wins. It’s short, sharp and brutal. Just the way we like it.

...

Michael Williams

Gilgamesh is terrific, and a personal favourite, but I’m going with The Children’s Bach. It’s tough, it’s lyrical and it won a zombie for crying out loud: how could it lose? Garner’s classic won’t just eat your brains; it’ll eat your heart too.

VOTE: The Children’s Bach

...

Robyn Annear

What a choice. Call me menopausal, but I choose London’s cool heat over Garner’s slangy sass.

VOTE: Gilgamesh

...

Michaela McGuire

Having already judged this exact match in Round One, I find it strange that Meanjin won’t bow to my request to simply give me the final say in this matter. That wouldn’t be ‘democratic,’ apparently. For the reasons I’ve already outlined, my vote goes to Gilgamesh.

VOTE: Gilgamesh

...

Rebecca Giggs:

The Children’s Bach is up there on my top ten books read in 2011 list; it is, undoubtedly a writer-reader’s book, a work of stunning craft and emotional compression. I’ve passed my copy on now, and followed it up with The First Stone, Joe Cinque’s Consolation, The Feel of Steel, True Stories and Monkey Grip. Indeed, for the last few months I’ve been on a Garner-reading glut. With a better sense of her oeuvre, The Children’s Bach remains a standout book.

VOTE: The Children’s Bach

...

Lisa Dempster

Joan London’s Gilgamesh has doggedly made its way to the final, irking me with every win. That said, my vote here is not against London’s novel, but decidedly for Helen Garner’s: for her spare prose and emotional honesty, my vote for the win is The Children’s Bach.

Vote: The Children’s Bach

...

AND THE WINNER, WITH THREE VOTES TO TWO, IS:

HELEN GARNER’S THE CHILDREN’S BACH

...

Ben: Here we are. The final countdown. The big show. Thunderdome. Two books enter. One book leaves. The other book waits for a bit, then the first book comes back and apologises for leaving its phone on. Then they do some fighting. Then they shake hands, and wave to the crowd. It’s a wonderful tradition as far as I know, and I can’t think of two books I would rather see locked in mortal, Predator-versus-Jason-style combat than these two, unless you count the Bible and Where Did I Come From? And really, that’d be a similar battle to this one, since, like the Bible, Joan London’s Gilgamesh has ripped off the Epic of Gilgamesh, and The Children’s Bach does indeed tell us where we came from, in an emotional sense. Probably. I’m not sure because I haven’t read it — I prefer to remain impartial. But I’m sure The Children’s Bach teaches us valuable lessons about who we are as people, even without nude cartoons, and there’s no denying it packs a punch with the critics. Going into this match I thought it was too close to call — with hot favourite My Brilliant Career having gone down like a sack of severed limbs, disappointing its millions of fans and Judy Davis, the competition was thrown wide open, and we found ourselves with an underdogs' final for the ages.

Jess: At this point, I’d like to remind you that early on in the piece I predicted that My Brilliant Career WOULDN’T end up winning this Tournament of Books (I have no beef with Miles Franklin, it’s just I couldn’t deny my Piscean intuition /compulsive gambling habit) and I believe you owe me ten bucks, Pobjie. I will accept cash, or a food voucher as payment. As you were.

Ben: It was with relish I watched these two champions hurl themselves into the fray, Garner’s critic-intoxicating attitude charging head-on into London’s geographical hurly-burly. It seemed that Gilgamesh’s habit of making people dislike it would be its downfall, but it’s proven itself a wily competitor, forcing people almost against their will to declare it a great novel. A neat trick, I think. Jess, your thoughts?

Jess: Agreed, Ben. It takes a fairly mighty text to make it this far in the competition even though the words “Oh no, don’t tell me bloody Gilgamesh managed to win yet another round!” were muttered more than once over the past few months by the blood-thirsty spectators who packed out Meanjin’s virtual coliseum, so Joan London’s novel certainly deserves some kudos for making it to the final bout. But at the end of the day, after a heartbreaking loss in the semi finals that was promptly followed by an audience decreed resurrection from the dead, Helen Garner’s magnificent tale of how the human body deals with puberty (hang on, that doesn’t sound right AT ALL, but let’s move on swiftly before we are declared idiots by all and sundry…) has taken home the trophy.

Interesting to see that hardcore Garner fan turned reluctant executioner Michaela McGuire has resolutely stuck to her guns, refusing to reverse her earlier ruling that Gilgamesh was the better book, isn’t it? Now THERE’S a lady with conviction! And while she may have the likes of Robyn Annear in her corner, it just wasn’t enough to stop the zombified heart-munching Children’s Bach when it came to the final hurdle.

Bravo, The Children’s Bach. And well fought, Gilgamesh. I tip my metaphorical hat to both of ye.

Ben: I think the most impressive part of the victory was the way in which Garner maintained her slangy sass. That slangy sass had served her well in the early rounds, but a lot of people thought it wouldn’t stand up to the heat of a final, and she should trade it in for a good time-travel subplot, or a talking animal. But she, much like uber-critic Michaela McGuire, stuck to her guns, hurled her slangy sass into the fray, and it was a tactical triumph.

Well done, indeed, The Children’s Bach. Played hard, done fine. You’re an inspiration to aspiring novels everywhere. And while we’re at it, well done to Gilgamesh. You too have achieved much, even if you will forever be known as a loser. That’s life, I guess. Literature is a ruthless world. And I think that’s the lesson we’ll take out of the Tournament of Books more than anything.

Congratulations TCB (those initials ain’t no coincidence!). Dear readers we shall see you next year.

Pobjie and McGuire, signing off.

A huge and heartfelt thank you to all our judges, the outraged fans, the authors of all of these brilliant Australian novels, and of course to our brilliant, incisive commentators.

If you’re in Melbourne, please join us this evening (Thursday 12th December) at the Wheeler Centre’s new bar The Moat for celebratory/commiseratory drinks from 6pm. All welcome.