Letters to the Editor - May 1993

Dear Editor, I was encouraged and shamed by your account of Mabel Edmund’s comments about violence against women. You are so right, even if you understate it a bit, in saying ‘if we don’t get the gender stuff right, then we’ll never get any of it right’. Bodo Kirchhoff’s smug sexist fantasy about finding a Filipina beauty in the monastery kitchen is important, because it says something not just about Kirchhoff but about all men. He is not Robinson Crusoe but Everyman. I am not ‘a feminist’ and I distrust all men who claim that proud title. All men are sexists, some of us are simply more subtle or more cunning than others. In moments of hope, I like to think that this is not beyond revolution, that men can be redeemed. But then I turn the page and read Noel McLachlan’s letter in support of Cassandra Pybus’s Gross Moral Turpitude and wonder if all of us men aren’t beyond hope. McLachlan’s letter reeks with good intentions; the road to hell for many women has been thoughtfully paved by ‘men of good intentions’. Men like me and McLachlan, who waves his patriarchal cane in blessing and brings it down with a whack. I pass over all the muddles in McLachlan’s letter and his unconvincing account of his own role in the development of the Orr myth. McLachlan’s letter reveals how far we are from the necessary revolution in male thought, attitude, imagination and language. Patriarch McLachlan patronises Cassandra (Pybus) and Bev (Kingston), pretends to approve, then gives them a daddy of a lecture. He notes that Orr ‘had propositioned’ a ‘sexy Czech-Australian political scientist’. Are unsexy political scientists to be considered fortunate or unfortunate? Then McLachlan blesses Suzanne Kemp with a lecture on how to run her life. All women have spent thousands of years being lectured by us kind men on how to live their lives in gross moral servitude. Contemporary women’s writing shows that women now speak more powerfully than men, partly because they all realise that what they are saying is crucial to human survival. If we men choose to talk like Bodo Kirchhoff and Noel McLachlan, our most positive contribution to human progress is silence and listening. More than most people, Suzanne Kemp deserves that silence. John Hanrahan Balwyn Dear Editor, In the weeks before our important but comical Federal election, there was a· good deal of discussion in the papers about the Australia Council, literary grants, funding priorities and justice to creative writers. One significant issue was shirked in most of this discussion, and it is this: what are such grants actually for? In the case of novelists, practising what Walter Benjamin saw as the loneliest of all arts, there may well be a case for the pure funding of time, allowing them to practise their Art for Art’s Sake. But many poets and playwrights would surely (like composers) prefer to be commissioned to produce something which somebody actually wants. As a poet, for example; I should like to be commissioned to write elegies, epithalamion’s, political satires, or other such formal jobs. I would delight to write applied verse celebrating places or restaurants. It would be a joy to do a job celebrating the products of a vineyard in verse; or to write poems in praise of an airline and its service, if there are still airlines that offer good service; perhaps to be commissioned by a food wholesaler or a football club. Being a professional Applied Poet would not in the least harm one’s (probably excessive) self-expression; indeed, it would surely do the private writer a great deal of good. Perhaps the Australia Council might give more thought to projects that give sharper point to the process of writing, a process that is not self-evidently valuable. Chris Wallace-Crabbe North Carlton Dear Editor, Stephen Muecke in ABR 148 quite provocatively questions the location of Aboriginal knowledges in his essay ‘Where are the Aboriginal Intellectuals’. However, it would seem that regardless of how one evaluates indigenous knowledge, or where one searches for Aboriginal intellectuals -these people are not appearing in the ABR. In 1992 there were twenty-four books reviewed which contained significant amounts of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander subject matter. At first sight this seems a reasonable contribution to public discourse on indigenous issues. What is disturbing however, is that the majority of this reviewed writing is written by non-Aboriginal people (approximately nineteen works) and all were reviewed by nonAboriginal people. Even given errors in my allocation of writers this is hardly an impressive record. As a consequence, the ABR seems to promote a circular discourse in which non-Aboriginal Australians write about indigenous Australia for non-Aboriginal Australians, with their work reviewed and evaluated by non-Aboriginal Australians. As a Koori reader this is acceptable as a hypothetical scenario in which the literature on Australian women was written by men and reviewed by men. For indigenous people our only point of contribution to literary discourse appears to be as subject matter. The reasons for the low Aboriginal participation in the publishing industry are complex and related to many other parameters of contemporary Aboriginal life. Nevertheless, many features of this are changing. Over the last decade Aboriginal participation in the higher education system has increased of the order of five hundred per cent. The increased confidence of Aboriginal participation in literary processes, which you might expect to parallel increased educational success, was evident at the recent National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Workshop (Budga Budga, Victoria December 1992). At this event the majority of the 160 participants were published writers. So where are all the Aboriginal intellectuals? Key industry publications such as the Australian Book Review obviously are still failing to tap into the network of Aboriginal writers. Whilst publications such as this do not directly influence the proportion of Aboriginal writers producing major written works – they certainly can enable a significant increase in the number of indigenous writers reviewing such material. This would allow some indigenous voices to penetrate this circular discourse. Given that this is the International Year of Indigenous People, it is perhaps timely for this publication to consider strategies to increase the participation of indigenous writers in literary production. Ian Anderson Clifton Hill Dear Editor, Jane Stephens’s review of Kerry Greenwood’s The Green Hill Murders is in itself an exercise in suspense. Questions abound. Why does Stephens devote one sixth of her review to two lesbian characters who appear on thirteen of the novel’s 259 pages? Why does she make a point of saying that, ‘Greenwood’s lesbian characters are always extraordinarily nice, resourceful, kind, intelligent, upright women’, when the only lesbian character in Greenwood’s five novels is the angry prostitute Klara in Murder on the Ballarat Train, who is definitely intelligent and resourceful but not noticeably nice or kind. As with all good thrillers, these questions lead on to further questions. Why does Stephens regard the inclusion of two lesbian minor characters as ‘preaching’ and ‘an attempt at positive discrimination’? Does she mean that ‘extraordinarily nice, resourceful, kind, intelligent, upright’ lesbians are somehow untypical or unlikely? Has she missed a vital clue in failing to notice that, unlike most of the new wave of women detective story writers, Kerry Greenwood surrounds her heroine with an extensive range of nice, resourceful, etcetera women characters, rather than constructing her as someone who is inherently different from other women? And, greatest mystery of all, how can Stephens claim so confidently that a mature writer would never mention the sexual preference of his or her characters unless ‘it is pertinent to the plot’? Surely, in the classic male detective novel heterosexual preference is a given. The author doesn’t need to mention the sexual preference; simply describe the hero’s lust for the femme fatale. The traditional narrative is constructed around the hero’s exploits with women. Is Stephens suggesting that mature writers should carefully suppress any mention of non-pertinent heterosexuality? Are these same writers supposed to omit all reference to their characters’ appearance, mannerisms and penchant for taking cocaine or playing the violin, when not provably relevant to the plot? Unfortunately, the logic behind these sweeping statements never emerges in Jane Stephens’s review, leaving this reader to feel as though she had just read a detective story whose final chapter was missing. Merrilee Moss Westgarth Dear Editor, I noticed that there is a ‘death of poetry’ debate beginning (Myron Lysenko’s article, April). I feel the review of my book Two Interpretations from Central Park may have contributed to this debate (Green Left Weekly No.92). So, I feel partly responsible, although of course I did not write the review and am hence not personally to blame (if there is any blame to be apportioned for simply airing an idea). You can’t stop ideas from entering the world. Ideas are common, not private property. If the prospect of the death of poetry were not expressed in writing, it would, and I think already has, entered the world via other media conversation, for instance. ‘The death of poetry’ is certainly an idea that has already gained currency amongst at least some of the West’s intellectuals. What they mean by this is that the conditions for poetry have been destroyed. Late capitalism has become so God-awful that any decent poet gives up or is destroyed -before his/ her work reaches fruition. All that is left, they think, are the bourgeois practitioners, who have absolutely nothing of substance to say. As with the ‘death of the novel’ forty-odd years ago, a bourgeois artform becomes quaint and irrelevant. Serious artists tum to other media – rock music or film etc. As someone with a personal investment in the survival of poetry (I feel like saying: ‘Poetry won’t die if I can help it’) what I would say on this debate is this -serious poetry cannot survive within capitalism. Capitalism and poetry are hostile to each other. There is no joy in late capitalism-no enchantment. That is why, in the West today, so many poets are on welfare. Once they step outside of the system, they can commune with the rich poetic heritage of the working class. Australia is a land of poets. Myron is quite correct to point out that there are more practising poets in Melbourne today than ever before. Craig McGregor in his book The Australian People draws attention to the fact that poetry is Australia’s greatest cultural achievement (greater even than painting), what with Henry Lawson, Banjo Patterson, Kenneth Slessor, A. D. Hope, Bruce Dawe, James McAuley etc., I would say that this is because of Australia’s strong convict and working-class history. The bourgeoisie has never felt completely comfortable here. As a poet who has survived late capitalism, I would conclude by saying that Australia is one of the few places m the world where capitalism might disappear before poetry. Graeme Merry South Croydon Dear Editor, I appreciate that ABR is pushed for both space and time and perhaps, therefore, was unable to consult me regarding cuts and alterations to my review of Jill Jones’s The Mask and the Jagged Star (April). However, those familiar with Jones’s work would have been amazed to see ‘Boys Go Crazy’, about male violence, analysed as a love poem (owing to a dexterous editorial combination of two paragraphs and three separate poems)! To re-establish the integrity of the poems concerned, I wonder whether I could ask you to publish the original text of the review at this point, as follows: A favourite from this section is ‘Boys Go Crazy’, rescued from the possible trap of self-righteousness by an adroit sense of language: There are lights in my head, too. But all my best shots I keep for myself My despair is mine. But boys go crazy all over everyone else, generous with their despair, unloading their loneliness in public places. Maybe, they’re not born like that. Maybe, they’ve just enlisted too soon for the war. This is a world in which love is tenuous and uncertain, in which there are no ground rules: ‘the jagged star bursts alight in my hand / I don’t know when to put on the black mask’ (‘the new law of contracts’). Its destruction is, perhaps, in-built, pre-programmed: ‘When your love is like a supernova, falling towards itself before it explodes, how do you recognise these events?’ (‘the coming of the death star’) It’s good to see Refrain appearing on a regular basis, and it would be great if more pages were devoted to poetry in every issue of ABR. Margaret Bradstock Ermington

From the New Issue

Like Fire-Hearted Suns by Melanie Joosten

On Kim Scott: Writers on writers by Tony Birch

Deep Water: The world in the ocean by James Bradley

Quantum Drama: From the Bohr-Einstein debate to the riddle of entanglement by Jim Baggott and John L. Heilbron