Poem
‘An Octopus Tests My Left Big Toe’, a new poem
Freaking twice, in real life by a grey-green beauty
with sapphire eyes;
their rockpool laboratory ankle-deep under a headland
in a state of collapse.
Accessibility Tools
October 2024, no. 469
The first time she came was remarkably with someone else. He had been doing more or less the same thing for about a week when it happened and she was glad but as is the nature of such thresholds it became a due before she could remember it being any different. Few things blow you away. Though it was mysterious at first she soon had it in her own power. Once years later while she was visiting her home town they met again by chance in the street and he smiled the way people can do who have shared that experience and she felt she did the same but there was a delay before she was really aware of what it was they had in common and even then it was an arousal of original knowledge purified of any local content, abstract as the moment you learned to ride a bike or even to hold your breath underwater. He had one shoulder higher than the other; she noticed it more from behind.
On many occasions throughout our nation’s history, change seemed imminent, perhaps even just on the horizon, but it has always receded into the distance. The instigation and then closure of successive important representative organisations such as the National Aboriginal Consultative Committee, the National Aboriginal Conference, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, and the National Congress of Australia’s First Peoples illustrate the impacts of electoral politics and the vagaries of political ideologies. Each decade seems to have brought a different structure, some more and some less representative than others. But there has been little continuity or coherence, in either the national or state administrative and political arrangements, in addressing the specific concerns of Indigenous people.
This week on The ABR Podcast, Seumas Spark takes us to Papua New Guinea, the country of his childhood. Spark describes returning to an independent PNG as an historian and tour guide, and the noticeable cooling of Australian attitudes to the place and its ‘intoxicating possibilities’. Listen to Seumas Spark’s ‘Drinking from coconuts: When Australians weren’t scared of Papua New Guinea’, published in the October issue of ABR.
The idea of place as a metaphor of Australia’s colonial past and post-colonial present is a recent development in Australian history. The three books reviewed here come from a new generation of cultural historians who want to move the story of Australia from the national to the local. These cultural historians’ books reveal an intimacy with place and a new confidence in connecting the past to the present.
This Gauche intruder into the Australian book scene is sure to annoy many readers. Their annoyance, even disgust, will be various and peculiar to their own preoccupation with what they consider a good read, good literary criticism, good Australian cultural identity. Jennifer Rutherford presents us with a passionate, scholarly, rude and uncompromising discussion about Australian culture, reading identity at both individual and collective levels. She is a Lacanian (sure to annoy some), an unapologetic deployer of psychoanalytic insights into Australian identity fantasies; she is an astute and forthright literary and cultural critic (critics past and present, quake!) who offers a range of non-partisan and theoretically consistent readings of the novels of Catherine Spence, Rosa Praed, Henry Handel Richardson, George Johnston, Tim Winton, David Malouf, and Patrick White; and she is a canny, amusing, serpent-toothed reader of the broader Australian culture, from Hansonism, to the streets and suburbs of Canberra, to contemporary academia. She bites hard.
The sky is silent. All the planes must keep
Clear of the fine volcanic ash that drifts
Eastward from Iceland like a bad idea.
In your apartment building without lifts,
Not well myself, I find it a bit steep
To climb so many stairs but know I must
If I would see you still alive, still here.
The word is out from those you love and trust –
Time is so short that from your clever pen
No line of verse might ever flow again.