Letters to the Editor - October 2005

ABR welcomes letters from our readers. Correspondents should note that letters may be edited. Letters and emails must reach us by the middle of the current month, and must include a telephone number for verification. Books Alive Dear Editor, Jeremy Fisher criticises the 2005 Books Alive campaign (Letters, ABR September 2005) for failing to do things it was not set up to do, and then acknowledges that it does the things it was set up to do extremely well. Fisher says: ‘The ASA has no issue with increasing the sales of Australian books. But that no longer appears to be the focus of Books Alive. Books Alive had the potential to be a unique opportunity to promote Australian literary culture. It has mutated into “an Australian Government initiative that aims to encourage all Australians to experience the joys of reading”.’ Wrong. Books Alive was set up to encourage all Australians to experience the joys of books and reading. It has not mutated into anything else. Along the way, it has successfully promoted the works of many Australian writers and substantially increased their sales. In fact, Books Alive 2005 promotes more Australian writers than either of the previous Books Alive campaigns. Fisher also takes issue with the Australia Council managing the Books Alive funding. However, he acknowledges that the money is not Australia Council funding. It is a separate budget line. It does not take money away from the funding of Australian writing. It indirectly (and directly) supports Australian writers. Whichever Australian government agency managed the programme, those are the facts. The arts are global, cross-cultural and trans-generational. Australian government support recognises that fact. By funding a major opera or theatre company, the Australia Council also funds the works of Tchaikovsky, Glass, Ibsen and Hare. Australian writers reside in New York, Paris, and London. Their publishers are multinationals. People born in other countries reside in Australia – as Australians – and are part of our arts and literary culture. In promoting reading to the Books Alive audience – which is the general public – it is fitting to place good Australian writing (literary, popular and non-fiction) alongside prominent overseas writers. Fisher is also troubled that there are no ‘emerging writers’ on the Books Alive list. But there are. Jane Goodall is a good example in the 2005 programme. Her first novel, The Walker, made a mark when it was first released, but she has a larger readership and increased recognition through this year’s Books Alive Great Read Guide. Books Alive relies upon the proven success of a title to do its work, to hook new or lapsed readers on the habit. The Council’s Literature Board has a separate pro-gramme to support emerging writers’ new work, available to authors of any age. It also manages part of a special Australian government initiative to support young and emerging artists. These programs are quite separate to Books Alive. Books Alive is achieving exactly what it was created to do. Authors require a reading culture, and Books Alive is helping to create just that. And it now has secured Australian government funding for a further four years, to entice a wider pool of new readers each year, building reading audiences for the future. We look forward to the Books Alive campaign continuing to build readership and continuing to increase the sale of Australian books, as it so clearly and demonstrably has already done. Ben Strout Executive Director, Arts Development, Australia Council for the Arts, Sydney, NSW Edinburgh or the bush Dear Editor, Jeremy Fisher’s letter (ABR, September 2005) is an entirely legitimate critique of the book promotion policies of the increasingly corporatised Australia Council, but its purview could have been even wider. Over recent years, the focus of the books programmes on ABC Radio National has become narrower and narrower. Whereas those programmes, previously, showed a serious commitment to Australian writing, currently they seem, principally, to reflect their presenters’ peregrinations, especially to the Edinburgh and Toronto Festivals. Australian writers, readers and listeners deserve far better. There is, too, the matter of compliance with the legislated role of the ABC. Some response from the ABC, with a clear explication of the relevant philosophy, would be welcome. John Carmody, Roseville, NSW Cover to cover Dear Editor, In answer to the estimable Michael Williams’s request for a show of hands in relation to Australian journals, I am proud to say I subscribe to three: Australian Book Review, Art Monthly Australia and Art & Australia. I read them all from cover to cover, even the ads, and I look forward to them more than I can say. What I do not miss, having become addicted to the New York Times, is our Australian daily newspapers. Angus Trumble, New Haven, Connecticut Old verities Dear Editor, Guy Rundle damns with faint praise my book Beyond Right and Left: New Politics and the Culture Wars (ABR, September 2005). But this amounts to an accusation that it is not the book that he would have written. He’s right there, but this kind of response simply shuts down debate rather than engages with it. And among people who oppose the ascendancy of the new right, debate is badly needed – which is why I wrote the book. One reason for the right’s ascendancy is that twenty years ago they reinvented themselves by adopting militant economic liberalism as the solution to the world’s problems. Another reason is that the left has failed to reinvent itself and has run out of ideas capable of inspiring people. The old left, with its roots in socialism, did much to humanise capitalism; the newer cultural left helped transform Australia for the better in the 1970s and 1980s. But we cannot keep defensively repeating old verities and then be surprised that they cannot counter the new right. Rather than dismissing the ideas of others, Guy should join that debate. David McKnight, Broadway, NSW Beyondrightandleft.com.au What’s the difference? Dear Editor, What is the difference between an original poem and a translation? I was prompted to ask this question after reading Keith Harrison’s essay in the June–July 2005 issue of ABR. My confusion arose as a result of Harrison’s discussion of Harold Stewart’s translations of various famous (Japanese) haiku. Unlike Harrison’s clear and competent discussion of James McAuley’s translations of Rilke, where the original German text was reproduced and a number of different translations of Rilke were compared to McAuley’s version, only Stewart’s English translations of the haiku were discussed, and no romanised Japanese texts were provided for the verses. Nor was there any attempt to compare Stewart’s versions to any other translations. There is no real excuse for this since among the haiku cited were a number of exceedingly famous verses that have been translated many times over into English. Harrison writes that Stewart’s translations ‘are accurate … [but] ... never slavishly “literal”’. This comment he applies to McAuley also – the evidence for the assertion in the case of McAuley is there in front of the reader – but no evidence is provided for this assertion in respect of Stewart. For all intents and purposes, Stewart’s translations were read as original poems. For Harrison, it seems, there is no difference between an original poem and a translation. Leith Morton, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan History is so long Dear Editor, My concern with John Monfries’ review of Anthony Reid’s book An Indonesian Frontier: Acehnese and Other Histories of Sumatra (ABR, May 2005) was not that he lacked sympathy for Acehnese claims to independence. Rather, it was with his almost flippant approach to Reid’s excellent work. Monfries, in his letter (ABR, August 2005), now restates his position, more clearly and seriously than in his review. I was also concerned that he incorrectly referred to GAM as an Islamic organisation, an error in these times one does not want to make. Monfries is correct to note that I have been adviser to the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) in the Helsinki peace talks, and of course my views on Aceh are subjective. The institutionalisation of death, rape, torture and destruction has always tested my sense of objectivity. But he is incorrect to say that I ‘believe Aceh should be independent’. I have been quoted elsewhere as saying I worked for a resolution to Aceh’s conflict that retains it within Indonesia, a view which, since February, has been endorsed by GAM. This is rather the opposite of Monfries’ assertion. As to Monfries’ incorrect extrapolation that I think Indonesia should break up, could do so and therefore will, he guesses to no purpose. History is long and Indonesia’s internal tensions are significant. But its cohesion or otherwise will result from its internal coherence, or lack thereof, and not from what outsiders think. Finally, I can only guess that Monfries wrote his letter some time ago, as the ‘more easily imagined than achieved’ settlement to the Aceh conflict was initialled in Helsinki on July 17 and was due to be signed on August 15. Being seen by him as ‘openly partisan’ is, therefore, more than okay. Damien Kingsbury, Brunswick, Vic. John Monfries wrote to us on June 21, during the winter double issue. Ed. Ersatz psychology Dear Editor, According to Dennis Altman (ABR, September 2005), it is a strength of Jacqueline Rose’s The Question of Zion that ‘psychoanalytic tools’ are used ‘to probe the deep inconsistencies and unquestioned assumptions of Zionism’. The Question of Zion is a good and brave book, and Altman’s review is appreciative and fair; but both he and Rose are mistaken in thinking that the book is a ‘psychoanalytic reading’ of Zionism. In the main, the book evidences only the ersatz psychology that has become a staple of contemporary criticism. Rose highlights two formative influences: the Messianic character of Zionism; and a shame over the Holocaust that finds relief in the humiliation of others. She argues, correctly, that the Messianic conceptions of the Zionist movement have created a powerful group identity and animus. But then, in locating the core of messianism in the idea of redemption, rather than in the narcissistic self-conceptions of specialness and privilege that underlie it, she neglects the potent unconscious motivations for the more superficial, conscious ones. The idea of redeeming the Jewish people by their in-gathering to the state of Israel, and subsequently redeeming the world, is not a dynamically unconscious motive. There is nothing distinctively psychoanalytic about Rose’s account here. Altman says that ‘[f]or Rose, the humiliations acted out daily against the Palestinians represent the classic psychoanalytic principle of repetition, where this shame [over the Holocaust] is denied through aggression against others’. Rose does indeed believe that the violence and humiliations result from some kind of repetition or return of the repressed (‘the internal debris of the past’.) And she may be right, though she has provided no grounds for thinking so. Repetition and kindred concepts are indispensable for understanding the individual psyche, but no one really has much of an idea how these concepts can be applied meaningfully to the behaviour of large groups, let alone states, over historical stretches of time. Rose does little – though she has some Lamarckian notions flickering in the background – to illuminate the complex relations between individual disposition and group behaviour: a vast conceptual chasm stares, but Rose and Altman (apparently) scarcely notice. In these (and in related) respects, the argument of Rose’s important book is significantly debilitated. And Altman’s oversight perpetuates some of the many misunderstandings that psychoanalysis has fallen heir to. Tamas Pataki, St Kilda West, Vic. Robert Manne replies to John Dawson Dear Editor, Might I reply very briefly to John Dawson’s latest letter (ABR, September 2005)? (1) Almost all historians agree that most of the Aboriginal killings of British settlers in Tasmania, which occurred mainly in the 1820s, can be explained because of the threat to Aboriginal life posed by the rush of settlers and flocks in that decade. In The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Keith Windschuttle claims, rather, that Aborigines killed British settlers because they were robbers and murderers, because they coveted British goods, and because there was nothing preventing them from so doing. Apart from the intrinsically disgraceful defamation, as common criminals, of a people whose ancient way of life was being destroyed, there are three serious problems with Windschuttle’s argument. First, he claims, preposterously, that the settlers stopped hunting for native game in 1811. Dawson concedes that Windschuttle is wrong. If this was an inconsequential matter, as Dawson now claims, why did Windschuttle raise it in the first place? Secondly, Windshuttle underestimates by 300 per cent the acreage of the land occupied by the settlers at the end of the 1820s. The minuscule acreage under British occupation by the late 1820s is another crucial part of Windschuttle’s case. As Dawson knows that, on this matter, Windschuttle has egregiously blundered, once more he passes over it in silence, hoping readers will not notice. Thirdly, if it were true that British settlers were killed by Aborigines, as Windschuttle claims, ‘simply because they could be’, why did the killings only really begin in the 1820s? Despite the waffle in his letter, Dawson has no satisfactory answer. (2) Dawson says that: ‘Windschuttle “doesn’t say it was possible to know exactly how many Tasmanian Aborigines the British settlers killed”’. Actually, this is what Windschuttle says: ‘The British were responsible for killing 118 of the original inhabitants – less than four deaths a year.’ What is that if not a claim to exact knowledge? (3) Dawson tells us that Windschuttle ‘provides a convincing case for Aboriginal deaths by disease’. This is not so. As James Boyce showed in Whitewash, Windschuttle produces no direct evidence at all for death by disease before 1830. Applying Windschuttle’s ‘crazed positivist’ methodology to Fabrication one would have no alternative but to conclude that before 1830 no Aborigine in Tasmania died from disease. (4) As Dawson admits, in his recent work Henry Reynolds is sceptical about the use of the idea of genocide in the case of Tasmania. Dawson fails in his letter to explain what he meant when he nonsensically claimed that Lyndall Ryan’s use of the idea is ‘implicit’ throughout her work. Why, then, does the question of genocide play so large a role in Dawson’s attack on Whitewash? There is no satisfactory explanation. (5) Dawson concedes that Greg Lehman is the only ‘postmodernist’ found in Whitewash. Why does Dawson spend so much energy in Washout wildly attacking postmodernism? Once more, he provides no satisfactory explanation. (6) Dawson did not tell the truth when he implied that I had doctored Peggy Patrick’s statement. I did not change a word. I do not withdraw my claim that Windschuttle plagiarised passages from Robert Edgerton. As I explained to a journalist at The Australian, I would be happy if my case and Windschuttle’s went to an independent scholar. I repeat the offer here. (7) I rest my case about Dawson. Robert Manne, Bundoora, Vic.

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