Letters - October 2002

ABR welcomes concise and pertinent letters. Correspondents should note that letters may be edited. They must reach us by the middle of the current month. Letters and emails must include a telephone number for verification Poetry at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival Dear Editor, Juno Gemes asks what is the current place of poetry within our literary festivals (ABR, ‘Letters’, September 2002). She also asks related questions, which in summary give the overall impression that poetry, particularly at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival, now has only a peripheral place. As evidence, she claims that in Melbourne ‘a mere five poets, including only one indigenous writer, will take part in five sessions in a programme representing hundreds of writers’. Here are some facts. The following poets took part in the Melbourne Writers’ Festival: Peter Porter, James Charlton, Peter Goldsworthy, Les Murray, Dorothy Porter, Peter Rose, Catherine Bateson, Phil Norton, Samuel Wagan Watson and Judith Rodriguez. The Festival opened its sessions at the Malthouse with Les Murray in conversation with Peter Goldsworthy. In the succeeding days, the poets appeared in spotlight interviews, panels, readings and individual talks. Indigenous poet Samuel Wagan Watson gave one of the Festival’s featured Six O’Clock Views lectures. In all, the poets took part in over twenty-five sessions. Some were specifically on poetry (though one never expects a poet to be constrained). Others were on power, on words and music, sport, religion, on what Colombians mean by duende, and why a poet might care. The élan and breadth of the poets’ contributions made all of these sessions outstanding experiences for our audience and, one hopes, for the poets themselves. In the past, poets have told us that they don’t necessarily wish to be confined in ‘poetry only’ sessions. This year we designed the programme with that request in mind, and the result was extraordinary - a demonstration of what pithy, wise, articulate makers our poets are, and how broad is the contribution they make to our culture. In future years, the Melbourne Writers’ Festival will have other poets and different sessions, perhaps ones that include poetry publishers. Meanwhile, poetry is, and will remain, central to what we believe a writers’ festival is about. Morag Fraser, Chair, Melbourne Writers’ Festival, Vic. Where’s the money coming from? Dear Editor, Lionel Orchard’s review of my book When the Boat Comes In: Transforming Australia in the Age of Globalisation (ABR, August 2002) made me laugh. According to Orchard, my disappointing political agenda is due to ‘the influence on Frankel’s argument of discredited neo-Marxist assumptions about the bedrock of economic structures determining the parameters of politics in capitalist democracy. It also reflects a left libertarian opposition to government and public intervention in Australian society.’ Is Orchard serious in claiming that I am opposed to government intervention? Perhaps he confused my book with one of the other three books he simultaneously reviewed. It is a sad day for Australian public discourse when new socioeconomic and political strategies are dismissed with labels such as ‘discredited neo-Marxist’ and other censorial clichés. The truth is that I share Orchard’s criticisms of neoliberalism and Third Way policies, and condemn the rise in social inequality and cuts to vital public services implemented by ALP and Coalition governments. Where I differ from traditional Keynesian social democrats such as Orchard is in how to combat dominant neoliberal policies. As I argue in my book, the broad left and Green movements have been completely ineffective in halting the cuts to the public sector, or convincing an electoral majority to implement progressive taxes on corporations and the rich. Orchard and other social democrats wait religiously for Australians to abandon the neoliberal agendas of Howard and Crean. There are many sociocultural and economic reasons why the division between various types of families, asset holders, and global and local market forces makes the adoption of well-intentioned leftist social democratic policies most unlikely. The old ‘Australian settlement’ that formed the context for earlier social democratic policies is largely gone. Orchard cannot have it both ways. If he accepts my analysis of the new forms of financial capital, industrial relations and public/private institutional arrangements dominating Australia, then he should be more self-reflective and less confident about the viability of old premid1970s policy solutions. I argue that the new politics of distribution, production and consumption require new economic policies and a set of sociocultural institutions. These new ‘Australian settlement’ institutions will have to incorporate all those social constituencies currently inadequately represented, and deal with pressing environmental problems consistently ignored. Importantly, no critique of economic rationalism is going to be successful if it is not based on clear ideas of ‘where the money is coming from’ to fund necessary social reforms. Over the past five decades, Australian governments have consistently raised about five to eight per cent less tax as a percentage of GDP than West European governments. This equates, approximately, to a $35 billion annual shortfall in revenue, and accounts for the neglected state of Australian public services and infrastructure. Yet, winning an election on a high progressive tax agenda is improbable. Instead, one of my many proposals includes tapping into the enormous capital accumulated in superannuation funds without jeopardising people’s savings. For example, by imposing a compulsory loan of a mere two per cent of super fund assets for a period of between ten and thirty years, Australian governments could immediately raise approximately $12 billion annually to begin solving unemployment, rebuilding community services and developing environmentally sustainable policies. Super fund members want their savings protected from volatile share markets and invested in socially useful activities. A compulsory loan would not be a tax, as it would earn fund members government bond rates. This is no ‘left libertarian’ agenda but a new interventionist strategy to rebuild public services necessary for a socially just and culturally diverse Australia. As I argue in my book, we have entered a second phase of neoliberal restructuring that targets welfare, families, health care, retirement income and education. Without new sources of public revenue, all critiques of neoliberalism and the Third Way will be rendered irrelevant. We need to move beyond both revolutionary slogans and historically obsolete social democratic rhetoric if Australian society is to be rescued from the callous and divisive socioeconomic policies pursued by the major parties. Boris Frankel, Melbourne, Vic. A.K. Macdougall responds to Elizabeth Durré Dear Editor, The recent publication of my selection of the War Letters of General Monash has received nothing but praise. The Age called the selection ‘superbly edited’; another paper said, ‘It is good to see them in print once again’; while Peter Ryan’s review (ABR, June/July 2002) gave me more pleasure than any in my thirty-eight years in books and publishing. Thus Elizabeth Durré’s extraordinary complaints about the book (ABR, August 2002) arrived with the shock of a howitzer shell. Her letter made a lot of noise, and caused damage, but it turns out to possess all the explosive power of a tin can full of sour grapes. With regard to three errors she cites (the birth date of Monash’s daughter; a reference to the ‘Princes Street Bridge’; and my inaccuracy in describing bar mitzvah), I stand corrected (and embarrassed) - but the rest of her complaints are founded on ignorance and misunderstandings. I sense that Elizabeth Durré is principally offended that anyone should dare touch the posthumously published letters of her grandfather. The early volume of War Letters (1934) has been out of print for nearly seventy years, and out of copyright for more than seventeen of these, yet no publisher has made any attempt to republish it. I imagine prospective buyers number no more than one or two thousand: hardly sufficient to warrant printing and distribution. The fact that Melbourne University Press has to beg for donations to fund a reissue of Geoffrey Serle’s peerless biography John Monash is indicative of the shrinking market for books on World War I figures. We should be grateful that Michael Duffy was quick to see that a selection of the letters, with the addition of brief biographical notes, would make a worthy addition to his innovative ‘Brief Lives’ series and help to rescue a forgotten treasure from oblivion. It is hard to see how any reader of this slim paperback could fail to realise that it is an ‘edited’ version of the original 320page book. The cover bears the tag ‘edited’, the imprint page notes that it is a ‘selection’, and readers are reminded twice of this fact in the first dozen pages. The modest wording I supplied for use on the imprint and title pages of this contentious book stated simply: ‘This selection, with an Introduction, edited by A.K. Macdougall’, but this was considered wholly inadequate. (I see that even copyright has been claimed for me! These Monash letters are, of course, in the public domain, and remain so.) If readers doubt my knowledge of military history, I refer them to my own sturdy seller, now in its third edition, Australians at War (not to be confused with the ABC book of the same title, presently being remaindered), or to the current edition of The Australian Encyclopaedia, where, as Editor-in-Chief, I revised the entry on Monash, doubling it in length. Elizabeth Durré is disappointed that the complete original 1934 edition has never been reprinted. Close reading of the original edition reveals that the first days of Gallipoli, and the majority of Monash’s extraordinary 1918 battles, are inadequately recorded, for the General was either too busy to describe them or was restrained by self-imposed or official censorship. F.M. Cutlack’s 1934 ‘editing’ was limited to a brief Introduction. To reprint that edition without amplifying notes would surely have done Monash’s memory a disservice. As for the letters deleted, only those dwelling on peripheral matters have been removed. For example: ‘I shall describe briefly the system of rationing in France … ‘ or ‘I should like to tell you about a nice little dinner-party I went to.’ Now for the balance of Elizabeth Durré’s ill-considered complaints. 1. Both Cutlack and Serle clearly state that Monash’s letters were written to his wife. 2. Hurling familial loyalty into reverse, Mrs Durré then asserts that Monash’s great intellect was not unique, and that he was only one of ‘hundreds’ of senior commanders of equal intellect. If these paragons existed, I’d like to know their names. Monash sailed off to war as a lowly militia colonel who had never heard a shot fired in anger (albeit with three university degrees tucked under his ample belt), but in less than four years not only invented modern warfare (the Germans were to call it ‘blitzkrieg’) but led his Australian Corps to victory after victory. By any standards, John Monash was a prodigy- as a soldier and a man. 3. Mrs Durré avers that two years of childhood in Jerilderie is not ‘a short period’. To me it is; to her it is not. But then, how long is a piece of string? She challenges my statement that Monash had a happy childhood. A boy who does well at school and grows up with, as Serle informs us, a loving mother and sisters, despite the absence of an affectionate father, can count his childhood happy. 4. She asks what I mean by ‘assimilated’. This means, surely, that the majority of Melbourne’s Jews were either no longer practising their religion or had intermarried with the Gentile majority. And Monash, incidentally, was a member of at least ten Melbourne clubs. 5. Mrs Durré challenges evidence that her grandfather could have progressed to the high command itself. Had the war continued until mid1919, as many predicted, Monash could have risen (as Birdwood had) to command one of Britain’s five armies on the Western Front, and perhaps progressed further. Tributes to his genius abound. In Serle’s words: ‘Some conjecture is allowable.’ Mrs Durré asserts that my edition has killed any chance of a reprint of the original 1934 edition. Nonsense. Any publisher is still free to reprint the letters. No book of this nature destroys another; instead, it sparks (or rekindles) interest in the subject. Sure proof of this is shown by MUP’s sudden announcement that Geoffrey Serle’s John Monash will soon be reprinted ‘in a handsome new edition’. But why a ‘new edition’? The old edition (1982) was handsome enough. It needs no redesign, editing or embellishment. To be relevant, the posthumous War Letters of 1934 required all of these. A.K. Macdougall, Binalong, NSW

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